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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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Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) Study: Design challenges associated with Mars; Remote; Temperature; Atmosphere; Radiation; Dust. Challenges unique to MAV: No vehicle has ever left the surface of Mars; Completely autonomous; Physical system extremely limited; Martian environment creates a number of issues with traditional propulsion systems.
Outline: Scientific motivation for MaGIXS (Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer) - Demonstrate sensitivity of MaGIXS to determine high temperature plasma; Instrument design - Challenges involved; Instrument status - alignment and calibration.
Milli-watt Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) based on Radioisotope Heater Units (RHUs) could be an ideal power source for certain spacecraft that cannot use solar power due to large distances from the sun, or other environmental constraints, and where they enable or significantly enhance the ability of a mission to meet its scientific or operational goals. Various modular, compact RHU-based thermoelectric (TE) generator concepts developed or derived from current NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) projects satisfying this need have been investigated. These modular, compact and low mass power systems could support small, highly-mobile robotic exploration packages, and could be incorporated into different robotic package concepts, spacecraft or satellites. Current modular RPS design concepts with 40mW, 80mW and 120mW power levels use RHUs and Bi2Te3 TE converters. Skutterudites materials could be used in the future if new higher thermal energy output and higher temperature miniature heat sources were developed, for example, using technologies currently in the General Purpose Heat Source (GPHS) used in higher electric power output RTGs. Small (a.k.a., “mice-like”) robotic packages could effectively utilize these RHU-driven power levels to accommodate crawling, climbing, monitoring, taking measurements, and communicating during long-term planetary missions aimed at gathering environmental and geologic data (i.e., over multiple decades). Waste heat from the cold side of the TE converter could also be directed toward the electronics and / or energy storage (e.g. batteries) to keep them within design temperature ranges. In addition to power generation and electronics / battery heating, the RHU / TE configuration could be designed to survive an external 500°C bake out procedure for critical spacecraft sterilization, environmental certification and planetary protection. Analytical studies have been performed to optimize various design configurations for power, mass, volume and robotic mobility. Specific power (mW/kg) and volumetric specific power (mW/cm3) characteristics of various design configurations will be presented and key conceptual design tradeoffs will be discussed. Hot- and cold-side thermal interfaces required to meet power and mass goals and associated design sensitivities will also be discussed. RHU / TE systems must overcome critical design challenges to survive high-g loadings in some robotic applications and we will examine the mass impacts required to satisfy various dynamic loading environments up to 10,000 g’s. Power can be generated for a minimum of 30 years or more using plutonium-238 dioxide heat sources (given that Pu-238 has an 87.7 year half-life) with some reduction in power as the heat source naturally degrades.
This project is sponsored by the eXploration Systems and Habitation (X-Hab) 2020 Academic Innovation Challenge is a university-level challenge designed to develop strategic partnerships and collaborations with universities. NASA has tasked this project to take another step in solving this issue by designing a volume optimized system in which food will be grown for astronauts to consume during long space journeys and to aid in setting up regenerative agriculture production on other terrestrial surfaces.
Appropriate integration between automation and robotics systems and their human operators is essential for future space exploration. The Human Factors and Behavioral Performance Element of NASA’s Human Research Program requires a systematic understanding of the critical human-automation/robotic (HAR) integration, or HARI, design challenges for future space exploration. This document reports the results of a systematic assessment of the spaceflight-relevant HARI technologies and research topics addressing critical gaps in spaceflight-relevant HARI knowledge, and prioritizes research required for successful human performance and HAR integration. We reviewed relevant literature across the past ten years and interviewed ten subject matter experts to investigate the current state of HARI technology, challenges facing development, the state of HARI research across a wide range of fields, and opportunities for advancing the state of the art through directed research. This information was used to identify relevant HARI technologies and research topics, as well as factors to assess relative priority of HARI technologies. We worked with NASA stakeholders to weight the factors relevant to assessing HARI specific technologies. A multi-dimensional trade analysis was performed to objectively score HARI research topics and specific technologies to recommended investment priorities for NASA.
A telescope for the LISA Mission is currently under development under a contract with L3Harris in Rochester, New York. The contract was kicked off March 19, 2020, and includes the design, construction and test of a Structural Thermal Model (STM), and two Engineering Development Units (EDUs). The program has just successfully passed a System Requirements Review (SRR) and is proceeding toward a Preliminary Design Review (PDR). We will describe requirements, design, and current status of the program, including some of the design challenges, some of the key trades, and some of the key interfaces.
