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

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At least 73 records · Page 4

Anticipating the reaction: public concern about sample return missions

Shifts in public attitude that may affect extraterrestrial sample return include increased public participation in the legal and regulatory environment, institutionalized public vigilance, politicization of technological debates and shifts in the nature of public decision-making, and a risk-averse public accustomed to mass media coverage that focuses on hazards and disasters. The ice-minus recombinant DNA experiment is used as an example of the effects of public opinion on scientific experimentation.

NASA Center ARC↗

Giving the Public a Perspective into Unmanned Aircraft Systems' Operations

NASA is currently engaged in research to safely enable large-scale commercial applications of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in low altitude airspace. This research effort, referred to as UAS Traffic Management (UTM), encompasses the concepts and technologies needed to accommodate the projected demand of UAS operating in the national airspace. One aspect related to the successful implementation of UTM in the future is public acceptance. Transparency will heavily influence this acceptance, and a public portal will provide much of that transparency through ease of access to information about the operations - mainly who, why, and where such operations are taking place. Related concerns to the public are individual privacy, security, and accountability of the operators. Providing the aforementioned information about operations can mitigate these concerns, but a balance will have to be achieved between the need for transparency from the public and the privacy of the operators. The proper balance and the needs of the various UTM stakeholders with regard to information access will be explored through the development and testing of a public portal as part of NASA's Technical Capability 3 (TCL 3) demonstration. Additionally, various approaches to the display of information and user interfaces will be surveyed through the development of a public portal by multiple UTM industry partners across different test sites.

UAS↗

Marine Energy Commercialization Review: Evaluation of the Transition From Public to Private Capital

The mission of the U.S. Department of Energy's Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) is to advance marine energy technologies through research, testing, and commercialization. This paper explores the barriers and potential solutions for marine energy commercialization by evaluating publicly available literature, feedback from public and private actors, and historical WPTO actions. A key finding is the absence of standardized metrics to measure marine energy commercialization progress and the lack of targeted success goals. This paper aims to define those metrics, informed by public and private goals and the challenges developers experience, and to further evaluate targets offered by public funders and private capital providers. Recommendations to address barriers in marine energy commercialization include enhancing public-private communication, refining commercialization requirements, leveraging technology transfer programs, and exploring novel funding mechanisms like green bonds and contracts for difference. Addressing these challenges through proposed adjustments could facilitate the transition of marine energy technologies from public funding to sustainable private investment, ultimately advancing their commercialization.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

Publications of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 1976

The formalized technical reporting, released January through December 1975, that resulted from scientific and engineering work performed, or managed, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is described and indexed. The following classes of publications are included: (1) technical reports; (2) technical memorandums; (3) articles from bi-monthly Deep Space Network (DSN) progress report; (4) special publications; and (5) articles published in the open literature. The publications are indexed by: (1) author, (2) subject, and (3) publication type and number. A descriptive entry appears under the name of each author of each publication; an abstract is included with the entry for the primary (first-listed) author. Unless designated otherwise, all publications listed are unclassified.

Source record↗

Publications of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1979

This bibliography includes 1004 technical reports, released during calendar year 1979, that resulted from scientific and engineering work performed, or managed, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Three classes of publications are included: (1) JPL Publications; (2) articles published in the open literature; and (3) articles from the bimonthly Deep Space Network Progress Report. The publications are indexed by: (1) author, (2) subject, and (3) publication type and number. A descriptive entry appears under the name of each author of each publication; an abstract is included with the entry for the primary (first listed) author. Unless designated otherwise, all publications listed are unclassified.

Source record↗

NASA educational publications

This is a catalog of educational and technical publications, sponsored by NASA, that are available to the general public from the Government Printing Office (GPO). The following types of publications are announced: periodicals, educational publications, NASA Facts, posters and wallsheets, other publications of interest to educators, scientific and technical publications, and educational materials from Regional Service Centers.

Source record↗

Achieving the Proper Balance Between Crew and Public Safety

A paramount objective of all human-rated launch and reentry vehicle developers is to ensure that the risks to both the crew onboard and the public are minimized within reasonable cost, schedule, and technical constraints. Past experience has shown that proper attention to range safety requirements necessary to ensure public safety must be given early in the design phase to avoid additional operational complexities or threats to the safety of people onboard. This paper will outline the policy considerations, technical issues, and operational impacts regarding launch and reentry vehicle failure scenarios where crew and public safety are intertwined and thus addressed optimally in an integrated manner. Historical examples and lessons learned from both the Space Shuttle and Constellation Programs will be presented. Using these examples as context, the paper will discuss some operational, design, and analysis approaches to mitigate and balance the risks to people onboard and in the public. Manned vehicle perspectives from the FAA and Air Force organizations that oversee public safety will also be summarized. Finally, the paper will emphasize the need to factor policy, operational, and analysis considerations into the early design trades of new vehicles to help ensure that both crew and public safety are maximized to the greatest extent possible.

