Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “DATA RATE”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 649 records · Page 36

Mars Infrared Spectroscopy: From Theory and the Laboratory To Field Observations

The continuity and timely implementation of the Mars exploration strategy relies heavily on the ability of the planetary community to interpret infrared spectral data. However, the increasing mission rate, data volume, and data variety, combined with the small number of spectroscopists within the planetary community, will require a coordinated community effort for effective and timely interpretation of the newly acquired and planned data sets. Relevant spectroscopic instruments include the 1996 TES, 2001 THEMIS, 2003 Pancam, 2003 Mini-TES, 2003 Mars Express OMEGA, 2003 Mars Express PFS, and 2005 CFUSM. In light of that, leaders of the Mars spectral community met June 4-6 to address the question: What terrestrial theoretical, laboratory, and field studies are most needed to best support timely interpretations of current and planned visible infrared spectrometer data sets, in light of the Mars Program goals? A primary goal of the spectral community is to provide a reservoir of information to enhance and expand the exploration of Mars. Spectroscopy has a long history of providing the fundamental compositional discoveries in the solar system, from atmospheric constituents to surface mineralogy, from earth-based to spacecraft-based observations. However, such spectroscopic compositional discoveries, especially surface mineralogies, have usually come after long periods of detailed integration of remote observations, laboratory analyses, and field measurements. Spectroscopic information of surfaces is particularly complex and often is confounded by interference of broad, overlapping absorption features as well as confusing issues of mixtures, coatings, and grain size effects. Thus some spectroscopic compositional discoveries have come only after many years of research. However, we are entering an era of Mars exploration with missions carrying sophisticated spectrometers launching about every 2 years. It is critical that each mission provide answers to relevant questions to optimize the success of the next mission. That will not occur effectively unless the spectroscopic remote sensing data can be processed and understood on an approximate 2-year rate. Our current knowledge of spectral properties of materials and confounding effects of the natural environment are note well enough understood for the accurate interpretations needed for such ambitious and time critical exploration objectives. This workshop focused on identify ing critical gaps in moving the field towards the goal of rapid and accurate analysis and interpretation.

Kirkland, Laurel↗

Data Link Summary for Peer Review.

New generations of high-temperature (HT) sensors and electronics are enabling increased measurement speed and accuracy allowing collection of more accurate and relevant data by downhole tools. Unfortunately, this increased capability is often not realized due to the bottleneck in the uplink data transmission rates due to poor signal characteristics of HT wireline. The objective of this project is to enable the high transmission rate of raw data from downhole tools such as acoustic logging tools and seismic measurement devices to minimize the need for downhole signal processing. To achieve this objective, Sandia has undertaken the effort to develop an asymmetric high-temperature (HT), highspeed data link system for downhole tools capable of operating at temperatures of 210°C while taking advantage of existing wireline transmission channels. Current data rates over HT single-conductor wireline are limited to approximately 200 kbps. The goal system will be capable of transmitting data from the tool to the surface (uplink) at rates of > 1Mbps over 5,000 feet of single-conductor wireline as well as automatically adapt the data rate to the longer wirelines by adapting modern telecommunications techniques to operate on high temperature electronics. The data rate from the surface to the tool (downlink) will be significantly smaller but sufficient for command and control functions. While 5,000 feet of cable is the benchmark for this effort, improvements apply to all lengths of cable.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) Overview

