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At least 955 records · Page 53

Supporting cost-effective watershed management strategies for Chesapeake Bay using a modeling and optimization framework

Extensive efforts to adaptively manage nutrient pollution rely on Chesapeake Bay Program’s (Phase 6) Watershed Model, called Chesapeake Assessment Scenario Tool (CAST), which helps decision-makers plan and track implementation of Best Management Practices (BMPs). We describe mathematical characteristics of CAST and develop a constrained nonlinear BMP-subset model, software, and visualization framework. This represents the first publicly available optimization framework for exploring least-cost strategies of pollutant load control for the United States’ largest estuary. The optimization identifies implementation options for a BMP subset modeled with load reduction effectiveness factors, and the web interface facilitates interactive exploration of >30,000 solutions organized by objective, nutrient control level, and for ~200 counties. We assess framework performance and demonstrate modeled cost improvements when comparing optimization-suggested proposals with proposals inspired by jurisdiction plans. Stakeholder feedback highlights the framework’s current utility for investigating cost-effective tradeoffs and its usefulness as a foundation for future analysis of restoration strategies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

LANL Contributions to pyiron: An integrated development environment for computational materials science

To support and accelerate the development of simulation protocols in atomistic modelling, we introduce an integrated development environment (IDE) for computational materials science called pyiron (http://pyiron.org). The pyiron IDE combines a web based source code editor, a job management system for build automation, and a hierarchical data management solution. The core components of the pyiron IDE are pyiron objects based on an abstract class, which links application structures such as atomistic structures, projects, jobs, simulation protocols and computing resources with persistent storage and an interactive user environment. The simulation protocols within the pyiron IDE are constructed using the Python programming language. To highlight key concepts of this tool as well as to demonstrate its ability to simplify the implementation and testing of simulation protocols we discuss two applications. In these examples we show how pyiron supports the whole life cycle of a typical simulation, seamlessly combines ab initio with empirical potential calculations, and how complex feedback loops can be implemented. While originally developed with focus on ab initio thermodynamics simulations, the concepts and implementation of pyiron are general thus allowing to employ it for a wide range of simulation topics.

Janssen, Jan↗

phenix v. 7.0

SAND2021-6741 O phenix is Sandia's orchestration tool that allows users to quickly deploy, un-deploy, and interact with SCEPTRE ICS environments. phenix is an orchestration tool used for managing the creation, configuration, and deployment of modeling and simulation environments. As an abstraction layer on top of an underlying virtual machine manager called minimega, phenix organizes the network, application, and scenario information for a given deployment. It allows users to create, configure, and deploy experiments in a repeatable and rapid fashion. An application framework provides the flexibility to manipulate an experiment to suit various needs and requirements. phenix also includes a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) where experiments can be created, configured, and interacted with.

Sahakian, Meghan↗

The State of Cryptolib – The Open-Source Satellite Cryptography Library

What state would the world be in if all internet traffic was unencrypted? Imagine an alternate universe where you can plug a packet sniffing device into your home internet and capture the web traffic of the entire world. It seems obvious that this scenario is less than desirable. If we would not allow this for the internet, why would we allow this in the space domain? With the advent of open-source ground stations, commercial off the shelf hardware, and ground stations as a service, the barrier to entry for space communications is rapidly lowering. New players enter the space realm everydayevery day, and the presence of tools to allow apprentice evildoers the ability to exploit satellite communications is on the horizon. Not only are legacy missions at risk, but future missions are as well - particularly lower budget science missions with more stringent sciencesize, weight, and power constraints. that may find it difficult to utilize hardware-based encryption solutions. In terms of Civilian Aerospace, NASA Standard 1006 generally directs that missions "shall protect the command stack with encryption that meets or exceeds Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140". Fortunately, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) has published an international standard on Space Data Link Security. The combination of these two forces has resulted in CryptoLib - an open-source, C-based, encryption library that aims to be CCSDS SDLS compliant. CryptoLib is designed to support smaller missions on a tight budget that may be subject to the more stringent command link encryption requirements. Additionally, CryptoLib serves as an underpinning in JPL's Key Management & Cryptography (KMC) suite and is also designed to function as a 'drop-in' for smaller missions. CryptoLib is in active development and currently provides Telecommand (TC), Telemetry (TM), and Advanced Orbiting Systems (AOS) encryption and decryption capabilities with a variety of encryption and authentication schemes. This presentation will report the latest features, current status, and future plans for CryptoLib.