Gowan, John↗

Using NASA Remotely Sensed Data to Help Characterize Environmental Risk Factors for National Public Health Applications

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center is collaborating with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Public Health Informatics to address issues of environmental health and enhance public health decision making by utilizing NASA remotely sensed data and products. The objectives of this study are to develop high-quality spatial data sets of environmental variables, link these with public health data from a national cohort study, and deliver the linked data sets and associated analyses to local, state and federal end-user groups. Three daily environmental data sets will be developed for the conterminous U.S. on different spatial resolutions for the period 2003-2008: (1) spatial surfaces of estimated fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposures on a 10-km grid utilizing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ground observations and NASA's MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data; (2) a 1-km grid of Land Surface Temperature (LST) using MODIS data; and (3) a 12-km grid of daily Solar Insolation (SI) using the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) forcing data. These environmental data sets will be linked with public health data from the UAB REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) national cohort study to determine whether exposures to these environmental risk factors are related to cognitive decline and other health outcomes. These environmental datasets and public health linkage analyses will be disseminated to end-users for decision making through the CDC Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) system.

Al-Hamdan, Mohammad↗

Future Extreme Heat Scenarios to Enable the Assessment of Climate Impacts on Public Health over the Coterminous U.S.

In the United States, extreme heat is the most deadly weather-related hazard. In the face of a warming climate and urbanization, which contributes to local-scale urban heat islands, it is very likely that extreme heat events (EHEs) will become more common and more severe in the U.S. This research seeks to provide historical and future measures of climate-driven extreme heat events to enable assessments of the impacts of heat on public health over the coterminous U.S. We use atmospheric temperature and humidity information from meteorological reanalysis and from Global Climate Models (GCMs) to provide data on past and future heat events. The focus of research is on providing assessments of the magnitude, frequency and geographic distribution of extreme heat in the U.S. to facilitate public health studies. In our approach, long-term climate change is captured with GCM outputs, and the temporal and spatial characteristics of short-term extremes are represented by the reanalysis data. Two future time horizons for 2040 and 2090 are compared to the recent past period of 1981- 2000. We characterize regional-scale temperature and humidity conditions using GCM outputs for two climate change scenarios (A2 and A1B) defined in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). For each future period, 20 years of multi-model GCM outputs are analyzed to develop a 'heat stress climatology' based on statistics of extreme heat indicators. Differences between the two future and the past period are used to define temperature and humidity changes on a monthly time scale and regional spatial scale. These changes are combined with the historical meteorological data, which is hourly and at a spatial scale (12 km), to create future climate realizations. From these realizations, we compute the daily heat stress measures and related spatially-specific climatological fields, such as the mean annual number of days above certain thresholds of maximum and minimum air temperatures, heat indices and a new heat stress variable developed as part of this research that gives an integrated measure of heat stress (and relief) over the course of a day. Comparisons are made between projected (2040 and 2090) and past (1990) heat stress statistics. Outputs are aggregated to the county level, which is a popular scale of analysis for public health interests. County-level statistics are made available to public health researchers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) via the Wideranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) system. This addition of heat stress measures to CDC WONDER allows decision and policy makers to assess the impact of alternative approaches to optimize the public health response to EHEs. Through CDC WONDER, users are able to spatially and temporally query public health and heat-related data sets and create county-level maps and statistical charts of such data across the coterminous U.S

Quattrochi, Dale A.↗

EARTHDATA PUB: A Data Publication Workflow Solution for NASA’s EOSDIS

Each NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) faces the challenge of dealing with an increasingly diverse number of publishable data products from diverse data producers. Data producers, on the other hand, may experience pain points when interacting with the EOSDIS for the first time or when publishing different data at different DAACs. As a result, there has been a growing need to develop a common software framework that serves as a common interface for data producers, rigorously defines the data publication procedure for DAAC staff, facilitates the management of various data publication processes, and tracks the progress of data publication. This software should also account for the different configurations at different DAACs. Currently, two primary data publication workflow and tracking tools exist in operation at the EOSDIS: Semi-Automated ingest System (SAuS) and Data Publication workflow Portal (DAPPeR). However, neither tool is cloud-ready. Automated data processing could be managed by Cumulus, an EOSDIS cloud-based data ingest, archive and management system. However, Cumulus does not support manual tasks or on-premise implementations. We propose to develop the Earthdata Publication Minimum Viable Product (Earthdata Pub MVP) -- a cloud-hosted solution that works with both cloud and on-premise systems and implements the communications and exchange requirements generated by the Earthdata Pub information architecture team.

