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At least 721 records · Page 40
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NASA NTRS2002

Visions of our Planet's Atmosphere, Land and Oceans: NASA/NOAA Electronic Theater 2002

The NASA/NOAA Electronic Theater presents Earth science observations and visualizations in a historical perspective. Fly in from outer space to the 2002 Winter Olympic Stadium Site of the Olympic Opening and Closing Ceremonies in Salt Lake City. Fly in and through Olympic Alpine Venues using 1 m IKONOS "Spy Satellite" data. Go back to the early weather satellite images from the 1960s and see them contrasted with the latest US and international global satellite weather movies including hurricanes and "tornadoes". See the latest visualizations of spectacular images from NASA/NOAA remote sensing missions like Terra, GOES, TRMM, SeaWiFS, Landsat 7 including new 1 - min GOES rapid scan image sequences of Nov 9th 2001 Midwest tornadic thunderstorms and have them explained. See how High-Definition Television (HDTV) is revolutionizing the way we communicate science. (In cooperation with the American Museum of Natural History in NYC) See dust storms in Africa and smoke plumes from fires in Mexico. See visualizations featured on the covers of Newsweek, TIME, National Geographic, Popular Science and on National and International Network TV. New computer software tools allow us to roam and zoom through massive global images e.g. Landsat tours of the US, and Africa, showing desert and mountain geology as well as seasonal changes in vegetation. See animations of the polar ice packs and the motion of gigantic Antarctic Icebergs from SeaWinds. data. Spectacular new visualizations of the global atmosphere and oceans are shown. See vortexes and currents in the global oceans that bring up the nutrients to feed tiny algae and draw the fish, whales and fisherman. See the how the ocean blooms in response to these currents and El Nino/La Nina climate changes. See the city lights, fishing fleets, gas flares and bio-mass burning of the Earth at night observed by the "night-vision" DMSP military satellite.

Haser, Fritz↗
NASA NTRS2001

Reliability of Fault Tolerant Control Systems

This paper reports Part I of a two part effort, that is intended to delineate the relationship between reliability and fault tolerant control in a quantitative manner. Reliability analysis of fault-tolerant control systems is performed using Markov models. Reliability properties, peculiar to fault-tolerant control systems are emphasized. As a consequence, coverage of failures through redundancy management can be severely limited. It is shown that in the early life of a syi1ein composed of highly reliable subsystems, the reliability of the overall system is affine with respect to coverage, and inadequate coverage induces dominant single point failures. The utility of some existing software tools for assessing the reliability of fault tolerant control systems is also discussed. Coverage modeling is attempted in Part II in a way that captures its dependence on the control performance and on the diagnostic resolution.

Wu, N. Eva↗
NASA NTRS2002

The Living With a Star CDAW on the Solar and Geospace Connections of Solar Energetic Particles

The Living With a Star Program is sponsoring its first CDAW (Coordinated Data Analysis Workshop) to be held July 23-26, 2002 at a conference support location near the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This CDAW's topic is Solar Energetic Particle events. The topic was chosen due to the breadth of the impact of SEP's on the space environment and terrestrial climate. General goals of the LWS CDAW are a) Stimulate LWS Science on the near term, b) Facilitate cross-disciplinary interaction between the LWS scientific and space environment communities, c) Produce science products for all potential users, and d) Assist in the development of the LWS data system. The workshop will proceed similar to a previous CDAW held in 1999 on Interplanetary Type 11 Shocks. A list of target events has been compiled, which can be found at the workshop home page. The page lists all of the SEP events from 1996 January to 2001 December with energy > 10 MeV particle intensities exceeding 10 PFU. Preparation for the workshop consists of identifying relevant data from a wide variety of sources (solar, interplanetary, magnetospheric and climatary), accumulating the data (frequently this consists of both raw data, processed data and plots to ease perusal during the workshop) and gathering the software tools. Participants in the workshop are expected to complete their contributions of data or models prior to arriving at the workshop. Most of the CDAW consists of joint analysis of this data; only a few introductory talks are given at the beginning of the workshop, with the rest of the time being devoted to producing scientific results. Additional symposia may be scheduled at a later date, which will allow a venue for scientific talks on the CDAW results and associated science. The poster will list the scientific goals of the workshop, as well as a scientific discussion of the data which has been accumulated thus far.

