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NASA NTRS2004

The Purpose of the Sensor Web

The Sensor Web concept emerged as the number of Earth Science Satellites began to increase in the recent years. The idea, part of a vision for the future of earth science, was that the sensor systems would be linked in an active way to provide improved forecast capability. This means that a system that is nearly autonomous would need to be developed to allow the satellites to re-target and deploy assets for particular phenomena or provide on board processing for real time data. This talk will describe several elements of the sensor web.

Schoeberl, Mark R.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Space-Based Sensor Web for Earth Science Applications: An Integrated Architecture for Providing Societal Benefits

There is a significant interest in the Earth Science research and user remote sensing community to substantially increase the number of useful observations relative to the current frequency of collection. The obvious reason for such a push is to improve the temporal, spectral, and spatial coverage of the area(s) under investigation. However, there is little analysis available in terms of the benefits, costs and the optimal set of sensors needed to make the necessary observations. Classic observing system solutions may no longer be applicable because of their point design philosophy. Instead, a new intelligent data collection system paradigm employing both reactive and proactive measurement strategies with adaptability to the dynamics of the phenomena should be developed. This is a complex problem that should be carefully studied and balanced across various boundaries including: science, modeling, applications, and technology. Modeling plays a crucial role in making useful predictions about naturally occurring or human-induced phenomena In particular, modeling can serve to mitigate the potentially deleterious impacts a phenomenon may have on human life, property, and the economy. This is especially significant when one is interested in learning about the dynamics of, for example, the spread of forest fires, regional to large-scale air quality issues, the spread of the harmful invasive species, or the atmospheric transport of volcanic plumes and ash. This paper identifies and examines these challenging issues and presents architectural alternatives for an integrated sensor web to provide observing scenarios driving the requisite dynamic spatial, spectral, and temporal characteristics to address these key application areas. A special emphasis is placed on the observing systems and its operational aspects in serving the multiple users and stakeholders in providing societal benefits. We also address how such systems will take advantage of technological advancement in small spacecraft and emerging information technologies, and how sensor web options may be realized and made affordable. Specialized detector subsystems and precision flying techniques may still require substantial innovation, development time and cost: we have presented the considerations for these issues. Finally, data and information gathering and compression techniques are also briefly described.

Habib, Shahid↗
NASA NTRS2004

Semantic-Web Technology: Applications at NASA

We provide a description of work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on building system based on semantic-web concepts and technologies. NASA has been one of the early adopters of semantic-web technologies for practical applications. Indeed there are several ongoing 0 endeavors on building semantics based systems for use in diverse NASA domains ranging from collaborative scientific activity to accident and mishap investigation to enterprise search to scientific information gathering and integration to aviation safety decision support We provide a brief overview of many applications and ongoing work with the goal of informing the external community of these NASA endeavors.

Ashish, Naveen↗
NASA NTRS2005

NASA and The Semantic Web

We provide an overview of several ongoing NASA endeavors based on concepts, systems, and technology from the Semantic Web arena. Indeed NASA has been one of the early adopters of Semantic Web Technology and we describe ongoing and completed R&D efforts for several applications ranging from collaborative systems to airspace information management to enterprise search to scientific information gathering and discovery systems at NASA.

Ashish, Naveen↗
NASA NTRS2005

Using a Web Browser for Environmental and Climate Change Studies

A new web browser for viewing and manipulating meteorological data sets is located on a web server at NASA, Langley Research Center. The browser uses a live access server (LAS) developed by the Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. LAS allows researchers to interact directly with the data to view, select, and subset the data in terms of location (latitude, longitude) and time such as day, month, or year. In addition, LAS can compare two data sets and can perform averages and variances, LAS is used here to show how it functions as an internet/web browser for use by the scientific and educational community. In particular its versatility in displaying and manipulating data sets of atmospheric measurements in the earth's radiation budget (ERB) or energy balance, which includes measurements of absorbed solar radiation, reflected shortwave radiation (RSW), thermal outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), and net radiation is demonstrated. These measurements are from the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) experiment and the surface radiation budget (SRB) experiment.

Bess, T. Dale↗
NASA NTRS2002

Using a Web Browser for Environmental and Climate Change Studies

A new web browser for viewing and manipulating meteorological data sets is located on a web server at NASA, Langley Research Center. The browser uses a live access server (LAS) developed by the Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. LAS allows researchers to interact directly with the data to view, select, and subset the data in terms of location (latitude, longitude) and time such as day, month, or year. In addition, LAS can compare two data sets and can perform averages and variances, LAS is used here to show how it functions as an internet/web browser for use by the scientific and educational community. In particular its versatility in displaying and manipulating data sets of atmospheric measurements in the earth s radiation budget (ERB) or energy balance, which includes measurements of absorbed solar radiation, reflected shortwave radiation (RSW), thermal outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), and net radiation is demonstrated. These measurements are from the Clouds and the Earth s Radiant Energy System (CERES) experiment and the surface radiation budget (SRB) experiment.

