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NASA NTRS1999

The Difficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in the Soviet Union

Perminov was the leading designer for Mars and Venus spacecraft at the Soviet Lavochkin design bureau in the early days of Martian exploration. In addition to competing with the U.S. to get to the Moon, the Soviets also struggled to beat the U.S. to Mars during the Cold War. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviets attempted to send a number of robotic probes to Mars, but for a variety of reasons, most of these missions ended in failure. Despite these overall failures, the Soviets garnered a great deal of scientific and technical knowledge through these efforts. This monograph tells some fascinating, but little-known, stories.

Perminov, V. G.↗

NASA NTRS1955

Fifty Years of Boundary-Layer Theory and Experiment

The year 1954 marked the 50th anniversary of the Prandtl boundary-layer theory from which we may date the beginning of man's understanding of the dynamics of real fluids. A backward look at this aspect of the history of the last 50 years may be instructive. This paper (1) attempts to compress the events of those 50 years into a few thousand words, to tell in this brief space the interesting story of the development of a new concept, its slow acceptance and growth, its spread from group to group within its country of origin, and its diffusion to other countries of the world. The original brief paper of Prandtl (2) was presented at the Third International Mathematical Congress at Heidelberg in 1904 and published in the following year. It was an attempt to explain the d'Alembert paradox, namely, that the neglect of the small friction of air in the theory resulted in the prediction of zero resistance to motion. Prandtl set himself the task of computing the motion of a fluid of small friction, so small that its effect could be neglected everywhere except where large velocity differences were present or a cumulative effect of friction occurred This led to the concept of boundary layer, or transition layer, near the wall of a body immersed in a fluid stream in which the velocity rises from zero to the free-stream value. It is interesting that Prandtl used the term Grenzsehicht (boundary layer) only once and the term Ubergangsschicht (transition layer) seven times in the brief article. Later writers also used Reibungsschicht (friction layer), but most writers today use Grenzschicht (boundary layer).

Dryden, Hugh L.↗

NASA NTRS1991

NASA Report to Education, Volume 9

This is an edition of 'NASA Report to Education' covering NASA's Educational Workshop, Lewis Research Center's T-34 and the Space Exploration Initiative. The first segment shows NASA Education Workshop program (NEWEST - NASA Educational Workshops for Elementary School Teachers). Highlights of the 14 days of intense training, lectures, fieldtrips and simple projects that the educators went through to teach the program are included. Participants are shown working on various projects such as the electromagnetic spectrum, living in Space Station Freedom, experience in T-34, tour of tower at the Federal Aviation Administrative Facilities, conducting an egg survival system and an interactive video conference with astronaut Story Musgrave. Participants share impressions of the workshop. The second segment tells how Lewis Research Center's T-34 aircraft is used to promote aerospace education in several Cleveland schools and excite students.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2001

ASK Magazine

Not everyone looks forward to reviews. Dog and pony shows I've heard them called. Exercises in putting together Power Point charts. Other less tasteful descriptions abound, but I won't bother to summarize these. This is a tasteful magazine after all. In this issue, we've assembled a number of articles on the subject of reviews, particularly as they occur in the NASA project world (although we cover the subject from other perspectives too). Veteran NASA Project Manager Marty Davis, in his article Tangled Up in Reviews, writes, "Many people regard reviews as something onerous, but if we can tailor them so that they're not as bad as they have to be, it can be a great benefit to a project manager." Great benefits to the project manager is what you'll find in Marty's story as he describes not only tailoring a single review but the entire lifecycle of reviews in his project. In Jo Gunderson's story, Calling Down the Fire on Yourself, she describes a young NASA Project Manager who does just that because, as he tells her, I needed to know if there was anything that I had overlooked." How he brings fire down on himself at his project review will inspire other young Project Managers, seasoned managers, and anyone else who reads this powerful story. Leave Your Ego at the Door, by Jenny Baer-Reidhart and Ray Morgan, uses reviews to highlight the creative collaboration that existed between NASA and one of its industry partners. The protagonist of this story is a company who took advantage of NASAs expert advice during reviews and accomplished amazing feats as a result. The story also examines how disasters might well have been avoided by two other NASA partners had they been as open-minded as the first company during their reviews. In Roy Malone's story, Standing Offer, a NASA Project Manager describes how he used a crack review team to help him pass a critical certification inspection while he was a Combat Systems Officer in the Navy. Malone invited the reviewers to come back several times so that they would be able to focus in detail on the many areas of the program that would be scrutinized during the certification inspection. These are just a sampling of some of the articles you'll find in this issue of ASK. We believe this issue offers ample evidence that talented Project Managers know how to use reviews to the great benefit of their projects. A talented Project Manager will typically figure out a way to turn any onerous task into a useful learning exercise. These Project Managers demonstrate that the real value of reviews is that they provide a chance to learn something. No dog and pony shows here.

