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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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186 records · Page 11

The Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) development efforts in the United States have demonstrated the technical viability and performance potential of NTP systems. For example, Project Rover (1955 - 1973) completed 22 high power rocket reactor tests. Peak performances included operating at an average hydrogen exhaust temperature of 2550 K and a peak fuel power density of 5200 MW/m3 (Pewee test), operating at a thrust of 930 kN (Phoebus-2A test), and operating for 62.7 minutes in a single burn (NRX-A6 test). Results from Project Rover indicated that an NTP system with a high thrust-to-weight ratio and a specific impulse greater than 900 s would be feasible. Excellent results were also obtained by the former Soviet Union. Although historical programs had promising results, many factors would affect the development of a 21st century nuclear thermal rocket (NTR). Test facilities built in the US during Project Rover no longer exist. However, advances in analytical techniques, the ability to utilize or adapt existing facilities and infrastructure, and the ability to develop a limited number of new test facilities may enable affordable development, qualification, and utilization of a Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (NCPS). Bead-loaded graphite fuel was utilized throughout the Rover/NERVA program, and coated graphite composite fuel (tested in the Nuclear Furnace) and cermet fuel both show potential for even higher performance than that demonstrated in the Rover/NERVA engine tests.. NASA's NCPS project was initiated in October, 2011, with the goal of assessing the affordability and viability of an NCPS. FY 2014 activities are focused on fabrication and test (non-nuclear) of both coated graphite composite fuel elements and cermet fuel elements. Additional activities include developing a pre-conceptual design of the NCPS stage and evaluating affordable strategies for NCPS development, qualification, and utilization. NCPS stage designs are focused on supporting human Mars missions. The NCPS is being designed to readily integrate with the Space Launch System (SLS). A wide range of strategies for enabling affordable NCPS development, qualification, and utilization should be considered. These include multiple test and demonstration strategies (both ground and in-space), multiple potential test sites, and multiple engine designs. Two potential NCPS fuels are currently under consideration - coated graphite composite fuel and tungsten cermet fuel. During 2014 a representative, partial length (approximately 16") coated graphite composite fuel element with prototypic depleted uranium loading is being fabricated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In addition, a representative, partial length (approximately 16") cermet fuel element with prototypic depleted uranium loading is being fabricated at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). During the development process small samples (approximately 3" length) will be tested in the Compact Fuel Element Environmental Tester (CFEET) at high temperature (approximately 2800 K) in a hydrogen environment to help ensure that basic fuel design and manufacturing process are adequate and have been performed correctly. Once designs and processes have been developed, longer fuel element segments will be fabricated and tested in the Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator (NTREE) at high temperature (approximately 2800 K) and in flowing hydrogen.

Houts, Michael G.↗

OLTARIS - Overview and Recent Updates

The On-Line Tool for the Assessment of Radiation in Space (OLTARIS) is a web-based set of tools and models that allow engineers and scientists to assess the effects of space radiation in spacecraft, habitats, rovers, and spacesuits. The site is intended to be a design tool for those studying the effects of space radiation for current and future missions as well as a research tool for those developing advanced material and shielding concepts. The tools and models are built around the HZETRN radiation transport code and are currently focused on human-related responses. OLTARIS was deployed in 2008. Since that time, many improvements and additional capabilities have been added to the site. The purpose of this poster/presentation is to give an overview of the current capabilities of OLTARIS and focus on the updates to the site since the last workshop presentation in 2014. OLTARIS currently has 240 active accounts - 87 accounts are government (including NASA, ORNL, JPL, AFRL, and FAA), 76 are university professors/researchers/students, and 51 are industry (including Boeing, Space X, Lockheed-Martin, ATK, Northrup Grumman, and Bigelow Aerospace). There have been 14,000 jobs run through OLTARIS since counting began in November 2009. ITAR restrictions were recently reversed, so the site is now available to registered users worldwide.

