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At least 91 records · Page 5
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2018

Development of the Multi-Purpose Transportation System for the Space Launch System (SLS) Core Stage (CS) Flight Article

NASA's Multi-Purpose Transportation System (MPTS) is designed to transport the Space Launch System (SLS) vehicle segments by waterway and roadway. It is tasked with transporting the vehicle from where it is manufactured to its intermediate test location and final launch destination. Its design incorporates mechanisms that release degrees of freedom to prevent excessive loading during transit and ensure a successful delivery of the vehicle to its intended destination. In addition to the Core Stage (CS) flight article, the system will also move three Structural Test Articles (STAs), the Dynamic Demonstration Unit (DDU), and a simulated CS Pathfinder (weight, center of gravity, outer mold line dimensions, and overall length) over road terrain at four NASA centers and on the Pegasus barge. The MPTS independently supports the article at both ends while operating as a combined unit through automated monitoring of its released degree of freedom and corrective responses. This allows the system to constrain its payload in a statically determinate manner while traversing highly variable terrain. Multi-body simulation of the transportation route is useful to predict free-body motion within its range of mobility. The MPTS has completed its design and analysis developmental cycles. This paper describes the design challenges encountered in developing this system of large-scale structure, which incorporates complex mechanisms. The unique techniques and methodologies developed for analytical assessment of the hardware are also discussed.

Sandridge, Sarah↗
NASA NTRS2018

Development of the Multi Purpose Transportation System for the Space Launch System (SLS) Core Stage (CS) Flight Article

NASA’s Multi Purpose Transportation System (MPTS) is designed to transport the Space Launch System vehicle segments by waterway and roadway. It is tasked with transporting the vehicle from where it is manufactured to its intermediate test location and final launch destination. Its design incorporates mechanisms that release degrees of freedom to prevent excessive loading during transit and ensure a successful delivery of the vehicle to its intended destination. In addition to the CS (Core Stage) flight article, the system will also move three structural test articles and a simulated CS Pathfinder (weight, center of gravity, outer mold line dimensions, and overall length) over road terrain on four NASA centers and on the Pegasus barge. The MPTS independently supports the article at both ends while communicating as a combined unit through automated monitoring of its released degree of freedom and corrective responses. This allows the system to constrain its payload in a statically determinate manner while traversing across highly variable terrain. Multi-body simulation of the transportation route is useful to predict free-body motion within the specified travel ranges. The MPTS has completed its design and analysis developmental cycles. This unpublished paper will describe the design challenges encountered in developing this system of large scale structure which incorporates complex mechanisms. The unique techniques and methodologies developed for analytical assessment of the hardware will be also be discussed. Key results from analytical evaluations as well as ongoing performance testing will be presented.

Sandridge, Sarah↗
NASA NTRS1991

Fusion of monocular cues to detect man-made structures in aerial imagery

The extraction of buildings from aerial imagery is a complex problem for automated computer vision. It requires locating regions in a scene that possess properties distinguishing them as man-made objects as opposed to naturally occurring terrain features. It is reasonable to assume that no single detection method can correctly delineate or verify buildings in every scene. A cooperative-methods paradigm is useful in approaching the building extraction problem. Using this paradigm, each extraction technique provides information which can be added or assimilated into an overall interpretation of the scene. Thus, the main objective is to explore the development of computer vision system that integrates the results of various scene analysis techniques into an accurate and robust interpretation of the underlying three dimensional scene. The problem of building hypothesis fusion in aerial imagery is discussed. Building extraction techniques are briefly surveyed, including four building extraction, verification, and clustering systems. A method for fusing the symbolic data generated by these systems is described, and applied to monocular image and stereo image data sets. Evaluation methods for the fusion results are described, and the fusion results are analyzed using these methods.