Laufer, Alexander↗

NASA NTRS2001

Academy Sharing Knowledge (ASK). The NASA Source for Project Management Magazine

How big is your project world? Is it big enough to contain other cultures, headquarters, hierarchies, and weird harpoon-like guns? Sure it is. The great American poet Walt Whitman said it best, 'I am large/I contain multitudes.' And so must you, Mr. and Ms. Project Manager. In this issue of ASK, we look outside the project box. See how several talented project managers have expanded their definition of project scope to include managing environments outside the systems and subsystems under their care. Here's a sampling of what we've put together for you this issue: In 'Three Screws Missing,' Mike Skidmore tells about his adventures at the Plesetek Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Ray Morgan in his story, 'Our Man in Kauai,' suggests we take a broader view of what's meant by 'the team.' Jenny Baer-Riedhart, the NASA program manager on the same Pathfinder solar-powered airplane, schools us in how to sell a program to Headquarters in 'Know Thyself--But Don't Forget to Learn About the Customer Too.' Scott Cameron of Proctor and Gamble talks about sharpening your hierarchical IQ in 'The Project Manager and the Hour Glass.' Mike Jansen in 'The Lawn Dart' describes how he and the 'voodoo crew' on the Space Shuttle Advanced Solid Rocket Motor program borrowed a harpoon-like gun from the Coast Guard to catch particles inside of a plume. These are just some of the stories you'll find in ASK this issue. We hope they cause you to stop and reflect on your own project's relationship to the world outside. We are also launching a new section this issue, 'There are No Mistakes, Only Lessons.' No stranger to ASK readers, Terry Little inaugurates this new section with his article 'The Don Quixote Complex.'

Post, Todd↗

DOE OSTI2022

What can surface wind observations tell us about interannual variation in wind energy output?

The past decade of wind power growth was supported by capacity factor improvements and associated cost reductions. But are higher capacity factors a technology success story or, as suggested by recent research, has the influence of technology been overstated by ignoring positive surface wind speed trends? The answer could influence estimates of wind energy's cost and even future deployment rates. We find that US surface wind speed observations imply a 2.6% improvement in capacity factors from 2010 to 2019. Yet newer vintages of wind plants have recorded capacity factors that are ~25% larger than plants built close to 2010. It follows that technological factors and improved site quality, not higher wind speeds, drove most of the improvement in capacity factors. Additionally, we match hundreds of meteorological stations to nearby (< 25 km) wind plants and compare annual estimated generation, based on a function of surface wind speed observations, to annual recorded generation. Researchers rely on this publicly available surface data because measurements co-located with wind plants are generally considered proprietary. Our analysis addresses a research gap: interannual variation in observed surface wind speeds is rarely compared to observed data at wind plant locations and turbine heights. We find that despite its common use for this purpose, generation estimates based on publicly available surface observational data provide a poor proxy for interannual variability in recorded wind generation. These findings suggest that caution is generally needed when researchers use surface wind speed measurements to investigate long-term wind energy trends.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

NASA NTRS2008

Read You Loud and Clear! The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network

A historical account is provided of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network (STDN), starting with its formation in the late 1950s to what it is today in the first decade of the 21st century. It traces the roots of the tracking network from its beginnings at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System space-based constellation of today. The story spans the early days of satellite tracking using the Minitrack Network, through the expansion of the Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network and the Manned Space Flight Network, and finally, to the Space and Ground networks of today. These accounts tell how international goodwill and foreign cooperation were crucial to the operation of the network and why the space agency chose to build the STDN as it did.

