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At least 343 records · Page 19

The CEOS Atmospheric Composition Constellation: Enhancing the Value of Space-Based Observations

The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) coordinates civil space-borne observations of the Earth. Participating agencies strive to enhance international coordination and data exchange and to optimize societal benefit. In recent years, CEOS has collaborated closely with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) in implementing the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) space-based objectives. The goal of the CEOS Atmospheric Composition Constellation (ACC) is to collect and deliver data to improve monitoring, assessment and predictive capabilities for changes in the ozone layer, air quality and climate forcing associated with changes in the environment through coordination of existing and future international space assets. A project to coordinate and enhance the science value of a future constellation of geostationary sensors measuring parameters relevant to air quality supports the forthcoming European Sentinel-4, Korean GEMS, and US TEMPO missions. Recommendations have been developed for harmonization to mutually improve data quality and facilitate widespread use of the data products.

Eckman, Richard↗

Sensor Web for Spatio-Temporal Monitoring of a Hydrological Environment

The Sensor Web is a macroinstrument concept that allows for the spatio-temporal understanding of an environment through coordinated efforts between multiple numbers and types of sensing platforms, including, in its most general form, both orbital and terrestrial and both fixed and mobile. Each of these platforms, or pods, communicates within its local neighborhood and thus distributes information to the instrument as a whole. The result of sharing and continual processing of this information among all the Sensor Web elements will result in an information flow and a global perception of and reactive capability to the environment. As illustrated, the Sensor Web concept also allows for the recursive notion of a web of webs with individual distributed instruments possibly playing the role of a single node point on a larger Sensor Web instrument. In particular, the fusion of inexpensive, yet sophisticated, commercial technology from both the computation and telecommunication revolutions has enabled the development of practical, fielded, and embedded in situ systems that have been the focus of the NASA/JPL Sensor Webs Project (http://sensorwebs.jpl.nasa.gov/). These Sensor Webs are complete systems consisting of not only the pod elements that wirelessly communicate among themselves, but also interfacing and archiving software that allows for easy use by the end-user. Previous successful deployments have included environments as diverse as coastal regions, Antarctica, and desert areas. The Sensor Web has broad implications for Earth and planetary science and will revolutionize the way experiments and missions are conceived and performed. As part of our current efforts to develop a macrointelligence within the system, we have deployed a Sensor Web at the Central Avra Valley Storage and Recovery Project (CAVSARP) facility located west of Tucson, AZ. This particular site was selected because it is ideal for studying spatio-temporal phenomena and for providing a test site for more sophisticated hydrological studies in the future.

Delin, K. A.↗

Investigation of Key Electronic States in Layered Mixed Chalcogenides With a d 0 Transition Metal as Li-Ion Cathodes

Lithium-rich transition metal chalcogenides are witnessing a revival as candidates for Li-ion cathode materials, spurred by the boost in their capacities from transcending conventional redox processes based on cationic states and tapping into additional chalcogenide states. A particularly striking case is Li 2 TiS 3-y Se y , which features a d 0 metal. While the end members are expectedly inactive, substantial capacities are measured when both Se and S are present. Using X-ray absorption spectroscopy, it is shown that the electronic structure of Li 2 TiS 3-y Se y is not a simple combination of the end members. The data confirm previous hypotheses that, in Li 2 TiS 2.4 Se 0.6 , this behavior is underpinned by concurrent and reversible redox of only S and Se, and identify key electronic states. Moreover, wavelet transforms of the extended X-ray absorption fine structure provide direct evidence of the formation of short Se–Se units upon charging. The study uncovers the underpinnings of this intriguing reactivity and highlights the richness of redox chemistry in complex solids.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Exploring battery material failure mechanisms through synchrotron X-ray characterization techniques

Rechargeable battery cycling performance and related safety have been persistent concerns. Here, it is crucial to decipher the capacity fading induced by electrode material failure via a range of techniques. Among these, synchrotron-based X-ray techniques with high flux and brightness play a key role in understanding degradation mechanisms. In this comprehensive review, we summarized recent advancements in degradation modes and mechanisms that revealed by synchrotron X-ray methodologies. Subsequently, an overview of X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray scattering techniques are introduced for the characterizing failure phenomena at local coordination atomic environment and long-range order crystal structure scale, respectively. At last, we envision the future of material failure mechanism exploration.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Rational solvent molecule tuning for high-performance lithium metal battery electrolytes

