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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2018

Understanding Extended Projected Profile (EPP) Trajectory Error Using a Medium-Fidelity Aircraft Simulation

A critical component of Trajectory-Based Operations is the ability for a consistent and accurate 4-dimensional trajectory to be shared and synchronized between airborne and ground systems as well as amongst various ground automation systems. The Aeronautical Telecommunication Network—Baseline 2 standard defines the Extended Projected Profile (EPP) trajectory that can be sent via Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Contract from an aircraft to ground automation. The EPP trajectory message contains a representation of the reference trajectory from an aircraft’s Flight Management System (FMS). In this work, a set of scenarios were run in a medium-fidelity aircraft and FMS simulation to perform an initial characterization of EPP trajectory errors under a given set of conditions. The parameters investigated were the route length, route type, wind magnitude error, wind direction error, and with and without a required time-of-arrival constraint.

Guerreiro, Nelson M.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Laboratory for Atmospheres 2002 Technical Highlights

How can we improve our ability to predict the weather-tomorrow, next week, and into the future? How is the Earth's climate changing? What causes such change? And what are its costs? What can the atmospheres of distant planets teach us about our own planet and its evolution? The Laboratory for Atmospheres is helping to answer these and other scientific questions about our planet and its neighbors. The Laboratory conducts a broad theoretical and experimental research program studying all aspects of the atmospheres of the Earth and other planets, including their structural, dynamical, radiative, and chemical properties, with the overarching goal to provide better understanding and to improve prediction of the Earth's climate. Vigorous research is central to NASA's exploration of the frontiers of knowledge. NASA scientists play a key role in conceiving new space missions, providing mission requirements, and carrying out research to explore the behavior of planetary systems, including, notably, the Earth's. Our Laboratory's scientists also supply outside scientists with technical assistance and scientific data to further investigations not immediately addressed by NASA itself. Laboratory scientists submit competitive research proposals with diverse scientific or technological approaches to NASA and other Federal agencies to acquire research support. The Laboratory management strives to provide a working environment that promotes creativity, competition, and openness. The Laboratory for Atmospheres is a vital participant in NASA's research program. Our Laboratory often has relatively large programs, sizable satellite missions, or observational campaigns that require the cooperative and collaborative efforts of many scientists. We ensure an appropriate balance between our scientists' responsibility for these large collaborative projects and their need for an active individual research agenda. This balance allows members of the Laboratory to continuously improve their scientific credentials. The Laboratory places high importance on promoting and measuring quality in its scientific research. We strive to assure high quality through peer-review funding processes that support approximately 90% of the work in the Laboratory. The overall quality of our scientific efforts is evaluated periodically by committees of advisors from the external scientific community, as detailed in Appendix 2 of this document. Members of the Laboratory interact with the general public to support a wide range of interests in the atmospheric sciences. Among other activities, the Laboratory raises the public's awareness of atmospheric science by presenting public lectures and demonstrations, by making scientific data available to wide audiences, by teaching, and by mentoring students and teachers. Section 6 presents details of the Laboratory's outreach activities during 2002. The Laboratory is also committed to addressing the demographic imbalances that exist today in the atmospheric and space sciences. We must address these imbalances for our field to enjoy the full benefit of all of the Nation's talent. The Laboratory makes substantial efforts to attract new scientists to the fields of atmospheric and space sciences. We strongly encourage the establishment of partnerships with Federal and state agencies that have operational responsibilities to promote the societal application of Earth sciences.

Steven E. Platnick↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Planning and Monitoring for Swarm Search and Service Missions

To transition from control theory to real applications, it is important to study missions such as Swarm Search and Service (SSS) where vehicles are not only required to search an area, but also service all jobs that they find. In SSS missions each type of job requires a group of vehicles to break-off from the swarm for a given amount of time to successfully service it. The required number of vehicles and the service rate are unique to each job type. Once a job has been completed the vehicles are able to return to the swarm for use elsewhere. If not enough vehicles are present in the swarm at the time that the job is identified, that job is dropped without being serviced. Human operators as tasked with effectively planning and managing these complex missions. This work presents a user study that seeks to test the efficacy and ease-of-use of a prediction model known as the Hybrid Model as an aid in planning and monitoring tasks. Results show that the novel computational model aid allows operators to more effectively choose the necessary swarm size to handle expected mission workload, as well as, maintain sufficient situation awareness to evaluate the performance of the swarm during missions.

swarm search and service↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Exploring the Landscape of Earth and Space Science Informatics using Latent Topic Modeling

