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At least 613 records · Page 34

There's Enough Space for Everyone

Only a few fortunate people have the opportunity to go into space and experience the wonders of our universe first-hand. But thanks to social media and virtual worlds, many unique opportunities exist for us to learn, explore and experience what s out there from wherever we are. NASA and Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) are making this even easier to do. From blogs to Twitter messages, from Facebook pages to Flickr Photo sites, NASA is leveraging social media to share never-before-seen footage and inside information on spaceflight, scientific discoveries and other space activities. Over the last year, Marshall has reached more than half-a-million viewers through its high-profile, real-time blogs. Through its Watching a Launch blog, visitors were invited to take the "virtual" rides of their lives as they received a first-hand account of seeing a powerful shuttle launch - up close and personal. Through the Shuttle Ferry Flight blog, they got to experience the Shuttle Atlantis journey home to Kennedy Space Center as it rode "piggyback" on a modified Boeing 747 airplane. This year, Marshall s Flickr photo galleries have been visited over 700,000 times, Ares rocket videos have been viewed on iTunes, YouTube, TeacherTube and NASA Web sites more than 1.2 million times, and Marshall s Facebook Page has over 2,800 "friends" who regularly follow NASA. Social media tools have been a powerful way to reach and inspire the public, but NASA has also used these tools effectively to promote education and outreach. From events such as the Great Moonbuggy Race to the Student Launch Initiative, Marshall has used social networks to interest, excite and engage students. This presentation shares some of NASA s experiences on what has worked . . . and what hasn't . . . and seeks to spread the message that through social media "there's enough space for everyone."

Schumacher, Daniel M.↗

UAS Reports (UREPs): EnablingExchange of Observation Data Between UAS Operations

As the volume of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) operations increases, the lack of weather products to support these operations becomes more problematic. One early solution to obtaining more information about weather conditions is to allow operators to share their observations and measurements with other airspace users. This is analogous to the AIREP and PIREP reporting systems in traditional aviation wherein pilots report weather phenomena they have observed or experienced to provide better situational awareness to other pilots. Given the automated nature of the small (under 55 lbs.) UAS platforms and operations, automated reporting of relevant information should also be supported. To promote automated exchange of these data, a well-defined data schema needs to be established along with the mechanisms for sending and retrieving the data. This paper examines this concept and offers an initial definition of the necessary elements to allow for immediate implementation and use.

UAS↗

Access to Space Interactive Design Web Site

The Access To Space (ATS) Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) supports the science and technology community at GSFC by facilitating frequent and affordable opportunities for access to space. Through partnerships established with access mode suppliers, the ATS Group has developed an interactive Mission Design web site. The ATS web site provides both the information and the tools necessary to assist mission planners in selecting and planning their ride to space. This includes the evaluation of single payloads vs. ride-sharing opportunities to reduce the cost of access to space. Features of this site include the following: (1) Mission Database. Our mission database contains a listing of missions ranging from proposed missions to manifested. Missions can be entered by our user community through data input tools. Data is then accessed by users through various search engines: orbit parameters, ride-share opportunities, spacecraft parameters, other mission notes, launch vehicle, and contact information. (2) Launch Vehicle Toolboxes. The launch vehicle toolboxes provide the user a full range of information on vehicle classes and individual configurations. Topics include: general information, environments, performance, payload interface, available volume, and launch sites.

Leon, John↗

The NASA Electronic Parts and Packaging (NEPP) Program - Presentation to Korean Aerospace Research Institute

This presentation will provide basic information about NASA's Electronic Parts and Packaging Program (NEPP), for sharing with representatives of the South Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) as part of a larger presentation by Headquarters Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. The NEPP information includes mission and goals, history of the program, basic focus areas, strategies, deliverables and some examples of current tasks.