Rice, Justin L.↗

Restricted and Uncontained: Health Care and Public Health Considerations in the Event of Loss of Containment During the Restricted Earth Return of Extraterrestrial Samples

The normal scope of an adequate public health response to released biological material is framed by working with biological vectors with known pathogenicity and virulence. Defining the scope of a response to the release of biological material with unknown pathogenicity and virulence enters into a novel and yet to be framed domain. A current case, the case of returning samples from a location other than Earth, extraterrestrial samples from a location such as Mars, which may harbor life as we know it, requires framing a public health response. An unintentional release of biological material with unknown pathogenicity and virulence may occur when biological containment mechanisms in the Earth-returning transport method are lost. This paper raises initial public health and healthcare response questions during a return of extraterrestrial samples to Earth, in the event of its release from biological containment mechanisms: How does the public health community prepare for a response when there is release of samples that may contain potential extraterrestrial organisms from a planetary body or hardy terrestrial organisms surviving a round trip? If a mishap occurs during the return of these samples, what considerations need to be made to confine, decontaminate, and collect material in regions around the mishap? How will the public health community work with relevant government organizations to prepare the general public? The unknowns of exposure, potential extraterrestrial pathogenicity, and decontamination approaches, underscore gaps in biopreparedness for this novel case from the federal to local levels.

Betsy Pugel↗

Modeling Atmospheric Science Knowledge from Research Publications

NASA Earth Science Data Centers contain enormous amounts of remote sensing digital data. It is often a significant challenge for users to find data suitable for their research topic in these vast archives. One of the approaches is the usage-driven dataset discovery, where users seek publications on projects similar to their intended study. For this approach to be effective, users need a clear connection between the underlying data in the publications and the study objectives; this is not often apparent to non-expert users. Tools and methodologies that can help facilitate and organize these connections are therefore valuable for creating improved knowledge mappings, which can be further used by search engines to suggest data or publications best tailored to a user’s specific research goal. As an illustration of these challenges, in this work we focus on the atmospheric chemistry processes related to Earth environmental impacts such as ozone depletion, aerosols, smog formation, acid rain, and radiative forcing. We further limit our study to publications that use data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument flown on the Aura Earth Observing System. To create knowledge representations of science carried out in these publications, we use existing ontologies such as the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET). These ontologies together encompass term dictionaries that include measured variables, names of molecules or radicals, mission and instrument names, locations, action words, among many others. Based on these terms acknowledge graph database was populated with the terms retrieved from scientific publications that study atmospheric chemistry. These databases can be used to further enhance the automation of knowledge discovery and facilitate machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms or applications. These tools and methods can also be extended to apply to content from other related Earth science domains.

Irina Gerasimov↗

Supervised Machine Learning Approach for Classifying Earth Science Publications

The data collections archived and distributed by the GES DISC NASA data center are widely utilized for various Earth Science studies. As these collections are created, many research works are published regarding these collections' algorithms, their validation, and their applications. As NASA data centers collect these publications for public use, it is helpful to categorize them based on how they relate to their associated datasets. Specifically, whether the publication linked to the GES DISC dataset is using it for applicational research, describing the algorithm used for the dataset creation, validating the dataset, or providing a general overview of the data collection. Currently, this process requires simple manual labeling, and as such, it may be possible to solve via automation. To approach this problem, machine learning classifiers were developed to predict a publication's category. Manually labeled publications were used as the training data for the supervised machine learning algorithms, specifically Random Forest and Multinomial Naïve Bayes. After balancing the dataset and implementing the Multinomial Naïve Bayes algorithm, the classification accuracy achieved was substantially higher than the baseline accuracy, thus significantly improving the efficiency of publication labeling.