Bess, T. Dale↗
NASA NTRS1998

Embedded Web Technology: Internet Technology Applied to Real-Time System Control

The NASA Lewis Research Center is developing software tools to bridge the gap between the traditionally non-real-time Internet technology and the real-time, embedded-controls environment for space applications. Internet technology has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. The simple World Wide Web browsers (such as earlier versions of Netscape, Mosaic, and Internet Explorer) that resided on personal computers just a few years ago only enabled users to log into and view a remote computer site. With current browsers, users not only view but also interact with remote sites. In addition, the technology now supports numerous computer platforms (PC's, MAC's, and Unix platforms), thereby providing platform independence.In contrast, the development of software to interact with a microprocessor (embedded controller) that is used to monitor and control a space experiment has generally been a unique development effort. For each experiment, a specific graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed. This procedure works well for a single-user environment. However, the interface for the International Space Station (ISS) Fluids and Combustion Facility will have to enable scientists throughout the world and astronauts onboard the ISS, using different computer platforms, to interact with their experiments in the Fluids and Combustion Facility. Developing a specific GUI for all these users would be cost prohibitive. An innovative solution to this requirement, developed at Lewis, is to use Internet technology, where the general problem of platform independence has already been partially solved, and to leverage this expanding technology as new products are developed. This approach led to the development of the Embedded Web Technology (EWT) program at Lewis, which has the potential to significantly reduce software development costs for both flight and ground software.

Daniele, Carl J.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Geographic Information Systems and Web Page Development

The Facilities Engineering and Architectural Branch is responsible for the design and maintenance of buildings, laboratories, and civil structures. In order to improve efficiency and quality, the FEAB has dedicated itself to establishing a data infrastructure based on Geographic Information Systems, GIs. The value of GIS was explained in an article dating back to 1980 entitled "Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre which stated, "There is a critical need for a better land-information system in the United States to improve land-conveyance procedures, furnish a basis for equitable taxation, and provide much-needed information for resource management and environmental planning." Scientists and engineers both point to GIS as the solution. What is GIS? According to most text books, Geographic Information Systems is a class of software that stores, manages, and analyzes mapable features on, above, or below the surface of the earth. GIS software is basically database management software to the management of spatial data and information. Simply put, Geographic Information Systems manage, analyze, chart, graph, and map spatial information. At the outset, I was given goals and expectations from my branch and from my mentor with regards to the further implementation of GIs. Those goals are as follows: (1) Continue the development of GIS for the underground structures. (2) Extract and export annotated data from AutoCAD drawing files and construct a database (to serve as a prototype for future work). (3) Examine existing underground record drawings to determine existing and non-existing underground tanks. Once this data was collected and analyzed, I set out on the task of creating a user-friendly database that could be assessed by all members of the branch. It was important that the database be built using programs that most employees already possess, ruling out most AutoCAD-based viewers. Therefore, I set out to create an Access database that translated onto the web using Internet Explorer as the foundation. After some programming, it was possible to view AutoCAD files and other GIS-related applications on Internet Explorer, while providing the user with a variety of editing commands and setting options. I was also given the task of launching a divisional website using Macromedia Flash and other web- development programs.

Reynolds, Justin↗
NASA NTRS2004

Web Growth Used to Confine Screw Dislocations to Predetermined Lateral Positions in 4H-SiC Epilayers

