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NASA NTRS2019

New York City Panel on Climate Change 2019 Report Chapter 1: Introduction

While urban areas like New York City and its surrounding metropolitan region are key drivers of climate change through emissions of greenhouse gases, cities are also significantly impacted by climate shifts, both chronic changes and extreme events. These are already affecting the New York metropolitan region, including the five boroughs of New York City through higher temperatures, more intense precipitation, and higher sea levels, and will increasingly do so in the coming decades. The City of New York has embarked on a flexible adaptation pathway (i.e., strategies that can evolve through time as climate risk assessment, evaluation of adaptation strategies, and monitoring continues) to respond to climate change challenges. This entails significant programs to develop resilience in communities and critical infrastructure to observed and projected changes in temperature, precipitation, and sea level. The first NPCC Report laid out the risk management framing for the city and region via flexible adaptation pathways. The second New York City Panel on Climate Change Report (NPCC2) developed the “climate projections of record” that are currently being used by the City of New York in its resilience programs . The NPCC3 2019 Report co-generates new tools and methods for the next generation of climate risk assessments and implementation of region-wide resilience. Co-generation is an interactive process by which stakeholders and scientists work together to produce climate change information that is targeted to decision-making needs. These tools and methods can be used to observe, project, and map climate extremes; monitor risks and responses; and engage with communities to develop effective programs. They are especially important at “transformation points” in the adaptation process when large changes in the structure and function of physical, ecological, and social systems of the city and region are undertaken.

Rosenzweig, Cynthia↗

NASA NTRS2019

Electric Propulsion and the Gateway: Sustainable Exploration of Cis-Lunar Space

NASA is committed to a sustainable return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization. Gateway will enable this sustained cis-lunar presence and provide the capabilities necessary to develop and deploy critical infrastructure.

Frieman, Jason D.↗

NASA NTRS2019

Analysis of the 2019 Midwest US Flooding Using NASA Data

In the wake of Winter Storm Ulmer, an intense "bomb cyclone" that set preliminary low-pressure records, historic flooding occurred in 41 locations across the Midwest United States, causing many streams and rivers - including the Platte, Missouri, and Elkhorn Rivers - to rise to all-time record flood levels in Nebraska. Warm and dry conditions, along with 4-8 inches of snowfall, and over 1" of rain caused over 3-5" of storm water runoff from rapid melting.A rare confluence of circumstances produced the flooding, including extreme cold earlier in the winter that preserved a significant amount of snowfall, a thick layer of ice on waterways, and the large downpour of rain from Winter Storm Ulmer. Unusually warm air caused the snow and ice to rapidly melt, producing record amounts of runoff within a short period of time. This poster presents several data sets from NASA and the USGS (our partner agency) that can be used in analyzing floods and flood areas, including soil moisture, snowfall, floodwater areas, vicinity of urban areas and impervious surfaces, and proximity of strategic or critical infrastructure.

DAAC↗

NASA NTRS2019

The Application of Advanced Electric Propulsion on the NASA Power and Propulsion Element (PPE)

NASA is charged with landing the first American woman and next American man on the South Pole of the Moon by 2024. To meet this challenge, NASA's Gateway will develop and deploy critical infrastructure required for operations on the lunar surface and that enables a sustained presence on and around the moon. NASA's Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), the first planned element of NASA's cis-lunar Gateway, leverages prior and ongoing NASA and U.S. industry investments in high-power, long-life solar electric propulsion technology investments. NASA awarded a PPE contract to Maxar Technologies to demonstrate a 2,500 kg xenon capacity, 50 kW-class SEP spacecraft that meets Gateway's needs, aligns with industry's heritage spacecraft buses, and allows extensibility for NASA's Mars exploration goals. Maxar's PPE concept design, is based directly on their high heritage, modular, highly reliable 1300-series bus architecture. The electric propulsion system features two 13 kW Advanced Electric Propulsion (AEPS) strings from Aerojet Rocketdyne and a Maxar-developed system comprised of four Busek 6 kW Hall-effect thrusters mounted in pairs on large range of motion pointing arms with four 6 kW-class, SPT-140-based PPUs. NASA is continuing to develop the 13 kW AEPS system through a contract with Aerojet Rocketdyne. In addition to the flight demonstration of an advanced electric propulsion system on PPE, a government-furnished plasma diagnostics package is planned to assess on-orbit performance characteristics and vehicle interactions. The paper will present overviews of NASA's Gateway and the PPE Project, the Maxar ion propulsion subsystem, the status of the two electric propulsion system developments, and the implementation of the plasma diagnostics package on the Maxar PPE spacecraft. The project is currently heading into SRR, with the propulsion build scheduled for 2021, and launch in 2022.