Sandridge, C. A.↗

In Situ Air Temperature and Humidity Measurements Over Diverse Land Covers in Greenbelt, Maryland, November 2013-November 2015

As our climate changes through time there is an ever-increasing need to quantify how and where it is changing so that mitigation strategies can be implemented. Urban areas have a disproportionate amount of warming due, in part, to the conductive properties of concrete and asphalt surfaces, surface albedo, heat capacity, lack of water, etc. that make up an urban environment. The NASA Climate Adaptation Science Investigation working group at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, conducted a study to collect temperature and humidity data at 15 min intervals from 12 sites at the center. These sites represent the major surface types at the center: asphalt, building roof, grass field, forest, and rain garden. The data show a strong distinction in the thermal properties of these surfaces at the center and the difference between the average values for the center compared to a local meteorological station. The data have been submitted to Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL-DAAC) for archival in comma separated value (csv) file format (Carroll et al.,2016) and can be found by following this link: http:daac.ornl.govcgi-bindsviewer.pl?ds_id1319.

Carroll, Mark L.↗

TPSAS-NF1676L-14038-DND

The next decade at NASA will see development of the Space Launch System heavy-lift vehicle and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle to expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit. Aeronautics will see the development of environmentally responsible aviation technology. Development of technology required for these vehicles will require improved multi0disciplinary simulation capabilities. The talk will describe the development of the computational fluid dynamics and computational aeroacoustics applications to meet these simulation needs. Some results will be presented for scaling a computational fluid dynamics solver on NASA's Pleiades and ORNL's Jaguar.

Joseph H Morrison↗

DAAC Collaboration Overview for AGU

The Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC), Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Systems Center (GES DISC), Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Land Processes DAAC, Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF), as well as NASA Global Imagery Browse Service (GIBS), Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Geographic Information Systems Team (EGIST), Earthdata Content Delivery Team, ArcGIS Online Governance Team, and the Systematic Data Transformation ACCESS team have come together to establish the ArcGIS DAAC Collaboration. This coalition of participants will demonstrate their use of the ArcGIS Enterprise to support Earth science research, applied science, and outreach using Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) data. This includes the use of web services to fuse data products across space and time through services (e.g. ArcGIS Image Services, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS), and OGC Web Mapping Services (WMS)) for analysis in Jupyter notebooks, desktop tools, and web based applications.

Matthew Steven Tisdale↗

AI Foundation Models for Science: An Open Collaborative Initiative

Foundation Models (FMs), AI models designed to replace task-specific models, are increasingly being recognized for their versatility across numerous downstream applications. These models, trained using self-supervised techniques on any type of sequence data, circumvent the need for large annotated datasets, a major bottleneck in traditional AI model development. FMs can be applied to downstream tasks using few-shot learning and fine-tuning, significantly reducing the need for large labeled training datasets and computational resources. However, the development of FMs requires substantial resources, including access to data and compute power, expertise in the latest models, and specialized scientific knowledge for systematic evaluation. It is challenging for a single group to possess all these capabilities. To address this, NASA IMPACT has initiated an open collaborative effort, leveraging partnerships with the private sector and other groups within and outside NASA, to jointly build FMs. The overarching goal is to develop a consistent and collaborative approach to building FMs for high-value science datasets. This initiative has fostered collaboration within NASA and with external partners, including IBM Research, Clark University, DOE’s ORNL, ESA, and USGS. The effort focuses on identifying key datasets with a wide range of downstream applications, pretraining and building FMs using modified transformer architectures, evaluating compute infrastructure needs, and sharing models, pretraining and fine-tuning code, and data with the community. Furthermore, it aims to train the Earth science community to fine-tune these models for various downstream applications. Our initial effort resulted in the creation of a 100 million parameter HLS Geospatial Model within six months, which was released on HuggingFace. We are now expanding our scope to include data from weather and climate models and investigating multimodal models. We invite those interested in participating in this effort to join us by sharing their use cases, expertise, or data.

Rahul Ramachandran↗