Shufelt, Jefferey↗
NASA NTRS2018

Traction Control Design and Integration Onboard the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover experienced increasing wheel damage beginning in October 2013. While the wheels were designed to operate with considerable damage, the rate at which damage was occurring was unexpected and raised concerns regarding wheel lifetime. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has now developed and deployed new software on Curiosity that reduces the forces acting on the wheels. Our new Traction Control algorithm adapts each wheel’s speed to fit the terrain it drives over. It does not rely on any a priori knowledge of the terrain, and instead leverages the rover’s measured attitude rates and suspension angles, together with a rigid-body kinematics model, to estimate the real-time wheel-terrain contact angles and ideal, no-slip wheel angular rates. In addition, free-floating “wheelies” are detected and autonomously corrected. In this paper, we describe the algorithm, its ground testing campaign and associated challenges, and finally its validation and performance in flight. Ground test data demonstrates reductions in the forces acting on the wheels and validates the wheelie-damping capability. Secondary benefits in some terrains include a reduction in heading deviations while climbing rocks, with a reduction in slip in certain sandy terrains. Preliminary validation from flight data confirms these findings.

Maimone, Mark↗
NASA NTRS1994

Cueing light configuration for aircraft navigation

A pattern of light is projected from multiple sources located on an aircraft to form two clusters. The pattern of each cluster changes as the aircraft flies above and below a predetermined nominal altitude. The initial patterns are two horizontal, spaced apart lines. Each is capable of changing to a delta formation as either the altitude or the terrain varies. The direction of the delta cues the pilot as to the direction of corrective action.

Kaiser, Mary K.↗
NASA NTRS2020

In Silico Methods for Space System Analysis: Optical Link Coding Performance and Lunar Terrain Masks

As deep space links migrate toward higher frequency bands like 𝐾𝑎 and optical, thor- ough trade-space exploration becomes increasingly valuable for designing reliable and efficient communications systems. In this contribution, we leveraged high-performance, concurrent simulations when the run-time complexity of simulation software overwhelms capabilities of ordinary desktop machines. The first part of this manuscript describes how to run error correcting code simulations concurrently on a high-performance supercomputer. The second part of this study describes a framework to produce azimuth and elevation terrain masks from imagery of the Lunar South Pole.

Michels, Dominik L↗
NASA NTRS1987

Sub-kilometer rampart craters in the equatorial region of Mars: Possible implications for the state and distribution of regolith H2O

It was long suspected that Martian rampart crater ejecta morphology originates from an impact into a water or ice-rich crust. If the water-impact hypothesis is correct, then the occurrence of rampart craters at all latitudes, elevations, and in all types of terrain, implies that the distribution of regolith H2O on Mars is global. To test this hypothesis, the occurrence of rampart craters was examined at three locations within the latitude band of + or - 30 degrees (specifically, within the ridged plains unit covered by MC-18). The analysis indicates that while few in number, rampart craters with diameters smaller than 3 km are indeed present at several locations withing the equatorial region of Mars. This finding appears to have significant implications for the inferred state and distribution of subsurface H2O. A more comprehensive analysis of the occurrence of sub-kilometer rampart craters is currently underway.

Clifford, Stephen M.↗
DOE OSTI2023

COMBLE Radar b1 Processing: Corrections, Calibrations, and Processing Report

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility recently concluded its Cold-Air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment (COMBLE), with its campaign emphasis on marine boundary-layer clouds and mixed-phase clouds during cold-air outbreaks. The COMBLE campaign featured the deployment of the first ARM Mobile Facility (AMF1) to northern Scandinavia (Andenes, Norway), including its standard complement of ARM cloud radars. In keeping with user demands stemming from the previous AMF Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign in Argentina, a post-campaign radar mentor effort was initiated for COMBLE. This activity was intended to improve the usability of the ARM cloud radar data sets in response to overall demands for calibrated, corrected data sets for downstream studies and retrieval applications. In addition to the terrain complexities previously important to CACTI data sets (e.g., clutter designation and/or removal), COMBLE presented new challenges to existing ARM radar mentor capabilities. These included the extension of existing methodologies (e.g., relative calibration adjustment [RCA] target techniques) to frozen environments and the potential issues with their applicability when considering mixed-phase precipitation conditions. As in the previous CACTI documentation (Hardin et al. 2020), the overall calibration and conditioning process in ARM nomenclature is referred to as generating a “b1” datastream. For the radars, these “b1” standards refer to a datastream that has been calibrated (and cross-calibrated), with effort to deliver the highest-quality (well-characterized) data possible. The “b1” radar mentor reporting (this current document) is intended to detail (i) the status/quality of the original “a1” (raw) data sets during the COMBLE AMF campaign, (ii) the corrections and calibrations that are applied to generate the b1 datastreams available on ARM’s Data Discovery, and (iii) the details of the applied methods, e.g., how radar offset/calibration numbers were determined.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1985