Tsiao, Sunny↗

NASA NTRS1981

Red star in orbit

Since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, the extent and direction of the Soviet space effort have remained unclear. The present book penetrates the secrecy-shrouded Soviet space program, telling not only of its unpublicized disasters, but giving credit to its recent successes as well. The book discusses Khrushchev's sponsorship of early space successes as political surprises, and the incident in October 1960, when forty rocket engineers died in a launch-pad disaster. The life story of Sergei Korolev, the chief designer, is discussed, as well as the 'race to the moon' in the late 1960s. The Apollo-Soyuz expedition and other more recent space-station missions are presented.

Oberg, J. E.↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Polarization Difference - The Scientific Story Behind One Variable and Its Practical Applications

Cloud ice and snow microphysical characteristics play an important role in determining cloud radiative effect. They are also closely connected to the details of surface precipitation characteristics. Ice orientation is one microphysical property that is traditionally believed to have trivial impact on the weather systems/climate, and it is hard to measure from space. In this presentation, I will show how many scientific stories can be told from one variable – the brightness temperature difference between vertically-polarized and horizontally-polarized 166 GHz measurements from the Global Precipitation Measurement Microwave Imager (GPM-GMI). Through scrutinizing collocated CloudSat, GMI and GPM radar observations together with the aid of radiative transfer model simulations, we can not only tell apart the particle size, shape and orientation, but also understand the precipitation regime as well as the life stage of a a precipitation system. In the second half of my talk, I will showcase how this variable can be used for predicting precipitation flags and separating mixed-phase cloud from liquid and ice with the powerful machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) technique.

cloud ice and snow microphysical characteristics↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

It’s Only a Paper Moon

One cool October morning in Cleveland I was presented with an interesting opportunity: a call for proposals for commercial lunar payloads was out, the response time frame was rapid, and the solicitation desired hardware that was nearly complete. I took the afternoon off, went for a long hike in a local park and developed an idea, later to be known as the Photovoltaic Investigation on the Lunar Surface (PILS). I will recount the story of how a handful of photovoltaics researchers developed lunar hardware to probe the interaction of solar arrays and the lunar plasma environment, and what this project means for NASA, going forward. My goal is to convey the message that the paperwork was as challenging as the research and development, but made me a better scientist. In this telling I will also present the fundamental physics of plasma interaction science, future directions in our research and also motivate why thin film solar cells may end up being the future of space power – if we can make them somewhere else.

Timothy Peshek↗

NASA NTRS1997

Efficacy of Code Optimization on Cache-based Processors

The current common wisdom in the U.S. is that the powerful, cost-effective supercomputers of tomorrow will be based on commodity (RISC) micro-processors with cache memories. Already, most distributed systems in the world use such hardware as building blocks. This shift away from vector supercomputers and towards cache-based systems has brought about a change in programming paradigm, even when ignoring issues of parallelism. Vector machines require inner-loop independence and regular, non-pathological memory strides (usually this means: non-power-of-two strides) to allow efficient vectorization of array operations. Cache-based systems require spatial and temporal locality of data, so that data once read from main memory and stored in high-speed cache memory is used optimally before being written back to main memory. This means that the most cache-friendly array operations are those that feature zero or unit stride, so that each unit of data read from main memory (a cache line) contains information for the next iteration in the loop. Moreover, loops ought to be 'fat', meaning that as many operations as possible are performed on cache data-provided instruction caches do not overflow and enough registers are available. If unit stride is not possible, for example because of some data dependency, then care must be taken to avoid pathological strides, just ads on vector computers. For cache-based systems the issues are more complex, due to the effects of associativity and of non-unit block (cache line) size. But there is more to the story. Most modern micro-processors are superscalar, which means that they can issue several (arithmetic) instructions per clock cycle, provided that there are enough independent instructions in the loop body. This is another argument for providing fat loop bodies. With these restrictions, it appears fairly straightforward to produce code that will run efficiently on any cache-based system. It can be argued that although some of the important computational algorithms employed at NASA Ames require different programming styles on vector machines and cache-based machines, respectively, neither architecture class appeared to be favored by particular algorithms in principle. Practice tells us that the situation is more complicated. This report presents observations and some analysis of performance tuning for cache-based systems. We point out several counterintuitive results that serve as a cautionary reminder that memory accesses are not the only factors that determine performance, and that within the class of cache-based systems, significant differences exist.