open-source encryption↗

The State of CryptoLib – The Open-Source Satellite Cryptography Library

What state would the world be in if all internet traffic was unencrypted? Imagine an alternate universe where you can plug a packet sniffing device into your home internet and capture the web traffic of the entire world. It seems obvious that this scenario is less than desirable. If we would not allow this for the internet, why would we allow this in the space domain? With the advent of open-source ground stations, commercial off the shelf hardware, and ground stations as a service, the barrier to entry for space communications is rapidly lowering. New players enter the space realm everydayevery day, and the presence of tools to allow apprentice evildoers the ability to exploit satellite communications is on the horizon. Not only are legacy missions at risk, but future missions are as well - particularly lower budget science missions with more stringent sciencesize, weight, and power constraints. that may find it difficult to utilize hardware-based encryption solutions. In terms of Civilian Aerospace, NASA Standard 1006 generally directs that missions "shall protect the command stack with encryption that meets or exceeds Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140". Fortunately, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) has published an international standard on Space Data Link Security. The combination of these two forces has resulted in CryptoLib - an open-source, C-based, encryption library that aims to be CCSDS SDLS compliant. CryptoLib is designed to support smaller missions on a tight budget that may be subject to the more stringent command link encryption requirements. Additionally, CryptoLib serves as an underpinning in JPL's Key Management & Cryptography (KMC) suite and is also designed to function as a 'drop-in' for smaller missions. CryptoLib is in active development and currently provides Telecommand (TC), Telemetry (TM), and Advanced Orbiting Systems (AOS) encryption and decryption capabilities with a variety of encryption and authentication schemes. This presentation will report the latest features, current status, and future plans for CryptoLib.

open-source encryption↗

Lightfall v0.0.1

Lightfall is a desktop application for synchrotron beamline instrument control, data acquisition, and live analysis at the Advanced Light Source (ALS). Built on Python and Qt, it provides a native graphical interface for operating beamline hardware, configuring and executing experimental scans, and visualizing results in real time. Key features include direct integration with EPICS control systems, a built-in electronic logbook, remote beamline access over secure tunnels, and an interprocess communication (IPC) architecture that coordinates with external analysis applications via ZMQ and EPICS process variables. This IPC approach allows Lightfall to orchestrate specialized analysis tools—including GPU-accelerated streaming correlators—without embedding them, avoiding the dependency conflicts common in monolithic scientific software platforms. Compared to prior approaches such as Xi-CAM's plugin-based architecture, Lightfall's design cleanly separates instrument control from domain-specific analysis, enabling feedback-driven acquisition where live analysis results can adjust scan parameters during an experiment. Its native Qt interface provides responsive performance for real-time data visualization that web-based alternatives struggle to match. Lightfall is designed for use by beamline scientists and staff operating synchrotron instruments at national user facilities.

Pandolfi, Ronald [Lawrence Berkeley National Labor↗

Flow Regime Based Climatologies of Lightning Probabilities for Spaceports and Airports

Objective: provide forecasters with a "first guess" climatological lightning probability tool (1) Focus on Space Shuttle landings and NWS T AFs (2) Four circles around sites: 5-, 10-, 20- and 30 n mi (4) Three time intervals: hourly, every 3 hr and every 6 hr It is based on: (1) NLDN gridded data (2) Flow regime (3) Warm season months of May-Sep for years 1989-2004 Gridded data and available code yields squares, not circles Over 850 spread sheets converted into manageable user-friendly web-based GUI

Bauman, William H., III↗

A Novel and Practical Method to Quantify the Quality of Mobility: The Mobility Energy Productivity Metric: Preprint

Recent technology innovations are enabling fundamental improvements in mobility systems, including options for new travel modes, methods, and opportunities to connect people with goods, services, and employment. A desire to quantify and compare both existing and emerging transportation options motivated development of the mobility energy productivity (MEP) metric described herein. The MEP metric fundamentally measures the potential of a city's transportation system to connect a person to a variety of services and activities that define a high-quality of life, relative to the convenience, cost and energy needed to provide these connections. Fundamentally derived from accessibility theory, the MEP advances practice by using readily available travel time data (either from web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) or outputs from an urban transportation model) combined with established parameters that reflect the energy intensity and cost of various travel modes, and relative frequency of activity engagement. The construction of the MEP metric allows for aggregation and disaggregation to the appropriate spatial, modal, and trip purpose resolution, as analysis needs dictate. The MEP could be used to compare alternative futures related to technology, infrastructure investment, or policy, providing a much-needed tool for planners, researchers, and analysts.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Higher Throughput, Lower Cost Processing of Flexible Perovskite Solar Cells by Photonic Curing

