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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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Presents a design to develop a Compact Coherent Laser Ranging with the following goals: Match the performance as GRACE-FO, with much reduced SWaP to fit on mini-Sat or CubeSat; Enables low cost and more frequent LL-SST gravitational missions; Immunes from ionosphere propagation delay with optical ranging; Increases the body pointing capability due to small satellite.
A coherent Doppler lidar has been developed to address NASA’s need for a high-performance, compact, and cost-effective velocity and altitude sensor onboard its landing vehicles. Future robotic and manned missions to planetary bodies require precise ground-relative velocity vector and altitude data to execute complex descent maneuvers and safe, soft landing at a pre-designated site. This lidar sensor, referred to as a Navigation Doppler Lidar, meets the required performance of landing missions while complying with vehicle size, mass, and power constraints. Operating from over five kilometers altitude, the lidar obtains velocity and range precision measurements with 2 cm/sec and 2 meters, respectively, dominated by the vehicle motion. After a series of flight tests onboard helicopters and rocket-powered free-flyer vehicles, the Navigation Doppler Lidar is now being ruggedized for future missions to various destinations in the solar system.
Custom coherent architectures can provide many advantages for FSO communications systems through co-development of integrated photonics, ASIC-or FPGA-based DSP algorithms, and system design to mitigate atmospheric turbulence and reduce pointing requirements.
We describe the problem of regular small telemetry losses incurred during coherency mode transitions in Cassini’s telecommunication. The project did not originally plan any corrective steps for avoiding these data losses, because of 1) the disparity between the small durations of the transitions (1-2 min) and large playback capability losses (15 min) needed for bracketing the transition time spans and 2) the unpredictable content of data downlinking during the transitions. However, as the intense science data return from the tour began, it became apparent that the impact of these small losses can sometimes be significant. We provide two examples of the impact on Radar-dedicated Titan flybys. In general, the impacts are larger for high-rate data and for data acquired during a targeted flyby of Titan and other icy satellites. Although the content of data during a transition for every downlink pass is unpredictable, we are certain that some important data will be lost on downlink passes dedicated to transmit the flyby data and it does not matter what part of the data will be hit by the transitions. We collected more than 200 days of data from Cassini tour operations between June 2004 and February 2005 to analyze the distributions of the start time and duration of the transitions. We found that the occurrence of a transition can be predicted within a 5-min window, with 95 percent confidence. Given that, it is possible to eliminate the data losses by pausing playback at the beginning of a transition for 5 minutes and resuming playback after transition completion. We briefly describe three operational fixes as to how to implement the playback pause, with the pros and cons for each method. Finally, we report the results of the method chosen by the project and implemented on the spacecraft for several Titan and icy satellites flybys between September and October, 2005.
A new technique for measuring the coherence time of the ocean surface at radar wavelengths has been developed and tested.
This paper proposes three so-called pseudo-coherent demodulation schemes for use in land mobile satellite channels. The schemes are derived based on maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation and detection of an N-symbol observation of the received signal.
Using a quantum annealer to simulate the dynamics of phase transitions shows that superconducting quantum devices can coherently evolve systems of thousands of individual elements. This is an important step toward quantum simulation and optimization.
Precision irrigation management and crop water stress assessment rely on accurate estimation of root zone soil moisture. However, only the top 5cm soil moisture can be estimated using the two current passive microwave satellite missions, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), which operate at L-band (wavelength of ~21cm). Since the contributing depth of the soil to brightness temperature increases with observation wavelength, it is expected that a P-band (wavelength of ~40cm) radiometer could potentially provide soil moisture information from deeper layers of the soil profile. Moreover, by combining both L- and P- bands, it is hypothesized that the soil moisture profile can be estimated even beyond their individual observation depths. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the potential of combined L-band and P-band radiometer observations to estimate the soil moisture profile under flat bare soil using a stratified coherent forward model. Brightness temperature observations at L-band and P-band from a tower based experimental site across a dry (April 2019) and a wet (March 2020) period, covering different soil moisture profile shapes, were used in this study. Results from an initial synthetic study showed that the performance of a combined L-band and P-band approach was better than the performance of using either band individually, with an average depth over which reliable soil moisture profile information could be estimated (i.e. with a target root mean square error (RMSE) of less than 0.04 m3/m3) being 20cm for linear and 15cm for second-order polynomial functions. Other functions were also tested but found to have a poorer performance. Applying the method to the tower-based brightness temperature achieved an average estimation depth of 28cm (20cm) and 5cm (5cm) during the dry and wet periods respectively when using a second-order polynomial (linear) function. These findings highlight the opportunity of a satellite mission with L-band and P-band observations to accurately estimate the soil moisture profile to as deep as 30cm globally.
The Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) is a non-conventional architecture that takes inspiration from physical annealing processes to solve Ising problems heuristically. Its dynamics are naturally continuous and described by a set of ordinary differential equations that have been proven to be useful for the optimization of continuous variables nonconvex quadratic optimization problems. The dynamics of such Continuous Variable CIMs (CV-CIM) encourage optimization via optical pulses whose amplitudes are determined by the negative gradient of the objective; however, standard gradient descent is known to be trapped by local minima and hampered by poor problem conditioning. In this work, we propose to modify the CV-CIM dynamics using more sophisticated pulse injections based on tried-and-true optimization techniques such as momentum and Adam. Through numerical experiments, we show that the momentum and Adam updates can significantly speed up the CV-CIM’s convergence and improve sample diversity over the original CV-CIM dynamics. We also find that the Adam-CV-CIM’s performance is more stable as a function of feedback strength, especially on poorly conditioned instances, resulting in an algorithm that is more robust, reliable, and easily tunable. More broadly, we identify the CIM dynamical framework as a fertile opportunity for exploring the intersection of classical optimization and modern analog computing.
Failure of conventional adiabatic criterion in case of excitation of helium atoms by helium ions
High power 2.05-mu m Fabry-Perot and distributed feedback (DFB) ridge waveguide lasers fabricated from epitaxially grown InGaAsSb/AlGaAsSb/GaSb and InGaAs/InP hetero-structures are reported.
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The effect fo the interplanetary and interstellar media upon a low frequency space array (300 KHz-30 MHz observing frequency, baseline lengths up to 100-200 km) has been quantified.
The use of airborne CO(sub 2) lidar to obtain cloud backscatter and extinction data at a thermal infrared wavelength is described.
This oral presentation explains that measurements of the opposition surge (the nonlinear increase in reflectance seen in particulate materials when observed at small phase angles) are the first ever made using the JPL long-arm goniometer, which permits very small phase angle measuremnets to be made.
Future radar satellites will visit SoCal within a day after a disaster event. Data acquisition latency in 2015-2020 is 8 to approx. 15 hours. Data transfer latency that often involves human/agency intervention far exceeds the data acquisition latency. Need interagency cooperation to establish automatic pipeline for data transfer. The algorithm is tested with ALOS PALSAR data of Pasadena, California. Quantitative quality assessment is being pursued: Meeting with Pasadena City Hall computer engineers for a complete list of demolition/construction project 1. Estimate the probability of detection and probability of false alarm 2. Estimate the optimal threshold value.
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