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The solar wind plasma experiment aboard the Ulysses spacecraft, including separate ion and electron instruments, measured the plasma properties of the Jovian magnetosheath during the February 1992 encounter with Jupiter. Seven separate magnetosheath intervals were observed, as well as four bow shock crossings and numerous encounters with the magnetopause and its boundary layer.
NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) instrument was launched Dec. 5, 2018, and installed on the International Space Station 419 km from Earth. The GEDI is a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) instrument; measuring the time of flight of transmitted laser beams to the Earth and back to determine altitude for geospatial mapping of forest canopy heights. The need for very dense cross track sampling for slope measurements of canopy height is accomplished by using three individual laser transmitter systems, where each beam is split into two beams by a birefringent crystal. Furthermore, one transmitter is equipped with a diffractive optical element splitting the two beams into four, for a total of 8 beams. The beams are reflected off of the features and imaged by an 800 mm diameter Receiver Telescope Assembly, composed of a Ritchey-Chretien telescope, a refractive aft optics assembly and focal plane array which collects and focuses the light from the 8 probe beams into the 8 science fibers, each with a field of view on the Earth subtending 300 mu rad. The dense cross-track sampling mandated a custom designed dual-fiber interface. The science fibers had to be aligned to the nominal, projected laser spots. The alignment was highly dependent on optimization and co-positioning of the fibers pair-wise due to mechanical constraints. This paper presents the end-to-end alignment and metrology of the full optical system from transmitter elements through receiver telescope, aft-optics, focal plane and receiver fibers performed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.[GRAPHICS]
Eight landed missions demonstrated that martian soils (defined as loose, unconsolidated surface material) consist of basaltic mineralogy, iron (hydr)oxides, amorphous material, sulfate, chloride, (per)chlorate, nitrate, carbonate, and possible organic C. The Viking Lander 1 and 2 (1976), Mars Pathfinder (1997), and Mars Exploration Rover (MER-A,B) (2004) missions determined that martian soil was similar at all landing sites by having mafic chemistry, high S (~ 7 wt.% SO3) and Cl (0.7 wt.%), and spectral detections of poorly crystalline and crystalline Fe-(hydr)oxide phases. The MER Mössbauer spectrometers detected Fe-bearing olivine and pyroxene along with magnetite, nano-phase Fe-oxides (npOx), hematite, and ferric sulfate. The 2008 Phoenix Lander instrumentation measured a soil pH of 7.7 and detected ~0.6 wt.% perchlorate, 3-5 wt.% Ca-rich carbonate and carbon (500 gC/g) consistent with oxidized organics and Fe-rich carbonate. The 2012 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover (Gale Crater) through X-ray diffraction detected plagioclase feldspar, pyroxene, magnetite, hematite, anhydrite, and quartz, with the balance being composed of Si/Fe-containing amorphous (30 to 40 wt.%) material. MSL evolved gas analysis detected (per)chlorate (0.4 wt.% ClO4), nitrate (0.23 wt.%), along with minor Fe/Mg sulfate and oxidized organic C (~2000 gC/g). Limited pedogenesis may have occurred at the 2018 InSight landing site and in one Gusev Crater soil (MER-B) which have 3 to 10 cm-thick duricrust horizons consistent with atmospheric water vapor interactions with soil salts. Martian soil primary mineralogy was derived mostly from local rock (volcanic, sedimentary) that is largely basaltic planet wide. Secondary minerals [e.g., sulfate, chloride, perchlorate, nitrate, carbonate, Fe-(hydr)oxides] in martian soils formed from oxidative aqueous alteration processes and were likely derived from a combination of local sedimentary rock sources and the global bright dust. The Mars 2020 mission will collect soil for Earth return to enable a thorough assessment of the nature and origin of martian soil.
The Mars 2020 rover landed at Jezero crater on February 18, 2021 [1]. Since then, the rover has traveled around the “Séítah” region [2] and has collected data from the Mastcam-Z, Supercam, PIXL and SHERLOC instruments that has led to insights into the formation of the olivine-clay-carbonate bearing rocks that were identified from orbit [3,4]. Here we discuss three questions: 1) What have we learned about the olivine-claycarbonate unit? 2) What terrestrial analogs exist for the unit? 3) Why do the rocks have a thinly layered morphology? We shall briefly mention instrumental measurements which provide important information regarding the olivine bearing rock at Seitah. Note: Extended abstract included on attachment.