Herman, Daniel A.↗

NASA NTRS2021

Satellites Support Disaster Response to Storm-Driven Landslides

High winds and flooding storm surges driven by tropical cyclones cause some of the deadliest and most damaging weather-related conditions around the world. The rainfall that cyclones bring compounds these conditions and, in hilly or mountainous areas, can trigger landslides that cause even more widespread and devastating impacts. When extreme precipitation occurs over short time frames, hillslopes may become saturated and critically unstable. The most intense storms can trigger thousands of landslides in mountainous areas, as was dramatically illustrated in Puerto Rico in September 2017, when Hurricane Maria’s rains left the landscape scarred by roughly 40,000 landslides. Before and during a major cyclone, disaster responders need information about where landslides are likely to occur. In the aftermath, locating landslides quickly helps authorities direct resources to where they are most needed to save people and critical infrastructure. However, this information is often unavailable during an event response or is presented only for small regions, constraining the effectiveness of response efforts.

Robert Emberson↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

SimUAM: A Comprehensive Microsimulation Toolchain to Evaluate the Impact of Urban Air Mobility in Metropolitan Areas

Over the past several years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has galvanized enthusiasm from investors and researchers, marrying expertise in aircraft design, transportation, logistics, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and broader policymaking. However, two significant questions remain unexplored: (1) What is the value of UAM in a region’s transportation network?, and (2) How can UAM be effectively deployed to realize and maximize this value to all stakeholders, including riders and local economies? To adequately understand the value proposition of UAM for metropolitan areas, we develop a holistic multi-modal toolchain, SimUAM, to model and simulate UAM and its impacts on travel behavior. This toolchain has several components: (1) MANTA: A fast, high-fidelity regional-scale traffic microsimulator, (2) VertiSim: A granular, discrete-event vertiport and pedestrian, (3) 3: A high-fidelity, trajectory-based aerial microsimulation. SimUAM, rooted in granular, GPU-based microsimulation, models millions of trips and their exact movements in the street network and in the air, producing interpretable and actionable performance metrics for UAM designs and deployments. The modularity, extensibility, and speed of the platform will allow for rapid scenario planning and sensitivity analysis, effectively acting as a detailed performance assessment tool. As a result, stakeholders in UAM can understand the impacts of critical infrastructure, and subsequently define policies, requirements, and investments needed to support UAM as a viable transportation mode.

Urban air mobility↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Towards a flexible framework for community-wide ensemble forecasting tailored for major space environment impacts

To build continuously improving space weather predictive capabilities based on science and enable assessments and rapid implementations of advances in research into source-to-impact modelling systems we need: to assemble parts of the puzzle by solving problems focused on specific physical domains; to identify essential space environment quantities (ESEQs) passed between domains and linked to impacts; evaluate modeling capabilities for each ESEQ; connect all validated solutions from space weather origins on the sun to impacts on humans and critical infrastructure; to design displays for ensemble predictions tailored for major space weather user groups; to build a collaborative environment for efficient sharing of information and capabilities (models/data/expertise) and collaborative development. The presentation will overview existing community-wide space weather forecasting frameworks and research-to-operations pipelines and discuss opportunities to build a collaborative plug-and-play platform for interconnecting predictive capabilities developed under different space weather programs.

space weather↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Towards A Flexible Framework for Community-Wide Ensemble Forecasting Tailored for Major Space Environment Impacts

space weather↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Dissemination of Global Flood Severity and Surface Water Mapping using Remote Sensing Data to Global Stakeholders