AGU Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) is at the forefront of data management, analysis, large scale experimentation, and infrastructure development pertaining to Earth and Space Science interests. The key topics of interest within ESSI are also evolving and diversifying over time. We aim to observe and quantify the various topics covered in ESSI, analyze their trends over time, and identify the contributors’ affiliations to gain an understanding of the landscape of ESSI and the direction of the research and management. The data for this work are abstracts submitted to AGU’s ESSI Fall meeting; They serve as a proxy for key research and development areas within ESSI. We use an unsupervised topic modeling technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation to observe the underlying topics covered in ESSI and their trends over time. With this presentation, we showcase our results from the analysis and insights gained.

Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Virginia Earth System Science Scholars (VESSS) Experience: Inspiring High School Students in Stem Through Mentorship and Collaborative Skills Development

Since 2016, the Virginia Earth System Science Scholars (VESSS) program offered by the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) has provided an interactive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning experience for Virginia high school juniors and seniors. The VESSS program was created through a partnership with VSGC, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC), and Hampton University to engage students in learning about Earth’s climate change and its global impacts. High school students from all areas of Virginia learn about Earth science and climate change in a 16 week online course focused on the Earth’s surface and interior, atmospheric composition, weather, water energy cycles, and climate variability. Students that complete the online course are invited to a no-cost seven-day residential summer academy at NASA LaRC where students are divided into teams based on four of the major spheres of study for Earth: atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. Each team is guided by a Master Teacher and teams of undergraduate student interns who were also previous VESSS scholars. Students interview for team positions and are given a role reflecting an actual satellite design team position such as project scientist, research scientist, budget analyst, launch and orbit analyst, contamination analyst, and education and public outreach specialist. The students spend a week mentored by NASA and industry scientists and engineers as they learn how to select science goals and objectives, select science instruments, balance a mission budget, determine the mission launch location and orbit, and communicate the importance of the mission to the public. Each team produces a mission proposal, and at the end of the week, each team presents their portion of the mission to a panel of experts, followed by a question and answer period. Through this week students learn teamwork, communication, time management, meeting management, and research skills. Project work is supplemented by team-building activities, NASA facility tours, and lectures by acclaimed guest speakers such as Dr. Christine Darden, a NASA “Hidden Figure.” Students have conveyed through course evaluations and testimonials not only the vast personal learning and growth they achieved, but also the new perspectives they gained on future STEM career fields and opportunities to explore.

Elaine Seasly↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Document Classification Techniques for Aviation Letters of Agreement

Often when working with historic air traffic management (ATM) documents, it is helpful to classify them into specific categories. In this paper, we conduct a thorough review of natural language processing techniques to perform this classification task on Letters of Agreement (LOAs), technical aviation documents outlining rules for utilizing US airspace. We evaluate multiple techniques for representing the text in the documents as embeddings: unigram and bigram Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, GloVe and RoBERTa. We investigate a wide range of classification models: K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Feed-Forward Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). By comparing the different methods, we found the best overall approach for our task was to use unigram TFIDF representations with SVM while also gaining insight into how the other methodologies performed on a small technical datasets.

ATM↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Document Classification Techniques for Aviation Letters of Agreement

Often when working with historic air traffic management (ATM) documents, it is helpful to classify them into specific categories. In this paper, we conduct a thorough review of natural language processing techniques to perform this classification task on Letters of Agreement (LOAs), technical aviation documents outlining rules for utilizing US airspace. We evaluate multiple techniques for representing the text in the documents as embeddings: unigram and bigram Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, GloVe and RoBERTa. We investigate a wide range of classification models: K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Feed-Forward Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). By comparing the different methods, we found the best overall approach for our task was to use unigram TFIDF representations with SVM while also gaining insight into how the other methodologies performed on a small technical datasets.