Electrolyte engineering improved cycling of Li metal batteries and anode-free cells at low current densities; however, high-rate capability and tuning of ionic conduction in electrolytes are desirable yet less-studied. In this study, we design and synthesize a family of fluorinated-1,2-diethoxyethanes as electrolyte solvents. The position and amount of F atoms functionalized on 1,2-diethoxyethane were found to greatly affect electrolyte performance. Partially fluorinated, locally polar –CHF 2 is identified as the optimal group rather than fully fluorinated –CF 3 in common designs. Paired with 1.2 M lithium bis(fluorosulfonyl)imide, these developed single-salt-single-solvent electrolytes simultaneously enable high conductivity, low and stable overpotential, >99.5% Li||Cu half-cell efficiency (up to 99.9%, ±0.1% fluctuation) and fast activation (Li efficiency >99.3% within two cycles). Combined with high-voltage stability, these electrolytes achieve roughly 270 cycles in 50-μm-thin Li||high-loading-NMC811 full batteries and >140 cycles in fast-cycling Cu||microparticle-LiFePO 4 industrial pouch cells under realistic testing conditions. The correlation of Li + –solvent coordination, solvation environments and battery performance is investigated to understand structure–property relationships.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Distributed Load Shedding Application Architecture and Bi-Level Predictive Estimator Algorithm

Increasing penetrations of distributed renewables are decreasing the effectiveness of traditional decentralized under-frequency load shedding (UFLS) schemes. As more distribution circuits begin to back-feed the transmission system, operation of traditional UFLS may exacerbate frequency instability. This paper presents the conceptual framework for a data-rich environment to coordinate UFLS across multiple distribution providers based on the laminar coordination framework in order to ensure optimal adaptive setting of UFLS relays. Communication and control are enabled through a distributed implementation of the IEC 61968-1 Common Information Model message bus structure. In addition to the proposed architecture, a novel adaptive UFLS scheme informed by a bi-level state estimator to create optimal relay setpoints is introduced. Initial simulation results are presented for the IEEE 14-bus test system on scenarios leading to mis-operation of traditional UFLS.

Anderson, Alexander A.↗

In situ potassium and hydrogen ion exchange into a cubic zirconium silicate microporous material

The selective separation of ions from aqueous systems, and even in the human body, is a crucial to overall environmental management and health. Nanoporous materials are widely known for their selective removal of cations from aqueous media, and therefore have been targeted for use as a pharmaceutical to treat hyperkalemia. This study investigated the detailed crystallographic molecular mechanisms that control the potassium ion selectivity in the nanoporous cubic zirconium silicate (CZS) related materials. Using time-resolved in situ Raman spectroscopy and time-resolved in situ X-ray diffraction, the selectivity mechanisms were determined to involve a synchronous cation-cation repulsion process that serves to open a favorable coordination bonding environment for potassium, not unlike the ion selectivity filter process found in potassium ion channels in proteins. Enhancement of ion exchange was observed when the CZS material was in a partial protonated state (≈3:1 Na:H), causing an expansion of the unit-cell volume, enlargement of the 7 member-ring window, and distortion of framework polyhedra, which allowed increased accessibility to the cage structures and resulted in rapid irreversible potassium ion exchange.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Seasonal/Spatial Vertical New Particle Formation Variation Study (SSVNV) Field Campaign Report

The Seasonal/Spatial Vertical NPF Variation Study (SSVNV) campaign was conducted to investigate vertically resolved aerosol variability, boundary-layer structure, and new particle formation (NPF) processes across contrasting atmospheric environments through coordinated tethered balloon system (TBS) observations during U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility fixed-site measurements (Dexheimer et al. 2026). The campaign leveraged the overlapping deployments of the third ARM Mobile Facility (AMF3) at Bankhead National Forest (BNF; Kuang et al. 2023, 2026), Alabama, and the first ARM Mobile Facility 1 (AMF1) Coast-Urban-Rural Gradient Atmospheric Experiment (CoURAGE) in the Baltimore region. The campaign was operated by the TBS team led by Darielle Dexheimer from Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with the BNF site science team lead by Chongai Kuang from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the ARM team.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Boundary conditions for the paleoenvironment: Chemical and Physical Processes in dense interstellar clouds

The present research includes searches for important new interstellar constituents; observations relevant to differentiating between different models for the chemical processes that are important in the interstellar environment; and coordinated studies of the chemistry, physics, and dynamics of molecular clouds which are the sites or possible future sites of star formation. Recent research has included the detection and study of four new interstellar molecules; searches which have placed upper limits on the abundance of several other potential constituents of interstellar clouds; quantitative studies of comparative molecular abundances in different types of interstellar clouds; investigation of reaction pathways for astrochemistry from a comparison of theory and the observed abundance of related species such as isomers and isotopic variants; studies of possible tracers of energenic events related to star formation, including silicon and sulfur containing molecules; and mapping of physical, chemical, and dynamical properties over extended regions of nearby cold molecular clouds.