Correction and Geological Analysis of Lunar 3.8 Cm Radar Data

Earth based radar observations of the Moon have been taken at many wavelengths during the last ten years -- at 3.8, 70 cm, and most recently, 7.5 cm. Radar returns have been collected in both polarized and depolarized form so that is possible to derive both topographic and local surface roughness from the data. Until recently, work with 3.8 cm radar data had consisted of qualitative correlation of photographic and thermal IR data with individual depolarized radar data frames (local surface roughness) at different wavelengths. These studies provided results which demonstrated that the relationships between surface roughness (measured by either thermal emission or radar reflectivity) at different wavelengths can be used as an index of a crater's state of degradation (age). However, systematic studies of craters, or other local terrain features, as well as regional or global studies of major terrains (involving a number of data frames), cannot be done until individual frames are calibrated, geometric distortion is removed, and corrected frames are mosaicked.

Clark, P. E.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Progress in the development of high degree potential coefficient models

A natural extension of the recent satellite derived potential coefficient models is the development of high degree (maximum 180 or 360) expansions. Such expansions are based on the combination of the satellite derived models with terrestrial gravity data and satellite altimeter data. Such models are useful for more precise geoid undulation computations, for simulation studies involving different typed of future missions (e.g., gradiometry), and as reference fields for different types of gravimetric computations. The attention is to the effect of the terrain, ellipsoidal terms, and weighting. The basic methods used for the high degree solutions are reviewed. Various correction terms are described and recent models are discussed and compared.

Rapp, Richard H.↗
NASA NTRS1984

Grainsize evolution and differential comminution in an experimental regolith

The comminution of planetary surfaces by exposure to continuous meteorite bombardment was simulated by impacting the same fragmental gabbro target 200 times. The role of comminution and in situ gardening of planetary regoliths was addressed. Mean grain size continuously decreased with increasing shot number. Initially it decreased linearly with accumulated energy, but at some stage comminution efficiency started to decrease gradually. Point counting techniques, aided by the electron microprobe for mineral identification, were performed on a number of comminution products. Bulk chemical analyses of specific grain size fractions were also carried out. The finest sizes ( 10 microns) display generally the strongest enrichment/depletion factors. Similar, if not exactly identical, trends are reported from lunar soils. It is, therefore, not necessarily correct to explain the chemical characteristics of various grain sizes via different admixtures of materials from distant source terrains. Differential comminution of local source rocks may be the dominating factor.

Horz, F.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Refinement of Magellan radiometric correction using range centroid estimation

The Magellan (MGN) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing radiometric compensation algorithm is described, and the effective pointing error caused by the terrain is examined. It is shown how the range centroid can be computed from spacecraft ancillary data with an accurate topographic model. In cases where such data are not available, a technique is presented to estimate the range centroid from the coherent radar echoes. This technique is demonstrated using MGN SAR data.

Cheng, T.↗
DOE OSTI2020

CACTI Radar b1 Processing: Corrections, Calibrations, and Processing Report

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility deployed a large number of instruments to a region nearby the Sierra de Córdobas mountains in Argentina as part of the Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign (1). During this campaign, four radars were installed at a site outside of Villa Yacanto as shown in Figure 1. As part of a post-campaign effort to improve the usability of these data, a significant activity was undertaken towards the calibration, correction, and improvement of the data quality of these radar datastreams. This process in ARM nomenclature is referred to as generating a “b1” datastream. While these “b1” standards may imply different corrections or standards for various ARM instruments, for radars it refers to a datastream that has been calibrated (and cross-calibrated), including a serious effort to deliver the highest-quality (well-characterized) data possible. This report details (i) the status/quality of the original “a1” (raw) data, (ii) the corrections and calibrations that are applied to generate these b1 datastreams, (iii) the details of the applied algorithms and how radar offset/calibration numbers were determined for the eventual corrections, and (iv) the new and flexible plug-in-based processing system designed during CACTI for radar b1 activities (current, future) that interfaces with ARM’s Data Integrator (ADI) and high-performance computing (HPC) system.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
NASA NTRS1976

Analysis of recreational land using Skylab data

The author has identified the following significant results. S192 data collected on 5 August 1973 were processed by computer to produce a classification map of a part of the Gratiot-Saginaw State Game Area in south central Michigan. A 10-category map was prepared of an area consisting of diverse terrain types, including forests, wetlands, brush, and herbaceous vegetation. An accuracy check indicated that 54% of the pixels were correctly recognized. When these ten scene classes were consolidated to a 5-category map, the accuracy increased to 72%. S190 A, S190 B, and S192 data can be used for regional surveys of existing and potential recreation sites, for delineation of open space, and for preliminary evaluation of geographically extensive sites.