Flooding is a natural event that occurs frequently with high severity worldwide, responsible for significant societal and economic impacts. Disaster managers face significant challenges managing essential information for preparedness, response, and recovery efforts. The development of an open access, global flood alerting system for effective identification of flood impacted areas, classification of potential impacts, and the formulation of effective emergency response measures requires the incorporation of a wide variety of flood models and remote sensing data sources from multiple platforms. NASA is currently funding projects focused on flood forecasting, post-event flood mapping, flood depth estimation and pre-event flood severity estimation using Earth observation (EO) datasets and derived flood products. A new initiative in the Disasters Program is underway to disseminate flood products from different hydrologic models and sensors to global stakeholders via Pacific Disaster Center’s DisasterAWARE®, NASA’s Disasters Mapping Portal and potentially other mechanisms. This initiative focuses on improving response capacity and use of EO products in near real-time by a broader community for resource planning in case of extreme events. As part of this initiative, we have deployed Model of Models (MoM) – an open-source ensemble approach, that integrates outputs from hydrologic models and EO data from optical imagery to assess flood severity daily at sub-watershed level globally. The MoM output is integrated with the incident event system of DisasterAWARE to generate flood severity risk and flood impact boundaries, which are disseminated via the DisasterAWARE platform to different stakeholders globally for decision-making and response efforts. The next step will focus on using MoM outputs to estimate flood depth and extent mapping using high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery, impact assessment using optical imagery and population datasets, and damage estimation using critical infrastructure datasets, which would be disseminated via DisasterAWARE to decision-makers, emergency managers and first responders around the world.

flood↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Comparison of Daily, Monthly (Lunar), Yearly, Decadal, Quarter-Century, Half-Century, and Centurial Shoreline Change Rates at the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA

The Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is North America’s premier spaceport and provides crucial access to space for both government and private entities. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities are clustered along a 12 km active shoreline at Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, with the entire NASA and US Space Force station (SF) shoreline stretching over 32 km (Figure 1). Several Launch Complexes (LC’s) including the modern heavy lift facilities are only a few tens of meters from the active shoreline and are imminently threatened by continued sea level rise and ongoing coastal erosion. The space center was built on the northern part of Cape Canaveral. Images collected in 1943 show that Apollo Heavy Lift Launch Complexes were built in swales on ground that was at or below sea level with Launch Complex 39B constructed on a paleo inlet (Figures 2 and 3). Today the Heavy Lift Launch Complexes are ~220 meters from the shoreline with the area between the complexes retreating at the highest rates along the cape (Figure 4). To better understand the intersection of environmental concerns, limited budgets for shoreline protection, and sheltering critical infrastructure; NASA, The University of Florida, United States Geological Survey (USGS), National Park Service (NPS) and contractors have and continue to conduct numerous studies to characterize and understand the shoreline evolution and rates of change at KSC. This project aims to better understand and visualize the temporal and spatial variability of change along the NASA shoreline beyond a simple point to point solution.

Richard MacKenzie III↗

NASA NTRS2023

Damage Detection of a Pressure Vessel with Smart Sensing and Deep Learning

Structural Health Monitoring plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety and reliability of critical infrastructure, including pressure vessels involved in various applications. This research reports the damage detection of a pressure box employed in space habitat that operates in harsh environment where both structural failure and bolt joint loosening may occur. These failure modes are extremely hard to model based on first principles. We explore proper sensing mechanism and the associated inverse analysis algorithm that can elucidate the health condition of the pressure box. It is identified that piezoelectric impedance based active interrogation can provide necessary information for damage detection in such a system. Concurrently, deep learning technique leveraging spatial convolutional neural network is synthesized to analyze the raw data acquired and identify different types of damage. By training the deep learning model on a dataset of healthy and various damage scenarios, we can achieve high accuracy in identifying the presence of damage and its type. This research provides a data-driven methodology for structural damage detection using deep learning and has the potential to be extended to various systems with different failure modes.

Yang Zhang↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Hardware Systems and EDU Demonstration of the Tall Lunar Tower Project