- The Tropospheric Doppler Radar Wind Profiler (TDRWP) is a wind measurement instrument at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, co-located on the United States Space Force’s (USSF) Eastern Range (ER) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCAFS), that generates atmospheric wind profiles which are utilized in the design, certification and operations of various launch vehicles - NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) - Commercial launch vehicles - NASA Crew-4 in April 2022 was first NASA crewed mission to use TDRWP - Composed of twenty antenna sectors and transmitter unit pairs which operate at 48 MHz - TDRWP data is required for day-of-launch structural margin and performance assessments
Highly stable frequency and timing standards are essential for deep-space missions and radio science. At the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN), these standards are distributed through a network of underground fiber cables to support several Goldstone antennas. Independently developed frequency-measuring instruments generate tremendous quantities of data to monitor and validate the antennas’ stringent frequency requirements. In this paper, we propose a lightweight processing tool capable of detecting disturbances on the frequency signal caused by DSN antenna motions. Our training data is sampled from the movement log of the antenna of interest and the generated data from the fiber optic metrology instrument linked to the antenna. We demonstrate that a convolutional neural network (CNN) model can achieve high accuracies on classifying instances of antenna movements and is an effective predictor when used iteratively on longer, variable stretches of metrology data. The simplicity, low training cost, and high accuracies of our model strongly suggest its efficacy in identifying and troubleshooting frequency disturbances caused by the antenna.
Spacecraft attitude determination and control is an important part of a spacecraft to achieve its designed mission. As of today, many spacecrafts have been successfully launched, and most of them have performed well as they were designed. Many research papers have been published to address the attitude determination and control design problems. Several text books are available for students to learn the technology and for engineers to use as references. The most popular spacecraft models for attitude determination algorithms and control design methods are the Euler angle models and the quaternion models . The Euler angle models have been proved very efficient as the linearized models are controllable, and all standard linear control system design methods are directly applicable. The drawbacks related to the Euler angle methods are (a) the designs based on linearized models may not globally stabilize the original nonlinear spacecraft, i.e., the design may not work when the attitude of the spacecraft is far away from the point where the linearization is performed; (b) the models depend on the rotational sequences, this can be error prone if several teams work on the same project and they use different rotational sequences; (c) for any rotational sequence, there is a singular point where the model is not applicable; and (d) since most attitude determination methods use quaternion to represent the spacecraft attitude, there is a need to transform quaternion into Euler angles. On the other hand, for quaternion models, people have found controllers that can globally stabilize nonlinear spacecraft systems; the models do not depend on rotational sequences and they have no singular point; and the quaternion is provided by attitude determination system and ready to use. The main problem with the quaternion model based control system design is that the linearized quaternion model is not controllable. Therefore, most published design methods heavily rely on Lyapunov functions for the nonlinear spacecraft system. But there is no systematic way to obtain a desired Lyapunov functions. Moreover, the Lyapunov function based designs focus on the closed-loop system stability but pay little attention to the closed-loop system performance. In a series of papers, the author proposed some reduced quaternion models which lead to some controllable linearized spacecraft models. Therefore, all standard linear system theory can be directly applied to analyze and design the spacecraft control systems. We showed that, in some cases, the designed control system is not only optimal for the linearized system, but also globally stabilize the original nonlinear system . Clearly, the reduced quaternion models do not depend on rotational sequences. Due to the special structure of the linearized spacecraft model, some most important design methods, such as LQR design and robust pole assignment design are very simple, enjoy the analytical solutions for some problems, have direct connection to the performance measures, such as settling time, rising time , and percentage of overshoot . All these features are attractive for high quality control system designs. The idea mentioned above is then extended to more spacecraft control problems using specific actuators such as magnetic torque bars and control momentum gyroscopes. These types of actuators may not provide exactly desired torques. Most existing methods use different conversions to get approximate solutions, meaning that these actuators may generate a torque close to but not equal to the desired one. Using the reduced quaternion models that incorporate the actuators into the system model, the control inputs are not torques but the operational parameters. The main benefit of this idea is that the control actions are not approximate but accurate. As all actuators have their operational limit, design with input constraints are also considered in this book by using recently developed interior-point optimization techniques. This book grows up from my research on the spacecraft attitude determination and control design methods in more than a decade which is focused on using reduced quaternion models because of their merits stated above. The book provides all necessary background materials on orbital dynamics, rotations and quaternion, frequently used reference frames, transformations between reference frames, space environment and disturbance torques, ephemeris astronomical vector calculations and measurement instruments, spacecraft control actuators and their models, so that the readers will get a global picture and can apply all these information into the spacecraft system modeling, attitude determination, and spacecraft control system designs, which is the main purpose of this book. This book is different from existing books in that we focus on quaternion based spacecraft control system designs and we consider only attitude control system design related problems, from spacecraft modeling, to attitude determination and estimation, to control system design method selection, to control algorithm development, and to the simulation of the control system designs. Moreover, this book addresses different attitude control tasks in the spacecraft life cycle, including spacecraft maneuver, orbit raising, attitude control, and rendezvous. Finally, this book emphasizes the state space design methods rather than the classical frequency design methods.