Technology Challenges↗

Utilizing AI and Spatial Data to Identify & Rapidly Disseminate Energy Infrastructure Insights

GeoGov Summit Final Presentation entitled "Utilizing AI and Spatial Data to Identify & Rapidly Disseminate Energy Infrastructure Insights". Maintaining the integrity of energy infrastructure plays a critical role in ensuring energy security. Robust foundational AI models using data from federal, state, industry, and other sources can help address integrity risk management & mitigation issues as well as evaluate extended use strategies. Trusted foundational models can help with industry adoption and accelerate innovation by enhancing integrity predictions, reduce costs, and informing infrastructure build-out. Coordination, collaboration & data sharing to develop robust models to aid in: Optimizing operations; Minimizing costs; Ensuring energy security.

Advanced Infrastructure Integrity Model (AIIM)↗

A model for the pilot's use of motion cues in roll-axis tracking tasks

Simulated target-following and disturbance-regulation tasks were explored with subjects using visual-only and combined visual and motion cues. The effects of motion cues on task performance and pilot response behavior were appreciably different for the two task configurations and were consistent with data reported in earlier studies for similar task configurations. The optimal-control model for pilot/vehicle systems provided a task-independent framework for accounting for the pilot's use of motion cues. Specifically, the availability of motion cues was modeled by augmenting the set of perceptual variables to include position, rate, acceleration, and accleration-rate of the motion simulator, and results were consistent with the hypothesis of attention-sharing between visual and motion variables. This straightforward informational model allowed accurate model predictions of the effects of motion cues on a variety of response measures for both the target-following and disturbance-regulation tasks.

Levison, W. H.↗

Operational alternatives for LANDSAT in California

Data integration is defined and examined as the means of promoting data sharing among the various governmental and private geobased information systems in California. Elements of vertical integration considered included technical factors (such as resolution and classification) and institutional factors (such as organizational control, and legal and political barriers). Attempts are made to fit the theoretical elements of vertical integration into a meaningful structure for looking at the problem from a statewide focus. Both manual (mapped) and machine readable data systems are included. Special attention is given to LANDSAT imagery because of its strong potential for integrated use and its primary in the California Integrated Remote Sensing System program.

Wilson, P.↗

Autonomous mission planning and scheduling: Innovative, integrated, responsive

Autonomous mission scheduling, a new concept for NASA ground data systems, is a decentralized and distributed approach to scientific spacecraft planning, scheduling, and command management. Systems and services are provided that enable investigators to operate their own instruments. In autonomous mission scheduling, separate nodes exist for each instrument and one or more operations nodes exist for the spacecraft. Each node is responsible for its own operations which include planning, scheduling, and commanding; and for resolving conflicts with other nodes. One or more database servers accessible to all nodes enable each to share mission and science planning, scheduling, and commanding information. The architecture for autonomous mission scheduling is based upon a realistic mix of state-of-the-art and emerging technology and services, e.g., high performance individual workstations, high speed communications, client-server computing, and relational databases. The concept is particularly suited to the smaller, less complex missions of the future.

Sary, Charisse↗

Embracing Open Source for NASA's Earth Science Data Systems

The overarching purpose of NASAs Earth Science program is to develop a scientific understanding of Earth as a system. Scientific knowledge is most robust and actionable when resulting from transparent, traceable, and reproducible methods. Reproducibility includes open access to the data as well as the software used to arrive at results. Additionally, software that is custom-developed for NASA should be open to the greatest degree possible, to enable re-use across Federal agencies, reduce overall costs to the government, remove barriers to innovation, and promote consistency through the use of uniform standards. Finally, Open Source Software (OSS) practices facilitate collaboration between agencies and the private sector. To best meet these ends, NASAs Earth Science Division promotes the full and open sharing of not only all data, metadata, products, information, documentation, models, images, and research results but also the source code used to generate, manipulate and analyze them. This talk focuses on the challenges to open sourcing NASA developed software within ESD and the growing pains associated with establishing policies running the gamut of tracking issues, properly documenting build processes, engaging the open source community, maintaining internal compliance, and accepting contributions from external sources. This talk also covers the adoption of existing open source technologies and standards to enhance our custom solutions and our contributions back to the community. Finally, we will be introducing the most recent OSS contributions from NASA Earth Science program and promoting these projects for wider community review and adoption.