Thompson, Barbara J.↗
NASA NTRS1988

Robot Design

Martin Marietta Aero and Naval Systems has advanced the CAD art to a very high level at its Robotics Laboratory. One of the company's major projects is construction of a huge Field Material Handling Robot for the Army's Human Engineering Lab. Design of FMR, intended to move heavy and dangerous material such as ammunition, was a triumph in CAD Engineering. Separate computer problems modeled the robot's kinematics and dynamics, yielding such parameters as the strength of materials required for each component, the length of the arms, their degree of freedom and power of hydraulic system needed. The Robotics Lab went a step further and added data enabling computer simulation and animation of the robot's total operational capability under various loading and unloading conditions. NASA computer program (IAC), integrated Analysis Capability Engineering Database was used. Program contains a series of modules that can stand alone or be integrated with data from sensors or software tools.

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NASA NTRS2002

A Grid Infrastructure for Supporting Space-based Science Operations

Emerging technologies for computational grid infrastructures have the potential for revolutionizing the way computers are used in all aspects of our lives. Computational grids are currently being implemented to provide a large-scale, dynamic, and secure research and engineering environments based on standards and next-generation reusable software, enabling greater science and engineering productivity through shared resources and distributed computing for less cost than traditional architectures. Combined with the emerging technologies of high-performance networks, grids provide researchers, scientists and engineers the first real opportunity for an effective distributed collaborative environment with access to resources such as computational and storage systems, instruments, and software tools and services for the most computationally challenging applications.

Bradford, Robert N.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Autocommander: A Supervisory Controller for Integrated Guidance and Control for the 2nd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle

This paper presents a hierarchical architecture for integrated guidance and control that achieves risk and cost reduction for NASA's 2d generation reusable launch vehicle (RLV). Guidance, attitude control, and control allocation subsystems that heretofore operated independently will now work cooperatively under the coordination of a top-level autocommander. In addition to delivering improved performance from a flight mechanics perspective, the autocommander is intended to provide an autonomous supervisory control capability for traditional mission management under nominal conditions, G&C reconfiguration in response to effector saturation, and abort mode decision-making upon vehicle malfunction. This high-level functionality is to be implemented through the development of a relational database that is populated with the broad range of vehicle and mission specific data and translated into a discrete event system model for analysis, simulation, and onboard implementation. A Stateflow Autocoder software tool that translates the database into the Stateflow component of a Matlab/Simulink simulation is also presented.

Fisher, J. E.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Visions of our Planet's Atmosphere, Land & Oceans

The NASA/NOAA Electronic Theater presents Earth science observations and visualizations in a historical perspective. Fly in from outer space to South Africa, Cape Town and Johannesburg using NASA Terra MODIS data, Landsat data and 1m IKONOS "Spy Satellite" data. Zoom in to any place South Africa using Earth Viewer 3D from Keyhole Inc. and Landsat data at 30 m resolution. Go back to the early weather satellite images from the 1960s and see them contrasted with the latest US and international global satellite weather movies including hurricanes & "tornadoes". See the latest visualizations of spectacular images from NASA/NOAA remote sensing missions like Terra, GOES, TRMM, SeaWiFS, Landsat 7 including 1 - min GOES rapid scan image sequences of Nov 9th 2001 Midwest tornadic thunderstorms and have them explained. See how High-Definition Television (HDTV) is revolutionizing the way we present science to the public. See dust storms and flooding in Africa and smoke plumes from fires in Mexico. See visualizations featured on the covers of Newsweek, TIME, National Geographic, Popular Science & on National & International Network TV. New computer software tools allow us to roam & zoom through massive global images e.g. Landsat tours of the US, and Africa, showing desert and mountain geology as well as seasonal changes in vegetation. See animations of the north and south polar ice packs and with icebergs on the coasts of Greenland and off the coast of Antarctica. Spectacular new visualizations of the global land, atmosphere & oceans are shown. Listen to the pulse of our planet. See how land vegetation, ocean plankton, clouds and temperatures respond to the sun & seasons. See vortexes and currents in the global oceans that bring up the nutrients to feed tiny algae and draw the fish, whales and fisherman. See the how the ocean blooms in response to these currents and El Nino/La Nina climate changes. See the city lights, fishing fleets, gas flares and biomass burning of the Earth at night observed by the "night-vision" DMSP military satellite. The presentation will be made using the latest HDTV and video projection technology that is now done from a laptop computer through an entirely digital path.