The Tall Lunar Tower (TLT) project developed a robotic tower assembly system (RTAS) and TLT Truss engineering development units (EDUs) to perform a ground demonstration of supervised semi-autonomous robotic assembly of a truss-based tall tower. Truss structures provide exceptional strength-to-weight ratios for payload capabilities supporting large masses. On the lunar surface, tall towers are a critical structural system that will enable significant solar power generation by supporting vertical solar arrays and beyond-the-horizon communications at the lunar south pole, supporting the Artemis mission architecture, as well as a lunar economy. Tall towers, greater than 30-meters-tall, provide the elevation needed for more consistent solar power generation due to low inclination sunlight and deep shadowing from surface features on the lunar surface at the poles. The robotic structural assembly technologies developed for truss-based tall towers will also enable other large-scale functional lunar structures to be built, including launch plume deflectors, lunar safe havens for astronauts and assets, surface transportation for cargo, and other critical infrastructure. Robotic assembly of truss structures for lunar surface infrastructure is near-term enabling for future Artemis mission campaign and Moon to Mars Objectives needs for power and communication. The project team designed, fabricated, tested, and demonstrated the RTAS EDU by assembling a TLT Truss EDU in a laboratory environment. The hardware systems and the supervised semi-autonomous assembly process for a TLT assembled EDU design, along with descriptions of a hardware demonstration are presented.

In-space Assembly↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Knowledge Graph Framework for Organizing Heterogeneous Datasets for Utilization in Classical and Quantum Computing: Current Challenges and Future Directions

"The escalating impact of climate change induced extreme weather events in urban, suburban, and rural environments demands a rethink of how we have been using the single event-based or use-case-based knowledge graph models. The lack of representation in interaction within environmental variables found in literature led to the development of a novel framework that reflects the true nature of the interconnectedness in our environment. We propose an Environmental Interaction Knowledge Graph (EIKG) framework. This general EIKG framework works as the basis for interconnected environmental events by knitting interrelated events such as hurricanes leading to storm surges, which lead to flood events that could cause mudslides, landslides, etc., The cascading nature of one event leading to another related event in the environment requires an adequate understanding of each event using contextual information before conducting any data-driven analytics. This vision paper showcases how the EIKG:floods, EIKG:wildfire EIKG:landslides, etc, can be derived from a base case framework of EIKG as those individual events are interconnected with some common denominator variables. As an example, the precipitation variable is used in the flood case study as well as in the wildfire case study, as excessive precipitation levels lead to floods, and lack of precipitation leads to droughts and wildfires. We identify the precipitation variable as a “common-denominator-variable” in extreme weather events that play a key role in modeling the environment leading to different extreme weather events based on the variability of that variable (varying values where low precipitation leads to drought, and high values lead to floods). We use the insights gained from EIKG to conduct classical and Quantum Machine Learning (QML) based data analysis on the research questions developed. Our preliminary study shows how the Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) and Quantum Support Vector Classifier (QSVC) are used along with the classical machine learning models to compare the model accuracies. Our study elaborates on how a quantitative analysis uses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that include implementing both classical and quantum machine learning models and developing the knowledge graph. The EIKG is used to organize heterogeneous datasets and integrate the relations to case-specific extreme weather events such as floods. The study uses datasets such as county-to-country residential mobility data, socioeconomic datasets from the US Census Bureau, climate and weather-related Earth Observational data from NASA, and critical infrastructure data from the Homeland Infrastructure datasets."

Knowledge Graphs, Quantum Computing, Heterogenous ↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Hardware Systems and EDU Demonstration of the Tall Lunar Tower Project

Lunar Infrastructure↗

NASA NTRS2017

Digital Model-Based Engineering: Expectations, Prerequisites, and Challenges of Infusion

Digital model-based engineering (DMbE) is the use of digital artifacts, digital environments, and digital tools in the performance of engineering functions. DMbE is intended to allow an organization to progress from documentation-based engineering methods to digital methods that may provide greater flexibility, agility, and efficiency. The term 'DMbE' was developed as part of an effort by the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Infusion Task team to identify what government organizations might expect in the course of moving to or infusing MBSE into their organizations. The Task team was established by the Interagency Working Group on Engineering Complex Systems, an informal collaboration among government systems engineering organizations. This Technical Memorandum (TM) discusses the work of the MBSE Infusion Task team to date. The Task team identified prerequisites, expectations, initial challenges, and recommendations for areas of study to pursue, as well as examples of efforts already in progress. The team identified the following five expectations associated with DMbE infusion, discussed further in this TM: (1) Informed decision making through increased transparency, and greater insight. (2) Enhanced communication. (3) Increased understanding for greater flexibility/adaptability in design. (4) Increased confidence that the capability will perform as expected. (5) Increased efficiency. The team identified the following seven challenges an organization might encounter when looking to infuse DMbE: (1) Assessing value added to the organization. Not all DMbE practices will be applicable to every situation in every organization, and not all implementations will have positive results. (2) Overcoming organizational and cultural hurdles. (3) Adopting contractual practices and technical data management. (4) Redefining configuration management. The DMbE environment changes the range of configuration information to be managed to include performance and design models, database objects, as well as more traditional book-form objects and formats. (5) Developing information technology (IT) infrastructure. Approaches to implementing critical, enabling IT infrastructure capabilities must be flexible, reconfigurable, and updatable. (6) Ensuring security of the single source of truth (7) Potential overreliance on quantitative data over qualitative data. Executable/ computational models and simulations generally incorporate and generate quantitative vice qualitative data. The Task team also developed several recommendations for government, academia, and industry, as discussed in this TM. The Task team recommends continuing beyond this initial work to further develop the means of implementing DMbE and to look for opportunities to collaborate and share best practices.