Rohan Dayal↗

A Review of the Customer Experience at Public Charging Stations and its Effects on Electric Vehicle Purchase and Use

The electric vehicle (EV) market in the U.S. has grown rapidly. However, poor public charging reliability could challenge achieving widespread adoption. We reviewed peer-reviewed articles and market research reports to understand how the public charging experience affects the willingness to purchase EVs among first-time buyers and current owners. Ample literature identifies the measures of the public charging experiences, characterizes the current public charging experience, and identifies the effect of infrastructure availability on EV purchase decisions. However, there is no causal evidence linking the customer experience at public chargers to purchase decisions or intentions for current EV owners or prospective buyers.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

The Art and Science of Storytelling in Presenting Complex Information to the Public, or, Give 'Em More Than Just the Facts

In communicating science to the public, just the facts can leave the public baffled, bewildered, and bored. In communicating science to the public, we need to learn to tell the story, not just the facts. Science and engineering is serious business, requiring precise language and rigorous reporting of "just the facts." Yet, we believe this very code of integrity has contributed to a public image, at best, of scientists as eccentrics and engineers as geeks, and at worst, as elitist snobs who speak in secret codes. The very heart of the science process - open discussion and disagreement - often leaves the public with the impression that scientists don't know which way is up.

education↗

Cross-platform analysis of public responses to the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence on Twitter and Reddit

Online social networks (OSNs) have become a powerful tool to study collective human responses to extreme events such as earthquakes. Most previous research concentrated on a single platform and utilized users’ behaviors on a single platform to study people’s general responses. In this study, we explore the characteristics of people’s behaviors on different OSNs and conduct a cross-platform analysis of public responses to earthquakes. Our findings support the Uses and Gratification theory that users on Reddit and Twitter are engaging with platforms that they may feel best reflect their sense of self. Using the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes as our study cases, we collected 510,579 tweets and 45,770 Reddit posts (including 1437 submissions and 44,333 comments) to answer the following research questions: (1) What were the similarities and differences between public responses on Twitter and Reddit? (2) Considering the different mechanisms of Twitter and Reddit, what unique information of public responses can we learn from Reddit as compared with Twitter? By answering these research questions, we aim to bridge the gap of cross-platform public responses research towards natural hazards. Our study evinces that the users on the two different platforms have both different topics of interest and different sentiments towards the same earthquake, which indicates the necessity of investigating cross-platform OSNs to reveal a more comprehensive picture of people’s general public responses towards certain disasters. Our analysis also finds that r/conspiracy subreddit is one of the major venues where people discuss the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes on Reddit and different misinformation/conspiracies spread on Twitter and Reddit platforms (e.g., “Big one is coming” on Twitter and “Nuclear test” on Reddit).

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Neural Architecture and Feature Search for Predicting the Ridership of Public Transportation Routes

Accurately predicting the ridership of public-transit routes provides substantial benefits to both transit agencies, who can dispatch additional vehicles proactively before the vehicles that serve a route become crowded, and to passengers, who can avoid crowded vehicles based on publicly available predictions. The spread of the coronavirus disease has further elevated the importance of ridership prediction as crowded vehicles now present not only an inconvenience but also a public-health risk. At the same time, accurately predicting ridership has become more challenging due to evolving ridership patterns, which may make all data except for the most recent records stale. One promising approach for improving prediction accuracy is to fine-tune the hyper-parameters of machine-learning models for each transit route based on the characteristics of the particular route, such as the number of records. However, manually designing a machine-learning model for each route is a labor-intensive process, which may require experts to spend a significant amount of their valuable time. To help experts with designing machine-learning models, we propose a neural-architecture and feature search approach, which optimizes the architecture and features of a deep neural network for predicting the ridership of a public-transit route. Our approach is based on a randomized local hyper-parameter search, which minimizes both prediction error as well as the complexity of the model. We evaluate our approach on real-world ridership data provided by the public transit agency of Chattanooga, TN, and we demonstrate that training neural networks whose architectures and features are optimized for each route provides significantly better performance than training neural networks whose architectures and features are generic.

Ayman, Afiya↗

Applicability of Public Dose Limits to Individuals on the Nevada National Security Site

Historically all persons working on the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) were considered subject to worker dose limits when calculations of potential dose from the air pathway were conducted to demonstrate compliance with Title 42 United States Code (USC) Chapter 85, “The Clean Air Act,” and Title 40 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 61, Subpart H, “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP).” Calculations were also conducted for the all-pathways potential dose to demonstrate compliance with U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Order DOE O 458.1 Chg. 3, “Radiation Protection of the Public and the Environment.” The need to evaluate environmental air sampling locations and past regulator questions about the existence of persons potentially subject to public dose limits being on the NNSS drove this assessment (letter from EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] Region 9 to DOE/Nevada Operations Office, dated September 3, 1999). This assessment also supports determining those persons subject to public dose limits from the all pathways perspective. A person that is a member of the public is subject to public dose limits.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