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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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The objective of the Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR) Network Mission is to establish a global network of small science stations on the surface of Mars to operate concurrently over a minimum of one martian year.
The Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR) project has been established to deliver and emplace a network of small landers on Mars. A key requisite for this mission is the development of a low cost, simple, robust delivery system for payloads to the Martian surface.
This is the first time in unmanned spacecraft history that an active heat rejection system of this type has been used on a long duration spacecraft mission.
Introduction: A new era in lunar exploration has recently begun. Through NASA’s robotic Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, international and the human Artemis programs, multiple assets are being deployed to explore the Moon and at a rapid cadence. There will be a huge expanse in lunar surface exploration with mobility (e.g., rovers). Several missions are focused on collecting data for assessing lunar resources for potential In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). With this expansion in exploration there will be a commensurate expansion in the volume and variety of data. Work has begun on establishing a measurement plan (i.e., what data is needed) for ISRU [1] but how to integrate these data into the broader Planetary Data Ecosystem (PDE) following FAIR (i.e., Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) data practices has not been addressed. The VIPER team intends to engage this challenge.
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The Radar Echo Telescope for Cosmic Rays (RET-CR) is a recently funded experiment designed to detect the englacial cascade of a cosmic ray-initiated air shower via in-ice radar, toward the goal of a full-scale, next-generation experiment to detect ultrahigh energy neutrinos in polar ice. For cosmic rays with a primary energy greater than 10 PeV, roughly 10% of an air shower’s energy reaches the surface of a high elevation ice sheet (≳2 ˙km) concentrated into a radius of roughly 10 cm. This penetrating shower core creates an in-ice cascade orders of magnitude more dense than the preceding in-air cascade. Additionally, this dense cascade can be detected via the radar echo technique, where transmitted radio waves are reflected from the ionization deposit left in the wake of the cascade. RET-CR will test the radar echo method in nature, with the in-ice cascade of a cosmic ray-initiated air shower serving as a test beam. In this work, we present the projected event rate and sensitivity based upon a three part simulation using corsika, geant4, and radioscatter. RET-CR expects ~1 radar echo event per day.
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Work performed under this one-year LDRD was concerned with estimating resource requirements for small quantum test beds that are expected to be available in the near future. This work represents a preliminary demonstration of our ability to leverage quantum hardware for solving small quantum simulation problems in areas of interest to the DOE. The algorithms enabling such studies are hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithms, in particular the widely-used variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). Employing this hybrid algorithm, in which the quantum computer complements the classical one, we implemented an end-to-end application-level toolchain that allows the user to specify a molecule of interest and compute the ground state energy using the VQE approach. We found significant limitations attributable to the classical portion of the hybrid system, including a greater than greater-than-quartic power scaling of the classical memory requirements with the system size. Current VQE approaches would require an exascale machine for solving any molecule with size greater than 150 nuclei. Our findings include several improvements that we implemented into the VQE toolchain, including a new classical optimizer that is decades old but hadn't been considered before in the VQE ecosystem. Our findings suggest limitations to variational hybrid approaches to simulation that further motivate the need for a gate-based fault-tolerant quantum processor that can implement larger problems using the fully digital quantum phase estimation algorithm.
This is the first progress report for the Laser / Fiber-Optic Based IAEA Seal. This seal implements spectral interferometry, which is crucial for its resilience to tampering. Indeed, based on our understanding of telecommunications-based fiber optic technology, it is essentially impossible to tamper with the fiber without detection either immediately (with an active system) or subsequently (with a passive system).
LANL missions can be affected by space weather.
The Shirokoff Line-Intensity Mapper (SPT-SLIM) is a mm-wavelength, superconducting on-chip spectrometer observing redshifted CO in the 2mm atmospheric window using the 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT). The instrument was recently deployed for the first time during the 2024-2025 austral summer season at South Pole, where it conducted a short two-week observing campaign. We will present an overview of the SPT-SLIM instrument and project, discuss early results from its initial deployment, and preview the prospects for a longer survey using upgraded instrumentation in the 2025-2026 austral summer.