The objectives of this SETO project are to explore whether photonic curing can be used to perform annealing in perovskite solar cell (PSC) fabrication, and if so, whether it can enable high-throughput PSC manufacturing. The successful outcome of the project will reduce manufacturing cost towards realizing the SETO goal of the Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) $0.03/kWh by 2030. The project is a collaboration between Hsu’s group at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and NovaCentrix, an Austin TX based company that pioneered the PulseForge® photonic curing tools and has expertise in applying this technology to printed electronics. Thin-film synthesis typically involves a thermal annealing step to convert from precursors to final material phases, to obtain the desired crystalline phase, or to improve materials structural or electrical properties. However, thermal annealing typically requires high temperatures that are incompatible with inexpensive plastic substrates and annealing times lasting tens-to-hundreds of minutes, making it incompatible with roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing at a desirable web speed. Photonic curing uses a flash Xe lamp to deliver short (20 µs to 100 ms) but high intensity (up to 50 kW/cm 2 ) pulses of broadband light (200 – 1500 nm) to the sample. It has been successfully applied to sinter printed metal nanoparticle inks into conductive patterns. This project aimed to extend the applications of photonic curing to convert halide perovskite films and transparent metal oxide transport layers. Despite the interruption by COVID-19, we have achieved significant accomplishments to establish photonic curing as a viable technology for the high-throughput manufacturing of PSCs. (1) We demonstrated that photonic curing can convert both metal oxide transport layer and halide perovskite absorber in the PSCs and successfully made flexible PSCs on Corning Willow glass® (WG)/ indium tin oxide (ITO) substrates without any thermal annealing steps. These photonically cured devices achieve performance comparable to conventional thermally annealed devices but were fabricated with a total processing time reduced by six orders of magnitude. We also show that photonic curing can achieve desirable web speed (up to 26 m/min) and large-area uniformity. (2) By establishing photonic curing processing phase spaces for the perovskite, we show that the longer pulses are more forgiving in small variation in the photonic curing conditions, making it more suitable for R2R manufacturing. (3) Our results clearly illustrated the importance of improving mechanical and optical properties of transparent electrodes on flexible substrates. (4) We also performed fundamental studies that elucidate the interactions between perovskite absorber and metal oxide transport layer that can undermine the PSC stability. Five refereed journal papers in top journals (ACS Energy Letters, npj Flexible Electronics, ACS Applied Energy Materials, Materials Advances, and Frontiers in Energy Research), one conference proceeding (PVSC-47), six conference presentations (PVSC and Materials Research Society meetings), and a Ph.D. dissertation (Trey B. Daunis) were produced under this project. Energy Materials Corporation (EMC) has forecast that with a 1.5 m wide web moving at a web speed of 30 m/min, R2R processing of PSC could provide up to 4 GW/year for a single R2R assembly line. Replacing thermal annealing with photonic curing, as demonstrated by the accomplishments of this project, is necessary to realize such an energy production goal.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Decayheatml

This code is designed to predict and analyze the decay heat generated in molten salt reactors (MSRs) using a hybrid approach that combines machine learning and segmented polynomial fitting. The accurate prediction of decay heat is essential for reactor safety and the optimization of spent fuel storage. The code operates through several key components: 1) Data Architecture: It incorporates a modular data architecture that handles various MSR-specific operational parameters such as power density, humidity content, and air ingress. These parameters are sampled using Sobol sequences to ensure comprehensive coverage of operational uncertainties. 2) Machine Learning Framework: The code employs a diverse set of machine learning models, including polynomial regression, decision trees, random forests, gradient boosting, support vector regression, k-nearest neighbors, multi-layer perceptrons, and symbolic regression. These models are trained to predict decay heat over a wide temporal range, from immediate shutdown up to 10,000 years. 3) Region-Optimized Training: The temporal domain is divided into multiple regions, each modeled separately to capture distinct decay heat characteristics across different time scales. This approach significantly improves the accuracy and interpretability of predictions. 4) Segmented Polynomial Interpretation (SPI): The SPI method translates machine learning predictions into piecewise polynomial equations. These equations are physically interpretable and can be directly integrated into existing engineering workflows and safety analyses. 5) Front-End Interfaces: The code includes both a Jupyter notebook interface for research development and a Streamlit web application for operational deployment. These interfaces allow users to interactively explore decay heat predictions, adjust operational parameters, and visualize results in real-time. 6) Applications: The framework supports various applications, including safety system validation and spent fuel container optimization. It enables real-time evaluation of worst-case decay heat scenarios, informing the design of passive safety systems and optimizing container designs for long-term storage. Overall, this code provides a robust, accurate, and user-friendly tool for predicting decay heat in MSRs, enhancing reactor safety, and optimizing spent fuel management.