ATM↗
NASA NTRS2002

The Idyllic Workplace

How many of us have worked in organizations where the discipline was so rigid and unyielding that it would send even a Marine Corps Drill Instructor screaming into the night? How many of us have worked in organizations where sightings of senior management were sporadic and rare, and any other interactions were by appointment only? Or, how many of us have worked in organizations where your role, absent specific direction, was to be seldom seen and rarely heard? And how many of us have worked in organizations where seemingly light itself was not permitted to escape without the acquiescence and approval of the director? Sadly, there are organizations that embody some of these conditions, and the resultant adverse effects on employee productivity, creativity and morale are profound. But what if you could work in an organization in which there was little hierarchy, where rank and seniority played no part, where there were no closed meetings or doors, where everyone knows what was expected of them, and where creativity was not only tolerated but encouraged and celebrated? Was there ever such a place? There was, and it was known as NASA's Space Station Task Force. I was fortunate enough to work there for a time, and I would like to tell you how this organization with few apparent rules led to incredibly high levels of employee satisfaction and fulfillment, and yielded work products of enduring quality. On May 20, 1982, NASA Administrator James M. Beggs established the Space Station Task Force under the direction of John D. Hodge. The Task Force was charged with the responsibility for "the development of the programmatic aspects of a Space Station as they evolve, including mission analysis, requirements definition and program management," and was authorized to draw on Space Station activities at the NASA Program Offices and Field Centers. No additional conditions or directions were provided. Hodge knew that in order to accomplish the job he had been given, he was going to have to obtain the services of the "best and the brightest" and facilitate the unleashing of the full force of their creative capabilities. In order to avoid the stultifying effects of a typical hierarchical organization, he set up a loosely structured, horizontal organization with only one supervisor of record - himself. He populated this organization with detailees from Headquarters, the field Centers and the Jet Propulsion Lab, thereby assuring himself of the political and technical expertise with which to deal with Congress and the bureaucracy, and conduct the required engineering studies and analyses.

Schoenfelder, Tony E.↗
NASA NTRS1977

The value of volume and growth measurements in timber sales management of the National Forests

This paper summarizes work performed in the estimation of gross social value of timber volume and growth rate information used in making regional harvest decisions in the National Forest System. A model was developed to permit parametric analysis. The problem is formulated as one of finding optimal inventory holding patterns. Public timber management differs from other inventory holding problems in that the inventory, itself, generates value over time in providing recreational, aesthetic and environmental goods. 'Nontimber' demand estimates are inferred from past Forest Service harvest and sales levels. The solution requires a description of the harvest rates which maintain the optimum inventory level. Gross benefits of the Landsat systems are estimated by comparison with Forest Service information gathering models. Gross annual benefits are estimated to be $5.9 million for the MSS system and $7.2 million for the TM system.

Lietzke, K. R.↗
NASA NTRS2018

Contingency Management with Human Autonomy Teaming

Automation is playing an increasingly important role in many operations. It is often cheaper faster and more precise than human operators. However, automation is not perfect. There are many situations in which a human operator must step in. We refer to these instances as contingencies and the act of stepping in contingency management. Here we propose coupling Human Autonomy Teaming (HAT) with contingency management. We describe two aspects to HAT, bi-directional communication, and working agreements (or plays). Bi-directional communication like Crew Resource Management in traditional aviation, allows all parties to contribute to a decision. Working agreements specify roles and responsibilities. Importantly working agreements allow for the possibility of roles and responsibilities changing depending on environmental factors (e.g., situations the automation was not designed for, workload, risk, or trust). This allows for the automation to "automatically" become more autonomous as it becomes more trusted and/or it is updated to deal with a more complete set of possible situations. We present a concrete example using a prototype contingency management station one might find in a future airline operations center. Automation proposes reroutes for aircraft that encounter bad weather or are forced to divert for environmental or systems reasons. If specific conditions are met, these recommendations may be autonomously datalinked to the affected aircraft.