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration s (NASA) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched on June 18, 2009 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle and into a direct insertion trajectory to the oon. LRO, which was designed, built, and operated by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, is gathering crucial data on the lunar environment that will help astronauts prepare for long-duration lunar expeditions. The mission has a nominal life of 1 year as its seven instruments find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and test new technology. To date, LRO has been operating well within the bounds of its requirements and has been collecting excellent science data images taken from the LRO Camera Narrow Angle Camera of the Apollo landing sites appeared on cable news networks. A significant amount of information on LRO s science instruments is provided at the LRO mission webpage. LRO s Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) subsystem is made up of an onboard attitude control system (ACS) and a hardware suite of sensors and actuators. The LRO onboard ACS is a collection of algorithms based on high level and derived requirements, and reflect the science and operational events throughout the mission lifetime. The primary control mode is the Observing mode, which maintains the lunar pointing orientation and any offset pointing from this baseline. It is within this mode that all science instrument calibrations, slews and science data is collected. Because of a high accuracy requirement for knowledge and pointing, the Observing mode makes use of star tracker (ST) measurement data to determine an instantaneous attitude pointing. But even the star trackers alone do not meet the tight requirements, so a six-state Kalman Filter is employed to improve the noisy measurement data. The Observing mode obtains its rate information from an inertial reference unit (IRU) and in the event of an IRU failure, the rate data is be derived from the star tracker, but with degraded pointing performance. The Delta-V control mode responsibility is to maintain attitude pointing during the cruise trajectory, insertion burns and lunar orbit maintenance by adjustments made to the spacecraft s velocity magnitude and vector direction. The ACS also provides for a thruster based system momentum management algorithm (known as Delta-H) to maintain the system and wheel momentum to within acceptable levels. In the event an anomaly causes the LRO spacecraft to lose the ability to maintain its current attitude pointing, a Sun Safe mode is included in the ACS for the purpose of providing a known power and thermally safe coarse inertial sun attitude for an indefinite period of time, within the manageable limits of the reaction wheels. The Sun Safe mode is also the initial spacecraft control mode off of the launch vehicle and provides for a means to null tip-off rates immediately after separation. The nominal configuration is to use the IRU for rate information in the controller. In the event of a gyro failure a gyroless control mode was developed that computes rate information from the CSS data.

Garrick, Joseph↗

The GlueX beamline and detector

The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab has been designed to study photoproduction reactions with a 9-GeV linearly polarized photon beam. The energy and arrival time of beam photons are tagged using a scintillator hodoscope and a scintillating fiber array. The photon flux is determined using a pair spectrometer, while the linear polarization of the photon beam is determined using a polarimeter based on triplet photoproduction. Charged-particle tracks from interactions in the central target are analyzed in a solenoidal field using a central straw-tube drift chamber and six packages of planar chambers with cathode strips and drift wires. Electromagnetic showers are reconstructed in a cylindrical scintillating fiber calorimeter inside the magnet and a lead-glass array downstream. Charged particle identification is achieved by measuring energy loss in the wire chambers and using the flight time of particles between the target and detectors outside the magnet. The signals from all detectors are recorded with flash ADCs and/or pipeline TDCs into memories allowing trigger decisions with a latency of 3.3 $μs$. The detector operates routinely at trigger rates of 40 kHz and data rates of 600 megabytes per second. Here, we describe the photon beam, the GlueX detector components, electronics, data-acquisition and monitoring systems, and the performance of the experiment during the first three years of operation.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

High-Speed, Multi-Channel Serial ADC LVDS Interface for Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are used in scientific and communications instruments on all spacecraft. As data rates get higher, and as the transition is made from parallel ADC designs to high-speed, serial, low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) designs, the need will arise to interface these in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). As Xilinx has released the radiation-hardened version of the Virtex-5, this will likely be used in future missions. High-speed serial ADCs send data at very high rates. A de-serializer instantiated in the fabric of the FPGA could not keep up with these high data rates. The Virtex-5 contains primitives designed specifically for high-speed, source-synchronous de-serialization, but as supported by Xilinx, can only support bitwidths of 10. Supporting bit-widths of 12 or more requires the use of the primitives in an undocumented configuration, a non-trivial task. A new SystemVerilog design was written that is simpler and uses fewer hardware resources than the reference design described in Xilinx Application Note XAPP866. It has been shown to work in a Xilinx XC5VSX24OT connected to a MAXIM MAX1438 12-bit ADC using a 50-MHz sample clock. The design can be replicated in the FPGA for multiple ADCs (four instantiations were used for a total of 28 channels).

Taylor, Gregory H.↗

AAM National Campaign Tech Talk: Data Pipeline Familiarization

NASA's AWS-based Data Pipeline allows real-time data submission and ingestion, with immediate monitoring of data rate, coverage and ingestion quality. Problems are immediately discovered and can be corrected with agility by both Partners and NASA during the a simulation or flight event​.

Data Pipeline↗

Digital high density (80 Mb/s) tape

Work with a state-of-the-art high density PCM tape recorder reproducer system is described. The tape recorder is designed for 80 Mb/s operation at an overall bit error rate of .00001and for 40 Mb/s operation at .000001. The article describes the process of measuring the error rate. Also detailed is a data rate buffer designed for use in recent radar experiments and generalizable to most potential uses of the recorder system.

