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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 883 records · Page 49

System Engineering a Solar Thermal Propulsion Mission Concept for Rapid Interstellar Medium Access

The interstellar medium (ISM) represents the next frontier in space exploration, with many new discoveries to be made. The challenge, being so far away from Earth, the ISM requires many decades to reach. To advance our knowledge of what exists beyond our Solar System, new approaches for rapid access are required. One such approach is solar thermal propulsion (STP). The approach uses several Venus and Earth gravity assists to fly to Jupiter and use its gravity well to dive towards the Sun. Approaching within 3 solar radii a perihelion burn would be performed, maximizing the spacecraft’s ΔV to achieve high Solar System escape velocities. A unique aspect of the STP mission concept is that the Sun is not only used as a gravity well for an Oberth manoeuvre, but also to heat the fuel to ultra-high-temperatures (>3000 K), enabling a monopropellant burn with high specific impulse (Isp). Prior preliminary studies indicated escape velocities of over 20 astronomical unit (AU)/yr would be possible. An in-depth modelling exercise was undertaken to determine how such a system would perform. The model in this paper showed the current STP design is capable of providing just under 9±1 AU/yr, but there are many technology developments that could increase escape velocity. The technologies vary from items that could be implemented in the near term, like turbo-pumps driven by the hydrogen, to items requiring more extensive development programs like thin coatings which do not erode in superheated hydrogen. After reviewing the STP approach, and comparing it to a solid rocket motor (SRM), it was found that with currently available technology, SRM outperforms STP with an escape velocity of approximately 10-12 AU/yr. However, future advances in heat exchanger lining materials, turbo pumps, and advanced heat exchanger geometries may enable solar thermal propulsion to provide higher escape velocities, providing one of the fastest ways to exit the solar system. Ultimately, if all technology paths could be implemented with minimal side effects, the performance in a best-case scenario could reach up to 16 AU/yr.

Alkalai, Leon↗

Low Cost Access to Mars Surface using a Small Impact Lander

In order to reduce the cost of landing small payloads on Mars, a new technology is being developed: the Small High Impact Energy Landing Device concept (SHIELD). The purpose of SHIELD is to provide a low-cost option to deliver up to 6 kg of science payload to the surface of Mars. SHIELD could be launched as a hosted payload, rideshare on an EELV secondary payload adapter (ESPA), or launching from a dedicated small launch vehicle using a kick stage. The SHIELD concept can achieve low-cost access to Mars by taking advantage of a low ballistic coefficient design to decelerate safely instead of using the typically required parachutes and/or propulsion to decelerate and stabilize itself during entry, decent, and landing (EDL). Current finite element simulations suggest that SHIELD would experience an impact acceleration pulse ranging from 1000 to 2000 g’s with a duration of 8 milliseconds. The SHIELD concept payload subsystem includes a “ruggedized” small warm electronics box (WEB). The WEB houses the telecommunications, command and data handling, thermal control, electrical power, and payload subsystems while maintaining an internal operating temperature ranging between -20° to 20° C. The system is designed to survive the Martian night by utilizing electric heaters powered with solar cells during the day and secondary batteries. The WEB is designed to be impact resistant capable of surviving an impact acceleration pulse equal to or less than 2000 g’s.

Woolley, Ryan↗

MIKA: Manager for Intelligent Knowledge Access Toolkit for Engineering Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval

Repositories of safety reports are often underutilized and only analyzed manually by trained experts, despite safety management systems requiring reports. These collections of documents contain a wealth of information from past projects and operations that could improve system safety and design. Advances in natural language processing techniques have improved information extraction and retrieval in consumer technology, biomedicine, and finance, for instance, but have not been applied to engineering documents on the same scale. To this end, the Manager for Intelligent Knowledge Access (MIKA) open-source toolkit has been developed for rapid knowledge discovery and information retrieval in safety engineering applications. The MIKA toolkit uses state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms and allows a user to apply these methods to their own dataset. This paper describes the MIKA toolkit and its two primary capabilities, knowledge discovery and information retrieval, and demonstrates the toolkit via a case study on National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports.

Machine Learning↗

An Overview of NASA’s Catalog of Archived Suborbital Earth Science Investigations (CASEI): Supporting FAIR and Open Access to Airborne and Field Data

Since 2019, NASA’s Airborne Data Management Group (ADMG) within the Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) has worked to promote and ensure the discoverability and accessibility of the agency’s non-satellite Earth science observations. A primary component of this effort is the development of NASA’s Catalog of Archived Suborbital Earth Science Investigations (CASEI) and the vetting of key contextual details required to sustain this unique inventory of airborne and field metadata. CASEI provides information on the science objectives motivating data collection, key events/time periods in the observational record aligned with the science objectives, complementary simultaneous observations, programmatic details, and much more. The diverse set of data formats and disciplines served by CASEI have required the implementation of a common data model to organize suborbital observation metadata and efficiently connect appropriate campaigns, platforms, and instruments. The CASEI inventory provides a single entry point for users to search and browse NASA’s airborne and field data archives, regardless of which repository is responsible for their stewardship. This presentation will provide a summary of the motivations for and the development of the CASEI system. Particular attention will be granted to how CASEI facilitates discovery and reuse of these lesser-known NASA data, supporting the Open Science vision and enhancing the return on investments made to collect these unique and varied observations. An up-to-date summary of CASEI inventory content and initial metrics will be provided. Current and future avenues ADMG is pursuing to enhance both CASEI and specific components of suborbital data stewardship at various stages of the data life cycle will also be discussed.