Hale, J. P.↗

NASA NTRS2018

An Overview of Science Challenges Pertaining to our Understanding of Extreme Geomagnetically Induced Currents

Vulnerability of man-made infrastructure to Earth-directed space weather events is a serious concern for today's technology-dependent society. Space weather-driven geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) can disrupt operation of extended electrically conducting technological systems. The threat of adverse impacts on critical technological infrastructure, like power grids, oil and gas pipelines, and communication networks, has sparked renewed interest in extreme space weather. Because extreme space weather events have low occurrence rate but potentially high impact, this presents a major challenge for our understanding of extreme GIC activity. In this chapter, we discuss some of the key science challenges pertaining to our understanding of extreme events. In addition, we present an overview of GICs including highlights of severe impacts over the last 80 years and recent U.S. Federal actions relevant to this community.

Ngwira, Chigomezyo M.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Things That Work: Roles and Services of SPDF

The current Heliophysics Science Data Management Policy (HpSDMP) defines the roles of the Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) project as a heliophysics active Final Archive (aFA), a focus for critical data infrastructure services and a center of excellence for data and ancillary information services. This presentation will highlight (1) select current SPDF activities, (2) the lessons we are continuing to learn in how to usefully serve the the heliophysics science community and (3)SPDF's programmatic emphasis in the coming year. In cooperation with the Heliophysics Virtual discipline Observatories (VxOs), we are working closely with current, and with upcoming missions such as RBSP and MMS, to define effective approaches to ensure the long-term availability and archiving of mission data, as well as how SPDF services can complement active mission capabilities. We are working to make the Virtual Space Physics Observatory (VSPO) service comprehensive in all significant and NASA relevant heliophysics data. We will highlight a new CDAWeb interface, a faster SSCWeb, availability of our data through VxO services such as Autoplot, a new capability to easily access our data from within IDL and continuing improvements to CDF including better handling of leap seconds.

McGuire, R. E.↗

NASA NTRS2011

Science Enabling Roles and Services of SPDF

The current Heliophysics Science Data Management Policy defines the roles of the Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) project as a heliophysics active Final Archive, a focus for critical data infrastructure services and a center of excellence for data and ancillary information services. This presentation will highlight some of our current activities and our understanding of why and how our services are useful to researchers, as well as SPDF's programmatic emphasis in the coming year. We will discuss how. in cooperation with the Heliophysics Virtual discipline Observatories (VxOs), we are working closely with the RBSP and MMS mission teams to support their decisions to use CDF as a primary format for their public data products, to leverage the ongoing data flows and capabilities of CDAWeb (directly and through external clients such as Autoplot) to serve their data in a multi-mission context and to use SSCWeb to assist community science planning and analysis. Among other current activities, we will also discuss and demonstrate our continuing effort to make the Virtual Space Physics Observatory (VSPO) service comprehensive in all significant and NASA relevant heliophysics data. The OMNI and OMNI High Resolution datasets remain current and heavily cited in publications. We are expanding our FTP file services to include online archived non-CDF data from all active missions, which is a re-hosting of this function from NSSDC's FTP site. We have extended the definitions of time in CDF to unambiguously and consistently handle leap seconds. We are improving SSCWeb for much faster per1ormance, more capabilities and a web services inter1ace to Query functionality. We will also review how CDAWeb data can be easily accessed within IDL and new features in CDAWeb.

McGuire, Robert E.↗