Sattinger, I. J.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Assessment of tropical forest stand characteristics with multipolarization SAR data acquired over a mountainous region in Costa Rica

A digital terrain elevation data set was coregistered with radar data for assessing tropical forest stand characteristics. Both raw and topographically corrected L-band polarimetric radar data acquired over the tropical forests of Costa Rica were analyzed and correlated with field-collected tree parameter data to study the stand characteristics. The results of analyses using 18 out of 81 plots for sites A and B indicated that per-plot bole volume and tree volume are related to SAR data, particularly at site A. The topographically corrected SAR data appear to produce the same findings as those of uncorrected data.

Wu, Shih-Tseng↗
DOE OSTI2020

Operational-based annual energy production uncertainty: are its components actually uncorrelated?

Calculations of annual energy production (AEP) from a wind power plant – whether based on preconstruction or operational data – are critical for wind plant financial transactions. The uncertainty in the AEP calculation is especially important in quantifying risk and is a key factor in determining financing terms. A popular industry practice is to assume that different uncertainty components within an AEP calculation are uncorrelated and can therefore be combined as the sum of their squares. We assess the practical validity of this assumption for operational-based uncertainty by performing operational AEP estimates for more than 470 wind plants in the United States, mostly in simple terrain. We apply a Monte Carlo approach to quantify uncertainty in five categories: revenue meter data, wind speed data, regression relationship between density-corrected wind speed (from reanalysis data) and measured wind power, length of long-term-correction data set, and future interannual variability. We identify correlations between categories by comparing the results across all 470 wind plants. We observe a positive correlation between interannual variability and the linearized long-term correction; a negative correlation between wind resource interannual variability and linear regression; and a positive correlation between reference wind speed uncertainty and linear regression. Then, we contrast total operational AEP uncertainty values calculated by omitting and considering correlations between the uncertainty components. We quantify that ignoring these correlations leads to an underestimation of total AEP uncertainty of, on average, 0.1% and as large as 0.5% for specific sites. Although these are not large increases, these would still impact wind plant financing rates; further, we expect these values to increase for wind plants in complex terrain. Based on these results, we conclude that correlations between the identified uncertainty components should be considered when computing the total AEP uncertainty.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS2022

Vision-based Velocimetry over Unknown Terrain with a Low-Noise IMU

This paper presents a novel approach to terrain-relative navigation with a visual camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The proposed algorithm uses an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to combine an IMU propagated state estimate with batch correction estimates computed over a sliding window of measurements. The batch correction algorithm follows the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach used in other Bundle Adjustment systems. Unlike other systems, the proposed system parameterizes the state over the entire window in terms of the state at a single epoch. By ignoring IMU error over the window duration, we obtain a state epoch MLE that jointly estimates the epoch state and terrain parameters with drastically reduced computationally cost. This paper presents the general architecture which can be adapted for various state parameterizations and measurement inputs. For space applications with high-accuracy IMUs, the reduction in computational cost comes with only a modest increase in estimation errors. The increase in error is quantified via a linear covariance analysis presented in this paper. Furthermore, we present simulation results which show the applicability of this algorithm to planetary landing problems.

San Martin, A. Miguel↗
NASA NTRS1981

Precision in the evaluation of Landsat autocorrelation - The terrain effect

The autocorrelation present in Landsat data can be described by a two-parameter model. Presence of this autocorrelation seriously inflates estimates of the variance of a set of pixels. The degree of inflation is always serious but varies markedly according to the values of the parameters phi and Theta. Thus corrections of the effects of the model require precise estimates of these parameters. Two hypotheses are proposed to explain the variation of phi with location. Several lines of evidence are presented which support the idea that phi is induced directly by the autocorrelation structure of the terrain being sensed. It is suggested that use of this relation will allow economical estimates of phi for any scene of interest.

Craig, R. G.↗