dispatch↗
NASA NTRS2017

Evaluating Process Effectiveness to Reduce Risk

It is well documented that government agencies do not have the same incentive as the private sector to focus on process effectiveness and continual improvement of those processes. It is also well documented whenever government agencies fail to deliver efficient, effective, consistent, and fair services to the citizens. In spite of the various "reinventing government" and "effectiveness initiatives" of the past decades, and in spite of the efforts on the part of many agencies to improve, government in general still lags behind industry in creating a culture of effective processes and systems. While the tragic events that unfolded recently in Flint, Michigan, teach us that running government "like a business" does not always take the needs of the citizenry into account, there are many lessons and techniques from the private sector that government agencies can use to improve. The incentive to improve, while mandated by various administrations1, needs to come from within the workforce, in order to effectively take root. The best, most effective incentive is to reduce, control or eliminate risk. Government agencies face some of the same risks as the private sector, while some are unique. While ISO 310002 has been around since 2009, risk has taken on increased visibility within the private sector with the advent of the emphasis on risk-based thinking in ISO 9001:20153. The relationship between risk-based thinking and effective processes is simple and direct. Those processes that are well thought out and standardized (i.e. Plan-Do-Check-Act), will have taken into account the applicable policy, statutory, regulatory, safety, quality and technical parameters, which may not occur to someone performing the process with minimal experience or training; and thus protect the employees, the public and the agency from statutory and regulatory violations; delay in providing services; non-delivery of services; harm to public or employee safety and health; cost overruns; breaches in security; loss of confidence in government; failure of publicly funded projects; damage to the environment; ethics violations, and the list goes on; with local, national and even international consequences. The Plan-Do-Check-Act process, also known as the "process approach" can be used at any time to establish and standardize a process, and it can also be used to check periodically for "process creep" (i.e., informal, unauthorized changes that have occurred over time), any necessary updates and improvements. While ISO 9001 compliance is not mandated for all government agencies, if interpreted correctly, it can be useful in establishing a framework and implementing effective management systems and processes.4 Another method that can be used to evaluate effectiveness is the scorecard definitions in Mallory's Process Management Standard5 as a basis for evaluating work on the process level on effective, and continuously improved and improving processes. With processes on the lower end of the scale, agencies are vulnerable to a great many risks, with employees and managers making up many of the rules as they go, leading to the above listed negative results. Without clear guidance for nominal operations, off-nominal situations can, and do, increase the likelihood of chaos. In an increasingly technical environment, with inter-agency communication and collaboration becoming the norm, agencies need to come to grips with the fact that processes can become rapidly outdated, and that the technical community should take on an increased role in the maturation of the agency's processes. Industry has long known that effective processes are also efficient, and process improvement methods such as Kaizen, Lean, Six Sigma, 5S, and mistake proofing lead to increased productivity, improved quality, and decreased cost. Again, government agencies have different concerns, but inefficiencies and mistakes can have dire and wide reaching consequences for the public that they serve. While no one goes to work planning to cause harm, it is up to agencies to establish upper level systems, which make establishment and compliance with processes possible. Again, Mallory provides us with a Systems Management Standard6, similar to the Process Management Standard, with a scale of 0-5 for systems effectiveness and maturity. Deming determined that "eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individual employees to do better." 7 It is not just the working level employees who need effective processes, but the mid-and upper level managers as well. A disciplined management culture sets the tone for the employees, aids both routine and off-nominal decision-making, and incorporates risk -based thinking into the systems and processes as a matter of normal activity. Figure 1, illustrates the relationship between ineffective and effective processes and risk, through the use of the "stoplight" colors that are commonly used to show serious situations (red), situations which may be improving or deteriorating depending on trends (yellow), and situations that are under control and continuously improved (green).

Shepherd, Christena C.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Handbook

The purpose of this document is to provide program/project teams necessary instruction and guidance in the best practices for Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and WBS dictionary development and use for project implementation and management control. This handbook can be used for all types of NASA projects and work activities including research, development, construction, test and evaluation, and operations. The products of these work efforts may be hardware, software, data, or service elements (alone or in combination). The aim of this document is to assist project teams in the development of effective work breakdown structures that provide a framework of common reference for all project elements. The WBS and WBS dictionary are effective management processes for planning, organizing, and administering NASA programs and projects. The guidance contained in this document is applicable to both in-house, NASA-led effort and contracted effort. It assists management teams from both entities in fulfilling necessary responsibilities for successful accomplishment of project cost, schedule, and technical goals. Benefits resulting from the use of an effective WBS include, but are not limited to: providing a basis for assigned project responsibilities, providing a basis for project schedule development, simplifying a project by dividing the total work scope into manageable units, and providing a common reference for all project communication.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2016

NASA Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Handbook

The purpose of this document is to provide program/project teams necessary instruction and guidance in the best practices for Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and WBS dictionary development and use for project implementation and management control. This handbook can be used for all types of NASA projects and work activities including research, development, construction, test and evaluation, and operations. The products of these work efforts may be hardware, software, data, or service elements (alone or in combination). The aim of this document is to assist project teams in the development of effective work breakdown structures that provide a framework of common reference for all project elements. The WBS and WBS dictionary are effective management processes for planning, organizing, and administering NASA programs and projects. The guidance contained in this document is applicable to both in-house, NASA-led effort and contracted effort. It assists management teams from both entities in fulfilling necessary responsibilities for successful accomplishment of project cost, schedule, and technical goals. Benefits resulting from the use of an effective WBS include, but are not limited to: providing a basis for assigned project responsibilities, providing a basis for project schedule and budget development, simplifying a project by dividing the total work scope into manageable units, and providing a common reference for all project communication.