Earth Science↗

Upper Class E Traffic Management: NASA's Collaborative Research and Technical Development to Enable Routine, Safe, and Scalable High Altitude Operation

In the past, operations at high altitudes have been limited in number and largely conducted for defense/security purposes. However, with broad technological advances, a growing number of commerical and public good use cases, and a significant rise in the number of capable platforms, the demand for operating in high altitude airspace - known as upper Class E in the United States - is increasing. With that increase in demand comes the need for a means to manage the airspace in a way that does not burden current air traffic services and infrastructure given that provisions for commercial operations are limited. NASA, in collaboration with other government agencies and strong representation from industry, has developed a cooperative approach to airspace management referred to as Upper Class E Traffic Management (ETM). Key aspects of the ETM concept are the ability to exchange information through services that enable the operators to share airspace in cetain areas by adhering to cooperative operating practices (COPs) and by having shared situation awareness. To advance the concept, NASA recently developed and formally tested the first dedicated reference ETM system and supportin architecture. The test involved real-time simulation of high altitude operations with a diverse set of aircraft and encourter situations that included industry partners connected to the system from their remote operating centers. This presentation will provide attendees with an understanding of the ETM concept, the details and importance of the system that has been developed, an overview of the groundbreaking simulation, and a glimpse of things to come in our next steps.

Conrad Dang-Gabriel↗

Data Interfaces for Automated Vehicle Services - A Municipality Perspective

As Automated Vehicle (AV) services proliferate, data sharing between AV operators and municipal agents is assuming greater importance. Information on the dynamic nature of the road system such as incidents to avoid, weather hazards (such as flooding), construction and detours, as well as active safety concerns (e.g. - riots) is important for AV operators. Such information cannot be directly sensed from a vehicle's sensor array, but instead must be communicated in a timely and trustworthy channel. Municipalities are interested in pushing this information to AV operators to support emergency response efforts, reduce traffic in construction zones, and generally improve operation of the system. Similarly, information on vehicle safety such as disengagements, as well as critical information on the use of roadway system (trips, origin and destination patterns) are important performance factors for municipalities to understand utilization and plan for appropriate infrastructure. As mobility shifts to on-demand options, the need for safe and coordinated pick-up and drop-off zones will increase (potentially reducing parking needs). For all of these reasons, communication flows between AV operators and municipalities are becoming increasingly important. This paper investigates the functions, emerging practices and protocols for sharing of such critical data, and identifies gaps in and challenges in existing practices. Additionally, case studies are used to highlight the impacts of data sharing between AV operators and municipalities.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Differential Privacy in Grid Kitchen: Implementation & Software Documentation

Sharing of power grid feeder models faces significant challenges due to the potential risk of exposing sensitive operational information. Traditional anonymization techniques have shown notable limitations in other sensitive domains, as evidenced by documented re-identification attacks that combine supposedly anonymized datasets with auxiliary information, raising concerns that similar vulnerabilities could affect power grid data. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a more rigorous privacy protection strategy that not only delivers formal mathematical guarantees but also preserves the analytical value of the shared models. To address this challenge, we have enhanced the Grid Kitchen framework by implementing differential privacy mechanisms within the distribution model dehydration pipeline. This implementation carefully calibrates and applies noise to sensitive attributes in feeder models according to configurable privacy levels—low, moderate, and high—each offering different balances between data utility and privacy protection. Our approach uses established noise functions (Gaussian for continuous data and Discrete Laplace for integer values) with parameters carefully calibrated so that the impact of individual data points is effectively masked in the final output. The integration leverages our Noise Catalog, which we developed to categorize feeder model properties by component type, data type, and sensitivity. This catalog guides the application of appropriate noise functions and privacy parameters ($\varepsilon$ and $\delta$) to each attribute, ensuring consistent privacy protection across the model while maintaining its structural integrity and analytical usefulness. This implementation also includes evaluation tools that allow model owners to assess the impact of privacy-preserving transformations before sharing data with external parties. This report provides documentation for the differential privacy capabilities added to the Grid Kitchen project. It includes a primer on differential privacy concepts and their importance in modern data sharing, details the architecture of our implementation, explains the privacy modes and parameter configurations, and offers practical guidance on using the code for applying differential privacy to grid feeder models. Through examples and code snippets, we demonstrate the effective application of these privacy-enhancing technologies, enabling utility operators and researchers to confidently share grid data while protecting sensitive information.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Exploring the role of judgement and shared situation awareness when working with AI recommender systems