Irvine, W. M.↗

LERC power system autonomy program 1990 demonstration

The NASA Lewis Research Center has undertaken a program for the development of space systems automation, with a view to increased reliability, safety, payload capability, and decreased operational costs. The NASA Space Station is a primary area of application for the techniques thus developed. Attention is presently given to the activities associated with the Power Systems Autonomy Demonstration Project, which has a projected demonstration date in 1990 and will integrate knowledge-based systems into a real-time environment. Two coordinated systems under expert system control will be demonstrated.

Faymon, Karl A.↗

Sensory motor coordination in an artificial gravity environment

The authors review and summarize research on the adaptation of limb movement control to Coriolis forces generated by body movements during rotation. They conclude that limb movement control can adapt to rotation rates as high as 10 rpm and that adaptation is rapid regardless of the presence or absence of visual and tactile feedback.

NASA Discipline Neuroscience↗

Adaptive Responses in Eye-Head-Hand Coordination Following Exposures to a Virtual Environment as a Possible Space Flight Analog

Virtual environments (VE) offer unique training opportunities, particularly for training astronauts and preadapting them to the novel sensory conditions of microgravity. Sensorimotor aftereffects of VEs are often quite similar to adaptive sensorimotor responses observed in astronauts during and/or following space flight. The purpose of this research was to compare disturbances in sensorimotor coordination produced by dome virtual environment display and to examine the effects of exposure duration, and repeated exposures to VR systems. The current study examined disturbances in eye-head-hand (EHH) and eye-head coordination. Preliminary results will be presented. Eleven subjects have participated in the study to date. One training session was completed in order to achieve stable performance on the EHH coordination and VE tasks. Three experimental sessions were performed each separated by one day. Subjects performed a navigation and pick and place task in a dome immersive display VE for 30 or 60 min. The subjects were asked to move objects from one set of 15 pedestals to the other set across a virtual square room through a random pathway as quickly and accurately as possible. EHH coordination was measured before, immediately after, and at 1 hr, 2 hr, 4 hr and 6 hr following exposure to VR. EHH coordination was measured as position errors and reaction time in a pointing task that included multiple horizontal and vertical LED targets. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. In general, we observed significant increases in position errors for both horizontal and vertical targets. The largest decrements were observed immediately following exposure to VR and showed a fairly rapid recovery across test sessions, but not across days. Subjects generally showed faster RTs across days. Individuals recovered from the detrimental effects of exposure to the VE on position errors within 1-2 hours. The fact that subjects did not significantly improve across days suggests that in order to achieve dual adaptation of EHH coordination may require more than three training sessions. These findings provide some direction for developing training schedules for VE users that facilitate adaptation, support the idea that preflight training of astronauts may serve as useful countermeasure for the sensorimotor effects of space flight, and support the idea that VEs may serve as an analog for sensorimotor effects of spaceflight.

Harm, Deborah L.↗

Data Integration Support for Data Served in the OPeNDAP and OGC Environments

NASA is coordinating a technology development project to construct a gateway between system components built upon the Open-source Project for a Network Data AcceSs Protocol (OPeNDAP) and those made available made available via interfaces specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This project is funded though the Advanced Collaborative Connections for Earth-Sun System Science (ACCESS) Program and is a NASA contribution to the Committee on Earth Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS). The motivation for the project is the set of data integration needs that have been expressed by the Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP), an international program that is addressing the study of the global water cycle. CEOP is assembling a large collection in situ and satellite data and mode1 results from a wide variety of sources covering 35 sites around the globe. The data are provided by systems based on either the OPeNDAP or OGC protocols but the research community desires access to the full range of data and associated services from a single client. This presentation will discuss the current status of the OPeNDAP/OGC Gateway Project. The project is building upon an early prototype that illustrated the feasibility of such a gateway and which was demonstrated to the CEOP science community. In its first year as an ACCESS project, the effort has been has focused on the design of the catalog and data services that will be provided by the gateway and the mappings between the metadata and services provided in the two environments.

McDonald, Kenneth R.↗

Coordinating Multi-Rover Systems: Evaluation Functions for Dynamic and Noisy Environments

This paper addresses the evolution of control strategies for a collective: a set of entities that collectively strives to maximize a global evaluation function that rates the performance of the full system. Directly addressing such problems by having a population of collectives and applying the evolutionary algorithm to that population is appealing, but the search space is prohibitively large in most cases. Instead, we focus on evolving control policies for each member of the collective. The fundamental issue in this approach is how to create an evaluation function for each member of the collective that is both aligned with the global evaluation function and is sensitive to the fitness changes of the member, while relatively insensitive to the fitness changes of other members. We show how to construct evaluation functions in dynamic, noisy and communication-limited collective environments. On a rover coordination problem, a control policy evolved using aligned and member-sensitive evaluations outperfoms global evaluation methods by up to 400%. More notably, in the presence of a larger number of rovers or rovers with noisy and communication limited sensors, the proposed method outperforms global evaluation by a higher percentage than in noise-free conditions with a small number of rovers.