VanderWijngaart, Rob F.↗

NASA NTRS2005

Comet Dust: The Story of Planet Formation as Told by the Tiniest of Particles

Our planetary system formed out of a gas-rich disk-shaped nebula with the early Sun at its center. Many small icy bodies were consumed by the formation of the giant planets. However, many km-size icy bodies were tossed out of the giant-planet region to the cold, distant reaches of our solar system. Comets remained in their places of cold storage until perturbed into orbits that carry them into the inner solar system where they pass relatively close to the Sun. Comets are warmed by the Sun and shed material from their outer layers. The ices and gases shed by comets reveal simple and complex organic molecules were present at the time and in the region of the formation of the giant planets. Where the Earth was forming was too hot and had too intense sunlight for many of these ices and molecules to survive. The dust shed by comets tells us that some stardust survived unaltered but much of the dust was heated and crystallized before becoming part of the comet. Therefore, comet dust grains tell of large radial migrations from the cold outer reaches near Neptune into the hot regions near the forming Sun, and then back out to the cold regions where icy comets were accreting and forming. On 2005 July 4, the NASA Deep Impact Mission hit a comet and ejected primitive materials fiom its interior. These materials were not released into the comet s coma during normal activity. Despite the many passages of this comet close to the Sun, these primitive volatile gases and dust grains survived in its interior. Comet dust grains show that cold and hot materials were mixed into the same tiny particle very early in the formation of the solar system, and these aggregate dust grains never saw high temperatures again. The survival of primitive materials in comet nuclei suggests comets could have delivered organic molecules and primitive dust grains to early Earth.

Wooden, D. H.↗

NASA NTRS2002

Keeping the Deal

On the 4th of July 1997, I lay on a blanket with my family at a fireworks display near our home in Los Angeles, California. The pyrotechnics, they tell me, were dazzling. I wouldn't know. My attention was fixed on a tiny orange dot in the sky - Mars. A month earlier, NASA had released an Announcement of Opportunity for a supplementary payload on the Mars Surveyor Lander mission scheduled for launch in 2001. The Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS) organization had been authorized to make the most preliminary of investigations into the feasibility of sending humans to Mars. Among the requested investigations was an opportunity to study the dust and soil of the Red Planet, emphasizing possible hazards to human explorers. I spent that summer of '97 working on a proposal for the project I would eventually lead, the Mars Environmental Compatibility Assessment (MECA). MECA was selected in February of '98. We promised to deliver four new instruments by April 2000 with a modest budget of $5M. This is a story about some of the people who created MECA.

Hecht, Michael↗

NASA NTRS2004

From Runway to Orbit: Reflections of a NASA Engineer

In his remarkable memoir Runway to Orbit, Dr. Kenneth W. Iliff - the recently retired Chief Scientist of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center- tells a highly personal, yet a highly persuasive account of the last forty years of American aeronautical research. His interpretation of events commands respect, because over these years he has played pivotal roles in many of the most important American aeronautics and spaceflight endeavors. Moreover, his narrative covers much of the second half of the first 100 years of flight, a centennial anniversary being celebrated this year. aerospace knowledge. He arrived at the then NASA Flight Research Center in 1962 as a young aeronautical engineer and quickly became involved in two of the seminal projects of modern flight, the X-15 and the lifting bodies. In the process, he pioneered (with Lawrence Taylor) the application of digital computing to the reduction of flight data, arriving at a method known as parameter estimation, now applied the world over. Parameter estimation not only enabled researchers to acquire stability and control derivatives from limited flight data, but in time allowed them to obtain a wide range of aerodynamic effects. Although subsequently involved in dozens of important projects, Dr. Iliff devoted much of his time and energy to hypersonic flight, embodied in the Shuttle orbiter (or as he refers to it, the world s fastest airplane). To him, each Shuttle flight, instrumented to obtain a variety of data, represents a research treasure trove, one that he has mined for years. This book, then, represents the story of Dr. Ken Iliff s passion for flight, his work, and his long and astoundingly productive career. It can be read with profit not just by scientists and engineers, but equally by policy makers, historians, and journalists wishing to better comprehend advancements in flight during the second half of the twentieth century. Dr. Iliff's story is one of immense contributions to the nation s repository of

Iliff, Kenneth W.↗