Silicon-carbide- (SiC-) based power devices could enable substantial aerospace electronics benefits over today's silicon-based electronics. However, present-day SiC wafers contain electrically harmful dislocations (including micropipes) that are unpredictably distributed in high densities across all commercial 4H- and 6H-SiC wafers. The NASA Glenn Research Center recently demonstrated a crystal growth process that moves SiC wafer dislocations to predetermined lateral positions in epitaxial layers so that they can be reproducibly avoided during subsequent SiC electronic device fabrication. The process starts by reactive ion etching mesa patterns with enclosed trench regions into commercial on-axis (0001) 4H- or 6H-SiC substrates. An example of a pregrowth mesa geometry with six enclosed triangular-shaped trench regions is shown. After the etch mask is stripped, homoepitaxial growth is carried out in pure stepflow conditions that enable thin cantilevers to grow laterally from the tops of mesas whose pregrowth top surfaces are not threaded by substrate screw dislocations. The image in the bottom figure shows the postgrowth structure that forms after the lateral cantilevers expand to coalesce and completely roof over each of the six triangular trench regions. Atomic force microscope (AFM) measurements of the roof revealed that three elementary screw dislocation growth spirals, each shown in the AFM insets of the bottom image on the previous page, formed in the film roof at three respective points of cantilever film coalescence. The image above shows the structure following an etch in molten potassium hydroxide (KOH) that produced surface etch pits at the dislocation defects. The larger KOH etch pits--S1, S2, and S3--shown in this image correspond to screw dislocations relocated to the final points of cantilever coalescence. The smaller KOH etch pits are consistent with epilayer threading edge dislocations from the pregrowth substrate mesa (P1, P3, and P4) and a final cantilever coalescence point (P2). No defects (i.e., no etch pits) are observed in other cantilevered portions of the film surface. On the basis of the principle of dislocation Burgers vector conservation, we hypothesize that all vertically propagating substrate dislocations in an enclosed trench region become combined into a single dislocation in the webbed film roof at the point of final roof coalescence. The point of final roof coalescence, and therefore the lateral location of a webbed roof dislocation, can be designed into the pregrowth mesa pattern. Screw dislocations with predetermined lateral positions can then be used to provide the new growth steps necessary for growing a 4H/6H-SiC epilayer with a lower dislocation density than the substrate. Devices fabricated on top of such films can be positioned to avoid the preplaced dislocations.

Powell, J. Anthony↗
NASA NTRS2000

New Web Server - the Java Version of Tempest - Produced

A new software design and development effort has produced a Java (Sun Microsystems, Inc.) version of the award-winning Tempest software (refs. 1 and 2). In 1999, the Embedded Web Technology (EWT) team received a prestigious R&D 100 Award for Tempest, Java Version. In this article, "Tempest" will refer to the Java version of Tempest, a World Wide Web server for desktop or embedded systems. Tempest was designed at the NASA Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field to run on any platform for which a Java Virtual Machine (JVM, Sun Microsystems, Inc.) exists. The JVM acts as a translator between the native code of the platform and the byte code of Tempest, which is compiled in Java. These byte code files are Java executables with a ".class" extension. Multiple byte code files can be zipped together as a "*.jar" file for more efficient transmission over the Internet. Today's popular browsers, such as Netscape (Netscape Communications Corporation) and Internet Explorer (Microsoft Corporation) have built-in Virtual Machines to display Java applets.

York, David W.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Workspaces in the Semantic Web

Due to the recency and relatively limited adoption of Semantic Web technologies. practical issues related to technology scaling have received less attention than foundational issues. Nonetheless, these issues must be addressed if the Semantic Web is to realize its full potential. In particular, we concentrate on the lack of scoping methods that reduce the size of semantic information spaces so they are more efficient to work with and more relevant to an agent's needs. We provide some intuition to motivate the need for such reduced information spaces, called workspaces, give a formal definition, and suggest possible methods of deriving them.

Wolfe, Shawn R.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Using Sensor Web Processes and Protocols to Assimilate Satellite Data into a Forecast Model

The goal of the Sensor Management Applied Research Technologies (SMART) On-Demand Modeling project is to develop and demonstrate the readiness of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) capabilities to integrate both space-based Earth observations and forecast model output into new data acquisition and assimilation strategies. The project is developing sensor web-enabled processing plans to assimilate Atmospheric Infrared Sounding (AIRS) satellite temperature and moisture retrievals into a regional Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model over the southeastern United States.

Goodman, H. Michael↗
NASA NTRS2008

Web Monitoring of EOS Front-End Ground Operations, Science Downlinks and Level 0 Processing

This paper addresses the efforts undertaken and the technology deployed to aggregate and distribute the metadata characterizing the real-time operations associated with NASA Earth Observing Systems (EOS) high-rate front-end systems and the science data collected at multiple ground stations and forwarded to the Goddard Space Flight Center for level 0 processing. Station operators, mission project management personnel, spacecraft flight operations personnel and data end-users for various EOS missions can retrieve the information at any time from any location having access to the internet. The users are distributed and the EOS systems are distributed but the centralized metadata accessed via an external web server provide an effective global and detailed view of the enterprise-wide events as they are happening. The data-driven architecture and the implementation of applied middleware technology, open source database, open source monitoring tools, and external web server converge nicely to fulfill the various needs of the enterprise. The timeliness and content of the information provided are key to making timely and correct decisions which reduce project risk and enhance overall customer satisfaction. The authors discuss security measures employed to limit access of data to authorized users only.