Retamales, Mauricio Eduardo Tano [Idaho National L↗

NASA's Earth Observatory and Visible Earth: Imagery and Science on the Internet

The purpose of NASA s Earth Observatory and Visible Earth Web sites is to provide freely-accessible locations on the Internet where the public can obtain new satellite imagery (at resolutions up to a given sensor's maximum) and scientific information about our home planet. Climatic and environmental change are the sites main foci. As such, they both contain ample data visualizations and time-series animations that demonstrate geophysical parameters of particular scientific interest, with emphasis on how and why they vary over time. An Image Composite Editor (ICE) tool will be added to the Earth Observatory in October 2002 that will allow visitors to conduct basic analyses of available image data. For example, users may produce scatter plots to correlate images; or they may probe images to find the precise unit values per pixel of a given data product; or they may build their own true-color and false-color images using multi- spectral data. In particular, the sites are designed to be useful to the science community, public media, educators, and students.

King, Michael D.↗

Enhancing Cassini Operations & Science Planning Tools

The Cassini team uses a variety of software utilities as they manage and coordinate their mission to Saturn. Most of these tools have been unchanged for many years, and although stability is a virtue for long-lived space missions, there are some less-fragile tools that could greatly benefit from modern improvements. This report shall describe three such upgrades, including their architectural differences and their overall impact. Emphasis is placed on the motivation and rationale behind architectural choices rather than the final product, so as to illuminate the lessons learned and discoveries made.These three enhancements included developing a strategy for migrating Science Planning utilities to a new execution model, rewriting the team's internal portal for ease of use and maintenance, and developing a web-based agenda application for tracking the sequence of files being transmitted to the Cassini spacecraft. Of this set, the first two have been fully completed, while the agenda application is currently in the early prototype stage.

science planning↗

New developments in space radiation research at NASA: Annotating data using a novel radiation biology ontology

Like many interdisciplinary sciences, data producers and consumers in the field of radiation biology often use a wide variety of terminology to describe their experiments and data. Furthermore, space systems and technologies are rapidly evolving, and a shared understanding and common terminology for these is also lacking. The efficiency of research organizations can be enhanced by standardizing metadata through the use of knowledge resources like ontologies. Employing a sophisticated model such as a formal ontology to standardize metadata enables automated data acquisition processes and supports more complete, accurate meta-analysis through more efficient and complete data discovery and retrieval, particularly when using multiple data sources. Thus, we developed the Radiation Biology Ontology (RBO) in order to improved radiation biology metadata uniformity and transparency. We used open-source software (the Ontology Development Kit, Protégé and WebProtégé) and worked within the OBO Foundry framework, which includes a set of ontology development principles and practices for ontology consistency, uniformity, and accountability. The RBO has now been incorporated into two radiation research data repositories, NASA’s GeneLab omics database (https://genelab.nasa.gov), and the European Commission STORE database (https://www.storedb.org/). Continuous build integration tools allowed our international RBO collaboration to be more efficient and focus its efforts on semantic model design. Currently, the RBO contains over 300 annotated classes and individuals specific to the study of radiation on biological systems, as well as imports of many additional classes from other OBO Foundry ontologies that relate to and/or provide context for these RBO entities. We publish the RBO through the OBO Foundry, so that it is available for browsing, download, and querying through NCBI Bioportal web site and application programming interface. The NASA Ames Life Science Data Archive (ALSDA) is also in the process of adopting use of the RBO, taking NASA one step closer to a knowledge-based system for space biology data. It is our hope that the global communities of radiation research Investigators, data curators and data analysts can similarly leverage the RBO and will contribute to its further development.