Abstract AI-advised Decision Making is a form of human-autonomy teaming in which an AI recommender system suggests a solution to a human operator, who is responsible for the final decision. This work seeks to examine the importance of judgement and shared situation awareness between humans and automated agents when interacting together in the form of a recommender systems. We propose manipulating both human judgement and shared situation awareness by providing the human decision maker with relevant information that the automated agent (AI), in the form of a recommender system, uses to generate possible courses of action. This paper presents the results of a two-phase between-subjects study in which participants and a recommender system jointly make a high-stakes decision. We varied the amount of relevant information the participant had, the assessment technique of the proposed solution, and the reliability of the recommender system. Findings indicate that this technique of supporting the human’s judgement and establishing a shared situation awareness is effective in (1) boosting the human decision maker’s situation awareness and task performance, (2) calibrating their trust in AI teammates, and (3) reducing overreliance on an AI partner. Additionally, participants were able to pinpoint the limitations and boundaries of the AI partner’s capabilities. They were able to discern situations where the AI’s recommendations could be trusted versus instances when they should not rely on the AI’s advice. This work proposes and validates a way to provide model-agnostic transparency into recommender systems that can support the human decision maker and lead to improved team performance.

Srivastava, Divya↗

Program Management Tool

The Program Management Tool (PMT) is a comprehensive, Web-enabled business intelligence software tool for assisting program and project managers within NASA enterprises in gathering, comprehending, and disseminating information on the progress of their programs and projects. The PMT provides planning and management support for implementing NASA programmatic and project management processes and requirements. It provides an online environment for program and line management to develop, communicate, and manage their programs, projects, and tasks in a comprehensive tool suite. The information managed by use of the PMT can include monthly reports as well as data on goals, deliverables, milestones, business processes, personnel, task plans, monthly reports, and budgetary allocations. The PMT provides an intuitive and enhanced Web interface to automate the tedious process of gathering and sharing monthly progress reports, task plans, financial data, and other information on project resources based on technical, schedule, budget, and management criteria and merits. The PMT is consistent with the latest Web standards and software practices, including the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) for exchanging data and the WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol for collaborative management of documents. The PMT provides graphical displays of resource allocations in the form of bar and pie charts using Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Application (VBA) libraries. The PMT has an extensible architecture that enables integration of PMT with other strategic-information software systems, including, for example, the Erasmus reporting system, now part of the NASA Integrated Enterprise Management Program (IEMP) tool suite, at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The PMT data architecture provides automated and extensive software interfaces and reports to various strategic information systems to eliminate duplicative human entries and minimize data integrity issues among various NASA systems that impact schedules and planning.