Cordier, Guy R.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Web-Based Mapping Puts the World at Your Fingertips

NASA's award-winning Earth Resources Laboratory Applications Software (ELAS) package was developed at Stennis Space Center. Since 1978, ELAS has been used worldwide for processing satellite and airborne sensor imagery data of the Earth's surface into readable and usable information. DATASTAR Inc., of Picayune, Mississippi, has used ELAS software in the DATASTAR Image Processing Exploitation (DIPEx) desktop and Internet image processing, analysis, and manipulation software. The new DIPEx Version III includes significant upgrades and improvements compared to its esteemed predecessor. A true World Wide Web application, this product evolved with worldwide geospatial dimensionality and numerous other improvements that seamlessly support the World Wide Web version.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2008

Web-Enabled Optoelectronic Particle-Fallout Monitor

A Web-enabled optoelectronic particle- fallout monitor has been developed as a prototype of future such instruments that (l) would be installed in multiple locations for which assurance of cleanliness is required and (2) could be interrogated and controlled in nearly real time by multiple remote users. Like prior particle-fallout monitors, this instrument provides a measure of particles that accumulate on a surface as an indication of the quantity of airborne particulate contaminants. The design of this instrument reflects requirements to: Reduce the cost and complexity of its optoelectronic sensory subsystem relative to those of prior optoelectronic particle fallout monitors while maintaining or improving capabilities; Use existing network and office computers for distributed display and control; Derive electric power for the instrument from a computer network, a wall outlet, or a battery; Provide for Web-based retrieval and analysis of measurement data and of a file containing such ancillary data as a log of command attempts at remote units; and Use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for maximum performance and minimal network overhead.

Lineberger, Lewis P.↗
NASA NTRS2007

Web-Based Software for Managing Research

aeroCOMPASS is a software system, originally designed to aid in the management of wind tunnels at Langley Research Center, that could be adapted to provide similar aid to other enterprises in which research is performed in common laboratory facilities by users who may be geographically dispersed. Included in aeroCOMPASS is Web-interface software that provides a single, convenient portal to a set of project- and test-related software tools and other application programs. The heart of aeroCOMPASS is a user-oriented document-management software subsystem that enables geographically dispersed users to easily share and manage a variety of documents. A principle of "write once, read many" is implemented throughout aeroCOMPASS to eliminate the need for multiple entry of the same information. The Web framework of aeroCOMPASS provides links to client-side application programs that are fully integrated with databases and server-side application programs. Other subsystems of aeroCOMPASS include ones for reserving hardware, tracking of requests and feedback from users, generating interactive notes, administration of a customer-satisfaction questionnaire, managing execution of tests, managing archives of metadata about tests, planning tests, and providing online help and instruction for users.

Computer software and hardware↗
NASA NTRS2010

Common Data Format (CDF) and Coordinated Data Analysis Web (CDAWeb)

The Coordinated Data Analysis Web (CDAWeb) data browsing system provides plotting, listing and open access v ia FTP, HTTP, and web services (REST, SOAP, OPeNDAP) for data from mo st NASA Heliophysics missions and is heavily used by the community. C ombining data from many instruments and missions enables broad resear ch analysis and correlation and coordination with other experiments a nd missions. Crucial to its effectiveness is the use of a standard se lf-describing data format, in this case, the Common Data Format (CDF) , also developed at the Space Physics Data facility , and the use of metadata standa rds (easily edited with SKTeditor ). CDAweb is based on a set of IDL routines, CDAWlib . . The CDF project also maintains soft ware and services for translating between many standard formats (CDF. netCDF, HDF, FITS, XML) <! .

Candey, Robert M.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Using Web 2.0 (and Beyond?) in Space Flight Operations Control Centers

Word processing was one of the earliest uses for small workstations, but we quickly learned that desktop computers were far more than e-typewriters. Similarly, "Web 2.0" capabilities, particularly advanced search engines, chats, wikis, blogs, social networking, and the like, offer tools that could significantly improve our efficiency at managing the avalanche of information and decisions needed to operate space vehicles in realtime. However, could does not necessarily equal should. We must wield two-edged swords carefully to avoid stabbing ourselves. This paper examines some Web 2.0 tools, with an emphasis on social media, and suggests which ones might be useful or harmful in real-time space operations co rnotl environments, based on the author s experience as a Payload Crew Communicator (PAYCOM) at Marshall Space Flight Center s (MSFC) Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) for the International Space Station (ISS) and on discussions with other space flight operations control organizations and centers. There is also some discussion of an offering or two that may come from beyond the current cyber-horizon.

Scott, David W.↗