The exoplanet atmosphere characterization goals of future UV/Optical/Infrared flagship space missions will drive challenging design requirements for instrument wavefront controls, spatial and spectral sampling, spectral bandwidth, and detector performance. The new ExoSpec Project links four previously distinct research efforts at Goddard and Ames for enabling and enhancing the characterization of directly-imaged exoplanets. ExoSpec is comprised of three laboratory subsystem demonstrations: high-contrast integral field spectrographs, p-channel CCDs, and parabolic deformable mirrors. A fourth component, exoplanet spectral retrieval, is an iterative data simulation activity driven by the goal of optimizing the system-level instrument design for atmosphere retrieval metrics. The ExoSpec Project’s emphasis on system-level spectroscopy performance complements the objectives of other technology demonstrations supported by NASA.
A centralized mission activity planning system for any long-term mission, such as the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER), is completely infeasible due to budget and geographic constraints. A distributed operations system is key to addressing these constraints; therefore, future system and software engineers must focus on the problem of how to provide a secure, reliable, and distributed mission activity planning system. We will explain how Maestro, the next generation mission activity planning system, with its heavy emphasis on portability and distributed operations has been able to meet these design challenges. MER has been an excellent proving ground for Maestro's new approach to distributed operations. The backend that has been developed for Maestro could benefit many future missions by reducing the cost of centralized operations system architecture.
The Mars Pathfinder mission promises to reap a harvest of geological information about Mars. One of the nearly half dozen instruments making this science data possible is the alpha proton X ray spectrometer (APXS). Using a curium source and backscattering techniques, the APXS will determine the elemental composition of rocks and the soil around the landing site. To ensure information of high fidelity, the APXS sensor face must be aligned to within 20° to the surface of each rock and soil sampling location and be held there for up to 10 hours. This is accomplished through the anthropomorphic deployment mechanism (ADM). The ADM mounts on the back of the Mars rover. Working with the rover, the ADM both actively and passively positions the APXS sensor head against a chosen target. The ADM is an amalgamation of unique solutions to some very challenging design problems. The resulting design is light, flexible, and nearly autonomous. Its straightforward operation rivals that of the human arm in simplicity and elegance.
This paper provides an overview of some of the recent developments in active microwave systems at JPL. The first section summarizes the engineering and scientific results that were obtained from the two recent flights of the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) on the Shuttle Endeavor. Specific examples of the applications of these data to various scientific disciplines will be discussed. The second section of the paper describes the recent progress in the development of an interferometric SAR system for high-resolution digital topography mapping. Examples of measurements from this technique over areas with earthquakes will be shown. The final section of the paper addresses development of meteorological radars for rain and cloud measurements. The design of an airborne rain mapping radar that was developed to support the Tropical Rain Measuring Mission is summarized. The technical design challenges for this high-frequency radar system will be described.
Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) of future long-duration, deep-space human exploration missions should treat all “waste” streams for recovery and ideally by near closed-loop. Onboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Water Recovery System (WRS) does not treat urine and gray water to recover elements beyond water and utilizes physical-chemical technologies that operate with single-use and hazardous consumables. Urine offers a renewable source of nitrogen and other trace elements that can support sustainable crop production. In response to the lack of flight ready technologies capable of treating urine and gray water for water and nutrient recovery, a Suspended Aerobic Membrane Bioreactor (SAMBR) is under development between the University of South Florida and Kennedy Space Center. SAMBR is optimized for an early planetary base/partial gravity habitat and serves as a hybrid alternative to currently utilized urine treatment technologies and support closing the resource recovery loop. With its ECLSS minded form factor and modular design, SAMBR’s operation can be customized to suit the treatment objectives (i.e., nitrogen conversion) at that time. This proceeding presents preliminary research pertaining to: 1) design challenges in maximizing hydraulic throughput while minimizing mass and volume of the assembly; 2) capabilities for treating high nitrogen waste under steady and non-steady state conditions; and 3) measured performance parameters such chemical oxygen demand (COD), nitrogen conversion, nutrients, turbidity, and system throughput. Future research and development pertaining to further optimization on system safety, reliability, and expanded treatment capabilities will also be presented.
The Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) on NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission is a hyperspectral imager with high SNR, precision and dynamic range, and with a very low striping artifact level in the 342-887 nm wavelength range with a spectral resolution of 5 nm in 2.5 nm steps, providing a significant technological advancement over previous ocean imagers. To achieve this, OCI is designed with specialized optical imaging and opto-electronic detection systems that push the boundaries of several state-of-the-art technologies. This paper provides an overview of these systems together with their achieved performances and discussions of their key design challenges.
The Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) on NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission is a hyperspectral imager with high SNR, precision and dynamic range, and with a very low striping artifact level in the 342-887 nm wavelength range with a spectral resolution of 5 nm in 2.5 nm steps, providing a significant technological advancement over previous ocean imagers. To achieve this, OCI is designed with specialized optical imaging and opto-electronic detection systems that push the boundaries of several state-of-the-art technologies. This paper provides an overview of these systems together with their achieved performances and discussions of their key design challenges.
Solid-state battery (SSB) is the new avenue for achieving safe and high energy density energy storage in both conventional but also niche applications. Such batteries employ a solid electrolyte unlike the modern-day liquid electrolyte-based lithium-ion batteries and thus facilitate the use of high-capacity lithium metal anodes thereby achieving high energy densities. Despite this promise, practical realization and commercial adoption of solid-state batteries remain a challenge due to the underlying material and cell level issues that needs to be overcome. This chapter thus covers the specific challenges, design principles and performance improvement strategies pertaining to the cathode, solid electrolyte and anode used in solid state batteries. Perspectives and outlook on specific applications that can benefit from the successful implementation of solid-state battery systems are also discussed. Overall, this chapter highlights the potential of solid-state batteries for successful commercial deployment in next generation energy storage systems.
Obtaining and analyzing high performance computing (HPC) telemetry in real time is a complex task that can impact algo- rithmic performance, operating costs, and ultimately scientific outcomes. If your organization operates multiple HPC systems, filesystems, and clusters, telemetry streams can be synthesized in order to ease operational and analytics burden. In order to collect this telemetry, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has deployed STREAM (Streaming Telemetry for Resource Events, Analytics, and Monitoring), which is a distributed and high-performance message bus based on Apache Kafka. STREAM collects center-wide performance information and must interface with many sources, including five HPE deployed supercomputers, each with their own Kafka cluster which is managed by HPCM. OLCF Supercomputers and their attached scratch filesystems currently send more than 300 million messages to over 200 topics producing around 1.3 Terabytes per day of telemetry data to STREAM. This paper describes the architectural principles that enable STREAM to be both resilient and highly performant while supporting multiple upstream Kafka clusters and other data sources. It also discusses the design challenges and decisions faced in adapting our existing system- monitoring infrastructure to support the first Exascale computing platform.
sPHENIX is the first new major detector at RHIC in over twenty years. It is designed for pioneering studies of the Quark Gluon Plasma and Cold QCD phenomena using high-pT jet and heavy flavor probes with a broad kinematic reach and a capability to take large statistics sets of A+A, p+p and p+A data. sPHENIX construction was completed in April 2023. It was commissioned and took first Au+Au data in the RHIC 2023 Run. This paper describes the details of the detector design, challenges of sPHENIX construction, progress on the commissioning and first data from the RHIC 2023 run.
The MAGIS-100 collaboration is building a long-baseline atom interferometer designed to investigate dark matter, novel forces, gravitational waves, and quantum science. A major design challenge is external, time-varying magnetic fields, the effect of which can mimic gravitational waves or expected dark matter signals; static magnetic fields must also be tightly controlled to manage measurement resolution. Several tools are being applied to the problem, including mu-metal shielding, field biasing, and a suite of magnetometers. This report details the development of a magnetic field monitoring system to be built from commercially available parts and installed at seventeen locations, one for each of the modular sections making up the length of the MAGIS-100 apparatus.
Increasing amounts of automation are being introduced to safety-critical domains. While the introduction of automation has led to an overall increase in reliability and improved safety, it has also introduced a class of failure modes, and new challenges in risk assessment for the new systems, particularly in the assessment of rare events resulting from complex inter-related factors. Designing successful human-automation systems is challenging, and the challenges go beyond good interface development (e.g., Roth, Malin, & Schreckenghost 1997; Christoffersen & Woods, 2002). Human-automation design is particularly challenging when the underlying automation technology generates behavior that is difficult for the user to anticipate or understand. These challenges have been recognized in several safety-critical domains, and have resulted in increased efforts to develop training, procedures, regulations and guidance material (CAST, 2008, IAEA, 2001, FAA, 2013, ICAO, 2012). This paper points to the continuing need for new methods to describe and characterize the operational environment within which new automation concepts are being presented. We will describe challenges to the successful development and evaluation of human-automation systems in safety-critical domains, and describe some approaches that could be used to address these challenges. We will draw from experience with the aviation, spaceflight and nuclear power domains.