Stephanie M. Wingo↗

MIKA: Manager for Intelligent Knowledge Access Toolkit for Engineering Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval

Repositories of safety reports are often underutilized and only analyzed manually by trained experts, despite safety management systems requiring reports. These collections of documents contain a wealth of information from past projects and operations that could improve system safety and design. Advances in natural language processing techniques have improved information extraction and retrieval in consumer technology, biomedicine, and finance, for instance, but have not been applied to engineering documents on the same scale. To this end, the Manager for Intelligent Knowledge Access (MIKA) open-source toolkit has been developed for rapid knowledge discovery and information retrieval in safety engineering applications. The MIKA toolkit uses state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms and allows a user to apply these methods to their own dataset. This paper describes the MIKA toolkit and its two primary capabilities, knowledge discovery and information retrieval, and demonstrates the toolkit via a case study on National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports.

Systems Engineering↗

NASA’s Data Preservation Strategies for Ensuring Ongoing Use and Access: Leveraging the Capabilities at the NASA DAACs

As NASA prepares for the follow on to EOS through the deployment of many new space and airborne-based assets envisioned under the ESO initiative, the need for ensuring user access to the very large and diverse archive of past missions remains a critical endeavor for current and future research. The ESDIS team has been working for many years on developing strategies and implementations that will make the linkage between the data held in our archives and the emerging missions possible. The focus on how best to preserve these past data has proven to be a collaborative effort, and one that may well benefit from the adoption of innovative technical tools that enable organizational efficiencies. This poster reveals both aspects of NASA’s EOS data repository strategy by discussing the collaborative community efforts of development of ISO 19165-2 – an international standard supported by a team from many countries around the world, the use by EOSDIS DAACs of a Preservation Content Specification, and ongoing work with mission teams to ensure mission data and all associated information are preserved and available for current and future use.

Francis Lindsay↗

Using OPeNDAP In The Cloud to Connect NASA Data Centers and Support Open Data Access

NASA DAACs (Distributed Active Archive Centers), including the Goddard Earth Sciences Data Information and Services Center (GES DISC), are currently transitioning from on-premises servers to a shared Earthdata Cloud in order to build more interoperability, cross-collaboration, and streamlined services between their data centers. Migrating its on-premises OPeNDAP service to the cloud is a critical component of making this interconnectedness between NASA DAACs possible. To improve their cloud services, GES DISC is leveraging open-source platforms like Github to collect user feedback, create use cases, and develop resources to enable real-time learning for users about OPeNDAP in the cloud. This presentation gives an overview of the OPeNDAP in the cloud, resources developed to access this service, and considerations for improved user guidance and experience to further support NASA's commitment to the Open-Source Science Initiative (OSSI).

Christopher Battisto↗

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Initiatives on the Mars 2020 Science Team and Implications for NASA Planetary Science Missions

For the first time, the most recent NASA Decadal Survey for Planetary Science and Astrobiology includes an entire chapter devoted to the state of the profession[1]. Understanding that people are NASA’s greatest resource, it specifically looked into is-sues of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) to make recommendations for recruiting and retaining the best talent. It calls on both NASA leadership and the NASA community to engage with these recommendations to advance the state of the profession.

DEIA↗

Why We Do What We Do: Data Reuse, Open Access, and Privacy in Data Management at the Life Sciences Data Archive

As custodian of the unique and irreplaceable collections of human subject research data generated by the Human Research Program and its predecessors throughout the agency’s history, the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA) is charged with protecting participants’ privacy and implementing their consent decisions as it provides retrospective data for use in new studies. This active, stewardship-focused approach to data management and preservation shapes the products that LSDA provides to researchers and the responsibilities of researchers in using the data and publishing their results. This presentation reviews how federal and agency mandates shape LSDA’s data management procedures and expectations for researchers. Topics covered will include LSDA’s movement towards implementation of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and how the archive’s evolving data management practices support FAIR-ness; collaboration between LSDA and the Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health (LSAH) project (the repository of astronaut medical data); LSDA’s response to the challenges of performing its stewardship role and maintaining trust given the public profiles of the subjects whose data it preserves; and the ever-increasing challenges to expectations of subject privacy stemming from the growing power and ubiquity of of data analysis and aggregation tools.