Hasler, Arthur F.↗
NASA NTRS2003

High End Computing Technologies for Earth Science Applications: Trends, Challenges, and Innovations

Earth science applications of the future will stress the capabilities of even the highest performance supercomputers in the areas of raw compute power, mass storage management, and software environments. These NASA mission critical problems demand usable multi-petaflops and exabyte-scale systems to fully realize their science goals. With an exciting vision of the technologies needed, NASA has established a comprehensive program of advanced research in computer architecture, software tools, and device technology to ensure that, in partnership with US industry, it can meet these demanding requirements with reliable, cost effective, and usable ultra-scale systems. NASA will exploit, explore, and influence emerging high end computing architectures and technologies to accelerate the next generation of engineering, operations, and discovery processes for NASA Enterprises. This article captures this vision and describes the concepts, accomplishments, and the potential payoff of the key thrusts that will help meet the computational challenges in Earth science applications.

Parks, John↗
NASA NTRS2003

Automated CFD Database Generation for a 2nd Generation Glide-Back-Booster

A new software tool, AeroDB, is used to compute thousands of Euler and Navier-Stokes solutions for a 2nd generation glide-back booster in one week. The solution process exploits a common job-submission grid environment using 13 computers located at 4 different geographical sites. Process automation and web-based access to the database greatly reduces the user workload, removing much of the tedium and tendency for user input errors. The database consists of forces, moments, and solution files obtained by varying the Mach number, angle of attack, and sideslip angle. The forces and moments compare well with experimental data. Stability derivatives are also computed using a monotone cubic spline procedure. Flow visualization and three-dimensional surface plots are used to interpret and characterize the nature of computed flow fields.

Chaderjian, Neal M.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Integrated G and C Implementation within IDOS: A Simulink Based Reusable Launch Vehicle Simulation

The implementation of multiple Integrated Guidance and Control (IG&C) algorithms per flight phase within a vehicle simulation poses a daunting task to coordinate algorithm interactions with the other G&C components and with vehicle subsystems. Currently being developed by Universal Space Lines LLC (USL) under contract from NASA, the Integrated Development and Operations System (IDOS) contains a high fidelity Simulink vehicle simulation, which provides a means to test cutting edge G&C technologies. Combining the modularity of this vehicle simulation and Simulink s built-in primitive blocks provide a quick way to implement algorithms. To add discrete-event functionality to the unfinished IDOS simulation, Vehicle Event Manager (VEM) and Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring (IVHM) subsystems were created to provide discrete-event and pseudo-health monitoring processing capabilities. Matlab's Stateflow is used to create the IVHM and Event Manager subsystems and to implement a supervisory logic controller referred to as the Auto-commander as part of the IG&C to coordinate the control system adaptation and reconfiguration and to select the control and guidance algorithms for a given flight phase. Manual creation of the Stateflow charts for all of these subsystems is a tedious and time-consuming process. The Stateflow Auto-builder was developed as a Matlab based software tool for the automatic generation of a Stateflow chart from information contained in a database. This paper describes the IG&C, VEM and IVHM implementations in IDOS. In addition, this paper describes the Stateflow Auto-builder.