Planning↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A PPE Use Case on Configuration Management Approach for MBSE

Systems engineers worldwide have been working to implement Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environments, tools, and methodologies. MBSE is a formalized application of modeling to support systems engineering, including requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation activities over the project’s lifecycle[1]; MBSE captures the system data into a digital environment. Significant benefits of MBSE includes a reduction in the time in performing systems engineering activities and an improvement higher fidelity data production. As more Systems Engineers are using MBSE, the models it produces are becoming the source of truth for Systems Engineering artifacts. As we move towards using these models as the source of truth, a more rigorous Configuration Management (CM) infrastructure is needed. Many of the MBSE tools provide CM options but utilizing them efficiently and effectively can be challenging. More rigorous methods and tools are needed to assist with keeping track of changes in the model, making sure inadvertent changes to baseline data did not occur, visibility of changes in the different model versions, and the impacts of changes to the models. System engineers and configuration management personnel from the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) project at NASA Glenn Research Center have been working to develop a modeling construct that allows models to be the source of truth and maintain a configuration managed baseline. This paper presents a process that leverages the existing CM tools and describes how PPE used this process to manage changes more rigorously. It will describe the process behind building the model architecture that utilizes the MBSE tool capabilities and the configuration management process. It will contain some of the advantages and disadvantages of the architecture that the PPE project had settled upon utilizing, as well as some enhanced capabilities that the PPE MBSE team has developed.

MBSE↗
NASA NTRS1993

NASDA's Advanced On-Line System (ADOLIS)

Spacecraft operations including ground system operations are generally realized by various large or small scale group work which is done by operators, engineers, managers, users and so on, and their positions are geographically distributed in many cases. In face-to-face work environments, it is easy for them to understand each other. However, in distributed work environments which need communication media, if only using audio, they become estranged from each other and lose interest in and continuity of work. It is an obstacle to smooth operation of spacecraft. NASDA has developed an experimental model of a new real-time operation control system called 'ADOLIS' (ADvanced On-Line System) adopted to such a distributed environment using a multi-media system dealing with character, figure, image, handwriting, video and audio information which is accommodated to operation systems of a wide range including spacecraft and ground systems. This paper describes the results of the development of the experimental model.

Yamamoto, Yoshikatsu↗
NASA NTRS1990

Ulysses - An ESA/NASA cooperative programme

Cooperation between ESA and NASA is discussed, noting that the Memorandum of Understanding lays the framework for this relationship, defining the responsibilities of ESA and NASA and providing for appointment of leadership and managers for the project. Members of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ESA's ESTEC staff have been appointed to leadership positions within the project and ultimate control of the project rests with the Joint Working Group consisting of two project managers and two project scientists, equally representing both organizations. Coordination of time scales and overall mission design is discussed, including launch cooperation, public relations, and funding of scientific investigations such as Ulysses. Practical difficulties of managing an international project are discussed such as differing documentation requirements and communication techniques, and assurance of equality on projects.

Meeks, W.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Upper Class E Traffic Management (ETM)

This is a slide set as part of a meeting series with members of a working group aimed at the development of a concept that addresses needs and gaps in the management of high altitude airspace operations. This concept leverages elements developed through the UAS Traffic Management project with respect to a cooperative, service-based approach that provides services and capabilities in areas (e.g., Upper Class E airspace) that currently receive no or limited service from Air Traffic Control. This concept is meant to provide a safe, fair, and scalable approach to management of Upper Class E operations that reduces the burden on ATC while providing the flexibility and access desired by current and new users of the airspace. This set of slides includes an overview of discussions and industry news covering the time since the previous group meeting, a discussion of service applicability to the ETM environment and examples from UAS Traffic Management, an update on modeling and simulation work, and an announcement of an upcoming ETM workshop.

Upper E↗
NASA NTRS2000

How Project Managers Really Manage: An Indepth Look at Some Managers of Large, Complex NASA Projects

This paper reports on a research study by the author that examined ten contemporary National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) complex projects. In-depth interviews with the project managers of these projects provided qualitative data about the inner workings of the project and the methodologies used in establishing and managing the projects. The inclusion of a variety of space, aeronautics, and ground based projects from several different NASA research centers helped to reduce potential bias in the findings toward any one type of project, or technical discipline. The findings address the participants and their individual approaches. The discussion includes possible implications for project managers of other large, complex, projects.

Mulenburg, Gerald M.↗