Data↗

Making Heliophysics Research More Open and Accessible at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC)

The Space Weather and Heliophysics modeling community seeks to improve our understanding of space weather events and their impact on human activities. The Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s (CCMC, https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov) mission is to support the community by providing a convenient collaborative platform that brings together space weather models, model simulation data, curated datasets of solar events, and associated value-added services. Using these services, researchers and other end-users may exercise, evaluate, and intercompare contributed models, triage designated R2O models, as well as collaborate on a continuously updated archive of model run results. This presentation reports on CCMC’s ongoing efforts in making Heliophysics models and data more accessible, open, and reproducible. We will also explore interoperability within the ecosystem of CCMC services and how this ecosystem interoperates with external partner services and data streams.

space weather↗

Enabling API Access to the Space Weather Services at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center

Over the span of 20 years, the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC, https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov) has been leading a number of community-driven services and applications that provide a free and open access to the cutting-edge space weather and Heliophysics models through a simple web-based interface. CCMC also oversees an open archive of user model simulations and related metadata, maintains space weather-related data streams, curates validation and event datasets, and more. To maximize utility of its complementary services and data holdings, CCMC has been gradually building up an ad-hoc set of interfaces and specifications that facilitate coupling and interconnection within the organization, while also simplifying management and monitoring of the data. As the models continue to grow in maturity and complexity, CCMC is looking to reduce the complexity for its end users by making public some of the internal APIs as well as implementing dedicated interfaces as required by the community. In this presentation, we will overview the current run services at CCMC and will describe our current and near-future efforts in providing interfaces to these services.

space weather↗

Why We Do What We Do: Data Reuse, Open Access and Privacy in Data Management at the Life Sciences Data Archive

As custodians of the unique and irreplaceable collections of human subject research data generated by the Human Research Program and its predecessors throughout the agency’s history, the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA) is charged with protecting participants’ privacy and implementing their consent decisions as it provides retrospective data for use in new studies. This active, stewardship-focused approach to data management and preservation shapes the products that LSDA provides to researchers and the responsibilities of researchers in using the data and publishing their results. This presentation reviews how federal and agency mandates shape LSDA’s data management procedures and expectations for researchers. Topics covered will include LSDA’s movement towards implementation of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and the archive’s evolving data management practices; collaboration between LSDA and the Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health (LSAH) project (the repository of astronaut medical data); LSDA’s response to the challenges of performing its stewardship role and maintaining trust given the public profiles of the subjects whose data it preserves; and the ever-increasing challenges to expectations of subject privacy stemming from the growing power and ubiquity of data analysis and aggregation tools.

data management↗

Governing Data Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR) Compliance

The most recent data strategy documents at both the federal and NASA levels stipulate that systems should strive for the data they manage to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). The NASA Life Sciences Portal (NLSP) has already begun leading efforts in this area for HRP, initiating efforts to comply with the FAIR principles. The broad interpretation of the FAIR principles has led to a plethora of tools that use a splay of metrics specifically but variably developed to judge how compliant data and systems are with the principles. A recent review [3] identified and studied 1,180 metrics across 20 publicly available tools for checking FAIR compliance of data and systems. Because of their very recent development, many organizations and data systems managers and developers have not yet had adequate time or resources to understand these FAIR compliance tools and metrics, their variations in design, accuracy or ease of application to their specific data sets and systems. Thus, it would be best for larger organizations like NASA to approach formulating a strategy for governance of FAIR compliance that can be flexibly applied and is adaptable to an evolving awareness knowledge of FAIR compliance methods and tools. In September 2024, the NASA Science Mission Directorate(SMD) organized a workshop on NASA science data repositories, including the topics of implementing FAIR and governing FAIR compliance across SMD. The initial part of these FAIR discussions focused on developing consensus around required science metadata fields. This is challenging given the diverse nature of NASA’s scientific data portfolio, the variety of metadata models and vocabularies used, and variable level of resources available to curate these data. Later discussion focused on three possible approaches to governing FAIR compliance: distributed, in which various programs, projects or systems define their own methods for assessing FAIR compliance, reporting results up appropriate management lines; centralized, in which higher-level organization(s) specify compliance tools or methods for the various data systems; and multi-level, in which a group comprised of individuals with expertise from multiple levels with organizations is formed to provide guidance and/or specifications for governing FAIR compliance. We report on the recommendations this session yielded, and how these might be shaped specifically to help implement and govern the compliance with FAIR of Human Research Program data and systems.

governance↗

Memory access system

A method and system for accessing a memory for a data processing system. The method comprises sending a read request for a plurality of locations in the memory to read the plurality of locations in parallel based on an upper bound for reading the memory. The upper bound for a number of locations is based on a group of constraints for the memory. The method receives a summed value of a plurality of memory values in the plurality of locations in the memory.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Improved Access and Analysis of Data Provides New Opportunities for Smart Cities

Making smart, informed, data-driven energy decisions for cities requires large amounts of high-value data and analysis. Cities’ energy data has traditionally been difficult to access and costly to store and manage for city administrators. When data is available, many cities lack the expertise to properly analyze and model large data sets. NREL’s transparency and knowledge about data availability, integration, and interpretation is critical to decision-making for cities.

cities' data↗