Fisher, Joseph E.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Digital Images on the DIME

With NASA on its side, Positive Systems, Inc., of Whitefish, Montana, is veering away from the industry standards defined for producing and processing remotely sensed images. A top developer of imaging products for geographic information system (GIS) and computer-aided design (CAD) applications, Positive Systems is bucking traditional imaging concepts with a cost-effective and time-saving software tool called Digital Images Made Easy (DIME(trademark)). Like piecing a jigsaw puzzle together, DIME can integrate a series of raw aerial or satellite snapshots into a single, seamless panoramic image, known as a 'mosaic.' The 'mosaicked' images serve as useful backdrops to GIS maps - which typically consist of line drawings called 'vectors' - by allowing users to view a multidimensional map that provides substantially more geographic information.

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NASA NTRS1999

Hyperspectral Thermal Fabry-Perot Modeling

Fabry-Perot interferometer are simple elegant, tunable filters that can be used to make compact hyperspectral thermal imaging system. To foster the development of these sensors, software tools for the design and simulation of tunable Fabry-Perot infrared imagers have been developed. The tools are provided at three levels: basic, design, and system. Basic tools describe a nearly ideal Fabry-Perot filter with perfectly flat and parallel mirrors in collimated space. Design tools that take into account non-ideal behavior such as mirror and collimation defects calculate free spectral range, finesse, and spectral width of the interferometer. System tools help analyze an integration of the Fabry-Perot filter into a camera system. They include spectral convolution, first-order optical layout, and an estimation of signal-to-noise ratio. The complete set of tools allows for simulations of system operation and performance with various illumination sources. Spectral images generated in such simulations were used to examine applicability of Fabry-Perot system in remote sensing of atmospheric gases including detection of environmental pollutants and hazardous gases. Different operating conditions and system configurations are presented.

Ryan, Robert↗
NASA NTRS2001

An Expertise Recommender using Web Mining

This report explored techniques to mine web pages of scientists to extract information regarding their expertise, build expertise chains and referral webs, and semi automatically combine this information with directory information services to create a recommender system that permits query by expertise. The approach included experimenting with existing techniques that have been reported in research literature in recent past , and adapted them as needed. In addition, software tools were developed to capture and use this information.

Joshi, Anupam↗
NASA NTRS2003

Accessing and Understanding MODIS Data

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Terra satellite in December 1999, as part of the Earth Science Enterprise promotion of interdisciplinary studies of the integrated Earth system. Aqua, the second satellite from the series of EOS constellation, was launched in May 2002. Both satellites carry the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. MODIS data are processed at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, and then archived and distributed by the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). Data products from the MODIS sensors present new challenges to remote sensing scientists due to specialized production level, data format, and map projection. MODIS data are distributed as calibrated radiances and as higher level products such as: surface reflectance, water-leaving radiances, ocean color and sea surface temperature, land surface kinetic temperature, vegetation indices, leaf area index, land cover, snow cover, sea ice extent, cloud mask, atmospheric profiles, aerosol properties, and many other geophysical parameters. MODIS data are stored in HDF- EOS format in both swath format and in several different map projections. This tutorial guides users through data set characteristics as well as search and order interfaces, data unpacking, data subsetting, and potential applications of the data. A CD-ROM with sample data sets, and software tools for working with the data will be provided to the course participants.

Leptoukh, Gregory↗
NASA NTRS2004

Discrete Spring Model for Predicting Delamination Growth in Z-Fiber Reinforced DCB Specimens

Beam theory analysis was applied to predict delamination growth in DCB specimens reinforced in the thickness direction with pultruded pins, known as Z-fibers. The specimen arms were modeled as cantilever beams supported by discrete springs, which were included to represent the pins. A bi-linear, irreversible damage law was used to represent Z-fiber damage, the parameters of which were obtained from previous experiments. Closed-form solutions were developed for specimen compliance and displacements corresponding to Z-fiber row locations. A solution strategy was formulated to predict delamination growth, in which the parent laminate mode I fracture toughness was used as the criterion for delamination growth. The solution procedure was coded into FORTRAN 90, giving a dedicated software tool for performing the delamination prediction. Comparison of analysis results with previous analysis and experiment showed good agreement, yielding an initial verification for the analytical procedure.