Gawadiak, Yuri↗

GIS Visualization of Transportation Energy Consumption

Transportation is witnessing unprecedented transformation, where emerging technologies are disrupting the way we travel. Be it sharing economy, or micro-mobility, the landscape of urban transportation is undergoing a much-needed paradigm shift. In order to capture and model these shifts, researchers need to be agile in their studies of the current and future transportation landscape. The need for agility in turn calls for sophisticated, intuitive, and reliable means to visualize and share transportation data. Travel is inherently spatial, so methods of visualizing transportation information should also be rooted in spatial analysis. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are the premier technological framework to analyze and display spatial data. GIS tools have been used in the past to depict flow of vehicles, and display of network conditions (speed, congestion, etc.). However, in an ever-changing technological landscape, spanning advancements in vehicle as well as information systems, depicting vehicle flows falls short of providing a comprehensive picture of the impact these advancements have on travel related energy consumption. To address this issue, this research effort presents a web-based mapping application to visualize how travel related energy flows across a city. The application is being developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers to integrate various transportation energy consumption models within a GIS schema. This has the goal of enabling rapid analysis of energy impacts of the dramatically evolving transportation environment. The application is being developed using a Python framework for ArcGIS Online. Using road network data from the City of Columbus, Ohio and traffic data from CATT Laboratory's Regional Integrated Transportation Information System, transportation energy consumption will be modeled at a macro level. The application aims to provide highly accurate data while still maintaining the flexibility needed to adapt the model when new technologies arise. The methodology presented through this effort is expected to provide insights into how light-duty vehicles use energy on a large scale based on the road network they use. The application will also provide data exports to enable sharing and collaboration. " need for agility in turn calls for sophisticated, intuitive, and reliable means to visualize and share transportation data. Travel is inherently spatial, so methods of visualizing transportation information should also be rooted in spatial analysis. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are the premier technological framework to analyze and display spatial data. GIS tools have been used in the past to depict flow of vehicles, and display of network conditions (speed, congestion, etc.). However, in an ever-changing technological landscape, spanning advancements in vehicle as well as information systems, depicting vehicle flows falls short of providing a comprehensive picture of the impact these advancements have on travel related energy consumption. To address this issue, this research effort presents a web-based mapping application to visualize how travel related energy flows across a city. The application is being developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers to integrate various transportation energy consumption models within a GIS schema. This has the goal of enabling rapid analysis of energy impacts of the dramatically evolving transportation environment. The application is being developed using a Python framework for ArcGIS Online. Using road network data from the City of Columbus, Ohio and traffic data from CATT Laboratory's Regional Integrated Transportation Information System, transportation energy consumption will be modeled at a macro level. The application aims to provide highly accurate data while still maintaining the flexibility needed to adapt the model when new technologies arise. The methodology presented through this effort is expected to provide insights into how light-duty vehicles use energy on a large scale based on the road network they use. The application will also provide data exports to enable sharing and collaboration.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Goddard's New Approach to Information Technology: The Information Systems Center an Overview

The Information Center (ISC) at Goddard was created as part of the Goddard reorganization and was located within the Applied Engineering and Technology (AET) Directorate. The creation of ISC was to: (1) focus expertise and leadership in information system development; (2) Promote organizational collaboration, partnerships, and resource sharing; (3) Stimulate design/development of seamless end-to-end flight and ground systems; (4) Enable flexibility to effectively support many simultaneous projects by improved access to critical mass of discipline expertise; (5) Enhance career growth and opportunities including multi-disciplinary opportunities; and (6) to improve communications among information system professionals. This paper presents a general overview of the Information Systems Center as well as the role of the Software Engineering Laboratory within the center.

Kea, Howard E.↗

The NASA NEESPI Data Portal: Products, Information, and Services

Studies have indicated that land cover and use changes in Northern Eurasia influence global climate system. However, the procedures are not fully understood and it is challenging to understand the interactions between the land changes in this region and the global climate. Having integrated data collections form multiple disciplines are important for studies of climate and environmental changes. Remote sensed and model data are particularly important die to sparse in situ measurements in many Eurasia regions especially in Siberia. The NASA GES DISC (Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center) NEESPI data portal has generated infrastructure to provide satellite remote sensing and numerical model data for atmospheric, land surface, and cryosphere. Data searching, subsetting, and downloading functions are available. ONe useful tool is the Web-based online data analysis and visualization system, Giovanni (Goddard Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure), which allows scientists to assess easily the state and dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems in Northern Eurasia and their interactions with global climate system. Recently, we have created a metadata database prototype to expand the NASA NEESPI data portal for providing a venue for NEESPI scientists fo find the desired data easily and leveraging data sharing within NEESPI projects. The database provides product level information. The desired data can be found through navigation and free text search and narrowed down by filtering with a number of constraints. In addition, we have developed a Web Map Service (WMS) prototype to allow access data and images from difference data resources.