Donner, M. D.↗

Laboratory experience with voltage breakdown

Voltage breakdown failures in photovoltaic module electrical insulations lead to loss of entire source circuits and require costly maintenance and replacement. Avoiding such catastrophes requires that modules be designed so that voltage breakdown either never occurs or occurs so rarely that it affects the least life cycle energy costs insignificantly. To achieve this desired balance of cost and reliability, the module design engineer must understand the failure mechanisms and use data on materials and failue rates to suppress or retard them. Recently obtained failure mechanism information, rate data and materials property data and a qualitative model of module failure prediction are presented.

Mon, G. R.↗

The analysis of ocean optical data

A new oceanographic instrument to measure underwater optical, biological and physical properties simultaneously has been built and used extensively at sea. The Bio-Optical Profiling System (BOPS) was designed for the rapid acquisition of data to accommodate shipboard 'synoptic' sampling strategies, often in conjunction with concurrent aircraft and satellite sensors. The data rates and associated quantity of data from the BOPS are some orders of magnitude larger than those traditionally encountered in optical oceanography. The rapid acquisition of optical data in a wide range of environmental conditions requires new methodologies in ocean optical data analysis.

Smith, R. C.↗

Data storage systems technology for the Space Station era

The paper presents the results of an internal NASA study to determine if economically feasible data storage solutions are likely to be available to support the ground data transport segment of the Space Station mission. An internal NASA effort to prototype a portion of the required ground data processing system is outlined. It is concluded that the requirements for all ground data storage functions can be met with commercial disk and tape drives assuming conservative technology improvements and that, to meet Space Station data rates with commercial technology, the data will have to be distributed over multiple devices operating in parallel and in a sustained maximum throughput mode.

Dalton, John↗

Propagation issues in the Globalstar system

The purpose of the Globalstar system is to provide reliable, timely space based telecommunications services for fixed, handheld and mobile user telephones throughout the world. The system supports communication services for voice and data as well as low rate data services such as paging. The Globalstar system can also support user position determination. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction of the Globalstar system followed by a discussion of the propagation issues in the Globalstar system design.

Prescott, Toby↗

Measurement of the Earth-Observer-1 Satellite X-Band Phased Array

The recent launch and successful orbiting of the EO-1 Satellite has provided an opportunity to validate the performance of a newly developed X-Band transmit-only phased array aboard the satellite. This paper will compare results of planar near-field testing before and after spacecraft installation as well as on-orbit pattern characterization. The transmit-only array is used as a high data rate antenna for relaying scientific data from the satellite to earth stations. The antenna contains distributed solid-state amplifiers behind each antenna element that cannot be monitored except for radiation pattern measurements. A unique portable planar near-field scanner allows both radiation pattern measurements and also diagnostics of array aperture distribution before and after environmental testing over the ground-integration and prelaunch testing of the satellite. The antenna beam scanning software was confirmed from actual pattern measurements of the scanned beam positions during the spacecraft assembly testing. The scanned radiation patterns on-orbit were compared to the near-field patterns made before launch to confirm the antenna performance. The near-field measurement scanner has provided a versatile testing method for satellite high gain data-link antennas.

Perko, Kenneth↗

Orion Handling Qualities During ISS Rendezvous and Docking

The Orion spacecraft was designed to rendezvous with multiple vehicles in low earth orbit (LEO) and beyond. To perform the required rendezvous and docking task, Orion must provide enough control authority to perform coarse translational maneuvers while maintaining precision to perform the delicate docking corrections. While Orion has autonomous docking capabilities, it is expected that final approach and docking operations with the International Space Station (ISS) will initially be performed in a manual mode. A series of evaluations was conducted by NASA and Lockheed Martin at the Johnson Space Center to determine the handling qualities (HQ) of the Orion spacecraft during different docking and rendezvous conditions using the Cooper-Harper scale. This paper will address the specifics of the handling qualities methodology, vehicle configuration, scenarios flown, data collection tools, and subject ratings and comments. The initial Orion HQ assessment examined Orion docking to the ISS. This scenario demonstrates the Translational Hand Controller (THC) handling qualities of Orion. During this initial assessment, two different scenarios were evaluated. The first was a nominal docking approach to a stable ISS, with Orion initializing with relative position dispersions and a closing rate of approximately 0.1 ft/sec. The second docking scenario was identical to the first, except the attitude motion of the ISS was modeled to simulate a stress case ( 1 degree deadband per axis and 0.01 deg/sec rate deadband per axis). For both scenarios, subjects started each run on final approach at a docking port-to-port range of 20 ft. Subjects used the THC in pulse mode with cues from the docking camera image, window views, and range and range rate data displayed on the Orion display units. As in the actual design, the attitude of the Orion vehicle was held by the automated flight control system at 0.5 degree deadband per axis. Several error sources were modeled including Reaction Control System (RCS) jet angular and position misalignment, RCS thrust magnitude uncertainty, RCS jet force direction uncertainty due to self plume impingement, and Orion center of mass uncertainty.