Turner, Kagan↗

Virtual Reality Training: "Cybersickness" and Effects on Sensorimotor Functions

The overall goal of this study is to examine the extent to which exposure to virtual reality (VR) systems produces motion sickness and disrupts sensorimotor functions. Two of the major problems in using VRs are: 1) potential "cybersickness", a form of motion sickness, and 2) maladaptive sensorimotor coordination following virtual environment (VE) training. It is likely that users will eventually adapt to any unpleasant perceptual experiences in a virtual environment. However the most critical problem for training applications is that sensorimotor coordination strategies learned in the VE may not be similar to the responses required in the real environment. This study will evaluate and compare responses to the two types of VR delivery systems (head-mounted display [HMD] and a dome-projection system [DOME]), two exposure duration periods (30 minutes or 60 minutes), and repeated exposures (3 sessions). Specific responses that we will examine include cybersickness severity and symptom patterns, and several sensorimotor functions (eye-hea.d and eye-head-hand coordination, and postural equilibrium). To date, all hardware and software acquisition, development, integration and testing has been completed. A database has been developed and tested for the input, management and storage of all questionnaire data. All data analysis scripts have been developed and tested. Data was collected from 20 subjects in a pilot study that was conducted to determine the amount of training necessary to achieve a stable performance level. Seven subjects are currently enrolled in the study designed to examine the effects of exposure to VE systems on postural control. Data has been collected from two subjects, and it is expected that the results from ten subjects will be presented.

Harm, Deborah L.↗

Bonding similarities and differences between Y–Sb–Te and Sc–Sb–Te phase-change memory materials

The scandium (Sc) – alloyed Sb 2 Te 3 phase-change alloy has recently been found to enable ultrafast crystal nucleation due to the formation of Sc-stabilized octahedral motifs in the amorphous phase, rendering cache-type phase-change memory feasible. When yttrium (Y) is added, however, non-octahedral bonding patterns form in the amorphous Sb 2 Te 3 -based network even though Y has a valence electron configuration similar to that of Sc and also forms perfect octahedral bonding environments with tellurium in the YTe crystal. Here we elucidate the origin of this difference between Sc and Y, by carrying out thorough ab initio simulations and orbital-based bonding analyses on amorphous Y–Sb–Te and Sc–Sb–Te compounds. We also demonstrate how the smooth overlap of atomic positions (SOAP) similarity kernel can be used to quantify the structural similarity of local motifs in the amorphous phase with respect to various crystalline yttrium and scandium tellurides, both in the nearest-neighbor shell and beyond. We discover that the bonding contrast of Y- and Sc-centered structural motifs in amorphous Sb 2 Te 3 stems from their parent crystals at high Te concentrations. The larger atomic radius of Y and the weaker charge transfer when bonded with Te is found to allow more Te neighbors and cause a more open bonding environment, leading to higher coordination numbers and non-octahedral environments. We discuss the implications of the different local environments for practical applications in memory devices.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Concepts for a NASA Applied Spaceflight Environments Office

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is launching a bold and ambitious new space initiative. A significant part of this new initiative includes exploration of new worlds, the development of more innovative technologies, and expansion our presence in the solar system. A common theme to this initiative is the exploration of space beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). As currently organized, NASA does not have an Agency-level office that provides coordination of space environment research and development. This has contributed to the formation of a gap between spaceflight environments knowledge and the application of this knowledge for multi-program use. This paper outlines a concept to establish a NASA-level Applied Spaceflight Environments (ASE) office that will provide coordination and funding for sustained multi-program support in three technical areas that have demonstrated these needs through customer requests. These technical areas are natural environments characterization and modeling, materials and systems analysis and test, and operational space environments modeling and prediction. This paper will establish the need for the ASE, discuss a concept for organizational structure and outline the scope in the three technical areas

Edwards, David L.↗

A NASA Applied Spaceflight Environments Office Concept

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is launching a bold and ambitious new space initiative. A significant part of this new initiative includes exploration of new worlds, the development of more innovative technologies, and expansion our presence in the solar system. A common theme to this initiative is the exploration of space beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). As currently organized, NASA does not have an Agency-level office that provides coordination of space environment research and development. This has contributed to the formation of a gap between spaceflight environments knowledge and the application of this knowledge for multi-program use and for use outside NASA. This paper outlines a concept to establish a NASA-level Applied Spaceflight Environments (ASE) office that will provide coordination and funding for sustained multi-program support in three technical areas that have demonstrated these needs through customer requests. These technical areas are natural environments characterization and modeling, materials and systems analysis and test, and operational space environments modeling. Additionally the ASE office will serve as an entry point of contact for external users who wish to take advantage of data and assets associated with space environments, including space weather. This paper will establish the need for the ASE, discuss a concept for organizational structure and outline the scope in the three technical areas.

Spann, James F.↗