Landing on the Moon safely, softly, and precisely is still an extremely difficult task to achieve. Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL) was designed to provide a solution to spaceflight landing vehicles in achieving this task. NDL is a high-performance, compact, and cost-effective velocity and altitude measurement instrument that has been developed, tested and improved over many years. Testing has now culminated with NDL’s successful operation on two spaceflight vehicles this year: Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander and Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander. Odysseus became the first U.S. vehicle to land successfully on the Moon since Apollo 17. The performance data obtained by NDL during the Intuitive Machines mission is exceptional, and this mission fully demonstrated NDL’s ability to produce critical velocity and altitude data for future robotic and human exploration missions to the Moon and other planetary bodies. This paper will give an overview of NDL briefly describing its history, architecture, and theory of operation. NDL’s system checkout on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is then discussed followed by NDL’s performance during the Intuitive Machines Odysseus lunar lander mission. A description of how the data acquired by NDL is then used to perform trajectory reconstruction and animation is then provided. Finally, this paper concludes with potential uses of NDL’s acquired mission data to future applications.
Landing on the Moon safely, softly, and precisely is still an extremely difficult task to achieve. Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL) was designed to provide a solution to spaceflight landing vehicles in achieving this task. NDL is a high-performance, compact, and cost-effective velocity and altitude measurement instrument that has been developed, tested and improved over many years. Testing has now culminated with NDL’s successful operation on two spaceflight vehicles this year: Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander and Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander. Odysseus became the first U.S. vehicle to land successfully on the Moon since Apollo 17. The performance data obtained by NDL during the Intuitive Machines mission is exceptional, and this mission fully demonstrated NDL’s ability to produce critical velocity and altitude data for future robotic and human exploration missions to the Moon and other planetary bodies. This paper will give an overview of NDL briefly describing its history, architecture, and theory of operation. NDL’s system checkout on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is then discussed followed by NDL’s performance during the Intuitive Machines Odysseus lunar lander mission. A description of how the data acquired by NDL is then used to perform trajectory reconstruction and animation is then provided. Finally, this paper concludes with potential uses of NDL’s acquired mission data to future applications.
Capabilities of the INL Irradiation Facilities –Instrumentation focused view of INL capabilities
Recent developments in nuclear fuel reprocessing techniques have yielded more efficient processes and fuel cycle options that strengthen the nuclear industry and production of clean energy. One such area of interest is pyroprocessing of used oxide fuel. However, with these advances in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, advances in safeguards instrumentation, measurements, and approaches are needed to ensure special nuclear material (SNM) is accounted for according to regulatory requirements. As a high-level overview of a nominal pyroprocessing approach, used oxide fuel from commercial light water reactors (LWR) is mechanically removed from the metallic cladding. Then the fuel is crushed and randomized representative samples are taken and sent to an analytical lab for analysis. The analytical results of the feed material are used for input accountancy into the rest of the process. The crushed oxide fuel is then moved to the oxide reduction (OR) furnace where it is reduced from an oxide to metallic form. The OR product is distilled to remove salt and then moved to an electrorefiner (ER), where it is immersed in a eutectic mixture of lithium chloride potassium chloride (LiCl-KCl) that typically ranges between 450-550 ?. Within the ER, the usable uranium is electrochemically transported through the molten salt from the anode to the cathode, and then subsequently removed as a relatively pure U product.. A simplified model of pyroprocessing techniques with added emphasis on the safeguards can be seen below in Fig. 1
Array failure modes, relevant materials property changes, and primary degradation mechanisms are discussed as a prerequisite to identifying suitable measurement techniques and instruments. Candidate techniques and instruments are identified on the basis of extensive reviews of published and unpublished information. These methods are organized in six measurement categories - chemical, electrical, optical, thermal, mechanical, and other physicals. Using specified evaluation criteria, the most promising techniques and instruments for use in life prediction tests of arrays were selected.
Instrument for measuring magnetic permeability of materials undergoing heat treatment as method for monitoring stress relief and tempering is described. Procedure is based on magnetic potentiometer principle with yoke compensating coils to cancel effects of reluctance of yoke and joint gaps. Instrument is heated with specimen being heat treated.