Hart, Jeremy J.↗

Data Science and the Knowledge Discovery Adventure

This talk will cover the important steps involved in the data science and knowledge discovery process: • Initial fact gathering (interview domain experts, review reports, articles, state-of-the-art) • Identify the problem (prediction, classification, statistical analysis, etc.) • Survey supporting data sources • Understand the data (numerical, categorical, text, sampling rate, data quality issues, etc.) • Selecting relevant features and sources • Acquire the data (set up agreements with the data stewards, APIs to download, etc.) • Merge data sources (temporal, spatial, common key, other ontologies...) • Feature Engineering (non linear domain knowledge or physics-based relationships) • Build data processing pipeline (may need to tap into data stream, develop parallel processing algorithm, federated learning etc.) • Build model and test (tune hyper-parameters, cross validation.) • Analyze/Validate results (do the results make sense. Does it answer the original question). • Deploy/Publish (Monitor and assess benefits)

Data science↗

A System to Provide Deterministic Flight Software Operation and Maximize Multicore Processing Performance: The Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) Datapath

A method and design are described for a system that processes multiple data streams, utilizing a multicore asymmetric processing architecture, that eliminates data interrupts to the application processors. The design supports a deterministic environment for flight software in NASA’s Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project. The SPLICE project develops sensor, algorithm, and compute technologies for Precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance (PL&HA) capabilities. The compute technology for SPLICE is the Descent and Landing Computer (DLC). The DLC hosts several SPLICE algorithms with high computational resource requirements that must be executed in a real-time and deterministic manner. The software runs on a custom Single Board Computer (SBC), with a Xilinx Ultrascale+ Multiprocessor System-on-a-Chip (MPSoC). Input data for the flight software is from a variety of sensors, unique with respect to data rate and packet size. A data path between the SPLICE sensors and algorithms is designed to efficiently deliver this data to the flight software using the MPSoC asymmetric processing cores and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) fabric. This is implemented in a manner that isolates the application processors running the flight software from interrupts associated with the input data. By leveraging real-time processors on the MPSoC, and a structure with the appropriate interfaces in the shared memory on the SBC, the flight software can use the full set of application processors. The available utilization for each processor in this set is also maximized for the SPLICE applications, providing a sufficiently deterministic execution environment without the cost and overhead of a real-time operating system.

heterogeneous processing system↗

A System to Provide Deterministic Flight Software Operation and Maximize Multicore Processing Performance: The Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) Datapath

A method and design are described for a system that processes multiple data streams, utilizing a multicore asymmetric processing architecture, that eliminates data interrupts to the application processors. The design supports a deterministic environment for flight software in NASA’s Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project. The SPLICE project develops sensor, algorithm, and compute technologies for Precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance (PL&HA) capabilities. The compute technology for SPLICE is the Descent and Landing Computer (DLC). The DLC hosts several SPLICE algorithms with high computational resource requirements that must be executed in a real-time and deterministic manner. The software runs on a custom Single Board Computer (SBC), with a Xilinx Ultrascale+ Multiprocessor System-on-a-Chip (MPSoC). Input data for the flight software is from a variety of sensors, unique with respect to data rate and packet size. A data path between the SPLICE sensors and algorithms is designed to efficiently deliver this data to the flight software using the MPSoC asymmetric processing cores and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) fabric. This is implemented in a manner that isolates the application processors running the flight software from interrupts associated with the input data. By leveraging real-time processors on the MPSoC, and a structure with the appropriate interfaces in the shared memory on the SBC, the flight software can use the full set of application processors. The available utilization for each processor in this set is also maximized for the SPLICE applications, providing a sufficiently deterministic execution environment without the cost and overhead of a real-time operating system.

David K. Rutishauser↗