Shen, Suhung↗

Informing Wildfire Needs: The Expanded User Interface of NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (Firms)

As the global community continues to experience, and respond to, living in a changing environment, access to tools, technologies, and timely data utilized by an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders is increasing. This year, 2023, has thus far seen an unprecedented number of extreme events, increasingly driven by changes in the climate and a strong 2023 ENSO pattern. In Canada, a record number of wildfires, and associated weather events, evacuations, and infrastructure and habitat destruction has taken place, and is ongoing. Large swaths of Greece have experienced similar wildfire destruction. Most recently, Maui has experienced destructive wildfires, and early 2023 saw massive wildfires in Chile. NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System, or FIRMS, has a fifteen-year history of providing timely and comprehensive data and information on wildfires to stakeholders. FIRMS was initially developed in 2007 by the University of Maryland, with funds from NASA's Applied Sciences Program and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), to provide near real-time active fire Locations to natural resource managers that faced challenges obtaining timely satellite-derived fire information. FIRMS has consistently evolved to address the needs of stakeholders Living in a changing environment; in 2012 it transitioned to NASA LANCE and in 2021 through a partnership between NASA and the US Forest Service, an updated version of FIRMS was released for the US and Canada. As NASA and other federal agencies continue to accelerate Open Science through integrated efforts such as the Year of Open Science, the provision of readily discoverable, findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable data represents a major focus to facilitate equitable outcomes. FIRMS supports this acceleration in Open Science by continuing to provision data and information for its traditional user base, while addressing the novel user needs of an increasingly diverse set of stakeholders seeking robust, reliable, transparently generated data and information. Increasingly, FIRMS is utilized by citizen scientists and individuals directly affected by wildfires - through evacuations, risks to structures/homes, poor air quality. etc. FIRMS has also been Leveraged to detect and assess the impacts resulting from ongoing conflicts. This further highlights the multi-faceted impacts of wildfires and other events. In the Fall of 2023, FIRMS will release an expanded User Interface (UI). This interface captures and reflects the needs of, and input from, a multitude of users. These users range from federal agency representatives to non-government organizations to the private sector to citizen science entities. To respond to this expansive and diverse user need base, the updated FIRMS UI will capture a range of features to support those beginning to explore the range of data and tools available to inform wildfire awareness and knowledge. These users are supported through a Basic Mode interface, furnishing access to a light set of functionalities that provision straight-forward, readily usable information and data, and ingestible knowledge. The Advanced Mode interface supports those stakeholder groups already proficient in navigating FIRMS. These stakeholders, representing fire managers and others, perform active fire management and tactical wildfire response activities. For these stakeholders, additional datasets have been included which require in-depth knowledge of both the utility as well as the caveats of such datasets. Additional functionalities have also been embedded to aid specific user queries. The expanded UI will introduce a new Experimental Mode. The focus of this UI will be to support the provision of emerging and innovative datasets that are in development for review and comment by the user community Examples include post-fire products generated by NASA's Earth Information System (EIS) Fire. This presentation will provide an overview of the expanded FIRMS UI. We will discuss how this UI is designed to be scalable and support the unique needs of an expanding and diverse user base. We will highlight key features, elements, and datasets, and describe how user needs have informed and guided the design of the UI. We will also share recent use cases to convey, and increase awareness, among conference participants. As the global community faces more extreme wildfires, due to climate variability and change, there is an increased need for reliable data to inform, manage, and mitigate the impacts of these events. Through this work, NASA FIRMS is striving to level the playing field, by making information accessible to all; from policy makers to the private sector to historically marginalized communities. In doing so, NASA is promoting the all-hands-on-deck response needed to minimize the impacts of wildfires and harness the strengths of open science to address the greatest environmental challenge faced.

Jenny Hewson↗