Electronics & Software

A digital phase meter has been designed to satisfy stringent requirements for measuring differences between phases of radiofrequency (RF) subcarrier signals modulated onto laser beams involved in the operation of a planned space-borne gravitational- wave-detecting heterodyne laser...

Use of multiple-antenna radar systems aboard moving high-altitude platforms has been proposed for measuring rainfall. The platforms contemplated in the proposal would be primarily spacecraft, but, in principle, the proposal could also apply to aircraft. The problem of measuring rainfall...

A document discusses the physical and engineering principles affecting the design of the Smart Data Node in the Sky (SDNITS) — a proposed Earthorbiting satellite for relaying scientific data from other Earth-orbiting satellites to one or more ground station(s). The basic concept of the SDNITS is similar to that of...

Surfer is an extensible framework for selecting and ranking grid resources. A resource is defined as anything that needs selecting such as compute resources, storage resources, and data resources. The user specifies the set of resource types desired, the constraints that must hold over all the resources, and the...

InvestigationOrganizer (IO) is a Webbased collaborative information system that integrates the generic functionality of a database, a document repository, a semantic hypermedia browser, and a rulebased inference system with specialized modeling and visualization functionality to support accident/mishap...

A control architecture and algorithms to implement the architecture have been conceived to enable a robot to learn from its experiences and to combine knowledge gained from prior experiences in such a way as to be able to solve new problems. The architecture is an abstraction of an...

The Hypothetical Scenario Generator for Fault-tolerant Diagnostics (HSG) is an algorithm being developed in conjunction with other components of artificial- intelligence systems for automated diagnosis and prognosis of faults in spacecraft, aircraft, and other complex engineering systems....

This monthly review lets you "meet" the new advertisers appearing in NTB and its supplements. Here's a sneak peek at the products, services, and offers available from May's first-time advertisers. 3Dconnexion (San Jose, CA) is a provider of 3D navigation devices for 3D design and visualization applications.

As part of NASA's Partnership Seed Fund program, Goddard Space Flight Center is integrating the ILIADS software, a geospatial information system (GIS) it developed for lunar applications, with Questus(TM), a management and planning software tool developed by United Space Alliance (USA) for space shuttle operations. The...

Led by the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Nottingham (U.K.), a research team is using thermoacoustic technology for the first time to convert biomass fuels into energy to power a combination stove, refrigerator, and generator. Part of the ~$4M SCORE (Stove for...

As noted in the article "Mini CW Lasers Enable Next-Generation Bioinstrumentation" in May's edition of Photonics Tech Briefs (PTB), continuous-wave (CW) lasers have helped advance research in fields such as cell sorting and DNA sequencing. Written by Jurgen Niederhofer, product manager of Newport's Spectra-Physics Lasers...

A model predictive control (MPC) algorithm that differs from prior MPC algorithms has been developed for controlling an uncertain nonlinear system. This algorithm guarantees the resolvability of an associated finite-horizon optimal-control problem in a receding horizon implementation. Given...

A versatile computer program analyzes the link-design control table necessary for designing the telecommunication subsystem of a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth or on a deep-space mission. The program helps to calculate all the important parameter values for spacecraft-to-ground telemetry links...

Avionics systems are becoming more powerful and more dependent upon data exchanged between instruments. These instruments and subsystems reside on a network and must share time-critical data to achieve their mission. For example, targeting systems require real-time input of...