We describe here a new instrument for the simultaneous, in situ measurement of the stratospheric tracer molecules, nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4). Argus is unique in its small size making it well suited for limited payload atmospheric research platforms. Argus employs second harmonic spectroscopy using tunable lead-salt diode lasers emitting in the mid-infrared. We first explain the Argus design philosophy followed by detailed descriptions of the instrument's optical, mechanical, and thermal sub-systems. Argus employs an in-flight calibration system providing real time calibrations and tightly constrained uncertainty estimates of the returned data. Data analysis is carried out using non-linear least-squares model fits to the acquired second harmonic spectra. A sampling of Argus data acquired on a recent stratospheric research campaign in the Arctic winter is presented.
The STRATCOM (STRATospheric COMposition) is a long term multipurpose program for integrated, correlated measurements of stratospheric parameters related to composition, thermodynamics, and radiative balance. Balloon 8-b, carrying a solar-pointing grating infrared spectrometer, two CO2 thermal emission radiometers and two in-situ air temperature sensors was launched at 1251 MST on 28 September 1977 to float at an altitude of 39 km from 1521 MST with the instruments making measurements at that altitude through the time of sunset at 1822 MST. Balloon 8-a lifted a payload consisting of four UV filter photometers, two UV spectrometers, two chemiluminescent ozonesondes, dasibi ozone monitor, 14 tube cryogenic sampler, two aluminum oxide H2O sensors, four air temperature sensors, atmospheric pressure sensor, infrared and visible pyranometers, downward-looking camera, blunt-kryton lamp-Gerdien condenser probe, three component anemometer, balloon apex-plate payload and three parachute-borne dropsondes.
Project Fire instrumentation for radiative heating measurements
This paper reports results of NASA's Chemical Instrumentation and Test Evaluation (CITE 3) during which airborne measurements for carbonyl sulfide (COS), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and carbon disulfide (CS2) were intercompared. Instrumentation included a gas chromatograph using flame photometric detection (COS, H2S, and CS2), a gas chromatograph using mass spectrometric detection (COS) and CS2), a gas chromatograph using fluorination and subsequent SF6 detection via electron capture (COS and CS2), and the Natusch technique (H2S). The measurements were made over the Atlantic Ocean east of North and South America during flights from NASA's Wallops Flight Center, Virginia, and Natal, Brazil, in August/September 1989. Most of the intercomparisons for H2S and CS2 were at mixing ratios less than 25 pptv and less than 10 pptv, respectively, with a maximum mixing ratio of about 100 pptv and 50 pptv, respectively. Carbonyl sulfide intercomparisons were at mixing ratios between 400 and 600 pptv. Measurements were intercompared from data bases constructed from time periods of simultaneous or overlapping measurements. Agreement among the COS techniques averaged about 5%, and individual measurements were generally within 10%. For H2S and at mixing ratio greater than 25 pptv, the instruments agreed on average to about 15%. At mixing ratios less than 25 pptv the agreement was about 5 pptv. For CS2 (mixing ratios less than 50 pptv), two techniques agreed on average to about 4 pptv, and the third exhibited a bias (relative to the other two) that varied in the range of 3-7 pptv. CS2 mixing ratios over the ocean east of Natal as measured by the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer technique were only a few pptv and were below the detection limits of the other two techniques. The CITE 3 data are used to estimate the current uncertainty associated with aircraft measurements of COS, H2S, and CS2 in the remote troposphere.
This paper reports results from NASA's Chemical Instrumentation and Test Evaluation (CITE 3) during which airborne measurements of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) from six instruments were intercompared. Represented by the six instruments are three fundamentally different detection principles (flame photometric, mass spectrometric, and electron capture after fluorination); three collection/preconcentration methods (cryogenic, gold wool absorption, and polymer absorbent); and three types of oxidant scrubbers (solid phase alkaline, aqueous reactor, and cotton). The measurements were made over the Atlantic Ocean in August/September 1989 during flights from NASA's Wallops Flight Center, Virginia, and Natal, Brazil. The majority of the intercomparisons are at DMS mixing ratios less than 50 pptv. Results show that instrument agreement is of the order of a few pptv for mixing ratios less than 50 pptv and to within about 15% above 50 pptv. Statistically significant (95% confidence) measurement biases were noted among some of the techniques. However, in all cases, any bias is small and within the accuracy of the measurements and prepared DMS standards. Thus, we conclude that the techniques intercompared during CITE 3 provide equally valid measurements of DMS in the range of a few pptv to 100 pptv (upper range of the intercomparisons).