Ratcliffe, James G.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Autonomous Multi-Sensor Coordination: The Science Goal Monitor

Many dramatic earth phenomena are dynamic and coupled. In order to fully understand them, we need to obtain timely coordinated multi-sensor observations from widely dispersed instruments. Such a dynamic observing system must include the ability to Schedule flexibly and react autonomously to sciencehser driven events; Understand higher-level goals of a sciencehser defined campaign; Coordinate various space-based and ground-based resources/sensors effectively and efficiently to achieve goals. In order to capture transient events, such a 'sensor web' system must have an automated reactive capability built into its scientific operations. To do this, we must overcome a number of challenges inherent in infusing autonomy. The Science Goal Monitor (SGM) is a prototype software tool being developed to explore the nature of automation necessary to enable dynamic observing. The tools being developed in SGM improve our ability to autonomously monitor multiple independent sensors and coordinate reactions to better observe dynamic phenomena. The SGM system enables users to specify what to look for and how to react in descriptive rather than technical terms. The system monitors streams of data to identify occurrences of the key events previously specified by the scientisther. When an event occurs, the system autonomously coordinates the execution of the users' desired reactions between different sensors. The information can be used to rapidly respond to a variety of fast temporal events. Investigators will no longer have to rely on after-the-fact data analysis to determine what happened. Our paper describes a series of prototype demonstrations that we have developed using SGM and NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite and Earth Observing Systems' Aqua/Terra spacecrafts' MODIS instrument. Our demonstrations show the promise of coordinating data from different sources, analyzing the data for a relevant event, autonomously updating and rapidly obtaining a follow-on relevant image. SGM was used to investigate forest fires, floods and volcanic eruptions. We are now identifying new Earth science scenarios that will have more complex SGM reasoning. By developing and testing a prototype in an operational environment, we are also establishing and gathering metrics to gauge the success of automating science campaigns.

Koratkar, Anuradha↗
NASA NTRS2004

Advanced Life Support Research and Technology Development Metric

The Metric is one of several measures employed by the NASA to assess the Agency s progress as mandated by the United States Congress and the Office of Management and Budget. Because any measure must have a reference point, whether explicitly defined or implied, the Metric is a comparison between a selected ALS Project life support system and an equivalently detailed life support system using technology from the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) for the International Space Station (ISS). This document provides the official calculation of the Advanced Life Support (ALS) Research and Technology Development Metric (the Metric) for Fiscal Year 2004. The values are primarily based on Systems Integration, Modeling, and Analysis (SIMA) Element approved software tools or reviewed and approved reference documents. For Fiscal Year 2004, the Advanced Life Support Research and Technology Development Metric value is 2.03 for an Orbiting Research Facility and 1.62 for an Independent Exploration Mission.

Hanford, A. J.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Planning Mars Memory: Learning from the Mer Mission

Knowledge management for space exploration is part of a multi-generational effort at recognizing, preserving and transmitting learning. Each mission should be built on the learning, of both successes and failures, derived from previous missions. Knowledge management begins with learning, and the recognition that this learning has produced knowledge. The Mars Exploration Rover mission provides us with an opportunity to track how learning occurs, how it is recorded, and whether the representations of this learning will be optimally useful for subsequent missions. This paper focuses on the MER science and engineering teams during Rover operations. A NASA team conducted an observational study of the ongoing work and learning of the these teams. Learning occurred in a wide variety of areas: how to run two teams on Mars time for three months; how to use the instruments within the constraints of the martian environment, the deep space network and the mission requirements; how to plan science strategy; how best to use the available software tools. This learning is preserved in many ways. Primarily it resides in peoples memories, to be carried on to the next mission. It is also encoded in stones, in programming sequences, in published reports, and in lessons learned activities, Studying learning and knowledge development as it happens allows us to suggest proactive ways of capturing and using it across multiple missions and generations.

Linde, Charlotte↗