radiation↗

Integrating Artificial Intelligence into Science Gateways

Science gateways are altering the manner in which people interact with high performance computing (HPC) by providing a web browser based interface to advanced computing platforms. In particular, science gateways lower the barrier to using HPC by simplifying the process of submitting workloads to such systems and by offloading the efforts required to use HPC to the maintainers of the system. While science gateways decrease the time-to-science that comes with using such advanced systems, progress can still be made in improving the user's experience. In this paper we explore two strategies for integrating artificial intelligence tools commonly found in non-HPC service workflows: voice activated assistants and chatbots. Since August 2021, the HPC group at Idaho National Laboratory answers an average of 581 support tickets per month of which a large percentage could be addressed via these two strategies. This work defines the key capabilities that an HPC voice activated assistant and chatbot would need to address for a userbase consisting of largely non-expert users as well as a design for integration into the Open OnDemand science gateway.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Assessing and Promoting Functional Resilience in Flight Crews During Exploration Missions

NASA plans to send humans to Mars in about 20 years. The NASA Human Research Program supports research to mitigate the major risks to human health and performance on extended missions. However, there will undoubtedly be unforeseen events on any mission of this nature - thus mitigation of known risks alone is not sufficient to ensure optimal crew health and performance. Research should be directed not only to mitigating known risks, but also to providing crews with the tools to assess and enhance resilience, as a group and individually. We can draw on ideas from complexity theory and network theory to assess crew and individual resilience. The entire crew or the individual crewmember can be viewed as a complex system that is composed of subsystems (individual crewmembers or physiological subsystems), and the interactions between subsystems are of crucial importance for overall health and performance. An understanding of the structure of the interactions can provide important information even in the absence of complete information on the component subsystems. This is critical in human spaceflight, since insufficient flight opportunities exist to elucidate the details of each subsystem. Enabled by recent advances in noninvasive measurement of physiological and behavioral parameters, subsystem monitoring can be implemented within a mission and also during preflight training to establish baseline values and ranges. Coupled with appropriate mathematical modeling, this can provide real-time assessment of health and function, and detect early indications of imminent breakdown. Since the interconnected web of physiological systems (and crewmembers) can be interpreted as a network in mathematical terms, we can draw on recent work that relates the structure of such networks to their resilience (ability to self-organize in the face of perturbation). There are many parameters and interactions to choose from. Normal variability is an established characteristic of a healthy physiological response. Healthy coupling has been investigated less extensively, but there are cases in which too tight or too loose coupling can be problematic. This might be in inter-individual behaviors, such as sleep cycles, coordination of work and meal times, and coupled motions during communication. Less apparent are couplings of physiological systems, nevertheless examples abound of coupled systems which might be monitored: cardio-respiratory rhythms; circadian rhythms, body temperature, and sleep; stress markers and cognition, sleep, and performance; profiles of biochemical markers related to immune function and nutritional status; sensorimotor aspects such as motion sickness, ataxia, reaction time, and manual control. Tools for resilience are then the means to measure and analyze these parameters, incorporate them into appropriate models of normal variability and interconnectedness, and recognize when parameters or their couplings are outside of normal limits. What to do when a problem is identified depends on its nature. Changes can be made to crew procedures, work pacing, interpersonal interactions, sleep cycles, meal timing and content, as guided by the model. Use and continued development of these methods could not only provide tools for resilience, but also meaningful autonomous work for the crew on an extended flight.

Shelhamer, Mark↗

An Open-source Llm Enhanced-tool Specialized In Helping Moose Related Problems And Tasks

MOOSEenger is an open-source, terminal-first chat application for the MOOSE ecosystem that couples specialized parsing of MOOSE documentation and “.i” input files with retrieval-augmented generation to deliver grounded answers about multiphysics modeling and workflows. It includes dedicated readers for MOOSE-style HTML and a pyhit-based parser that uses the MOOSE syntax tree to preserve block structure and attach retrieval metadata. A data-ingestion pipeline performs semantic chunking into atomic facts and stores them hierarchically in a local Chroma vector database that maintains parent–child relationships across documents; the system can ingest directories, individual files, and single-page web content, and it provides CRUD operations (insert, update, delete) to manage the corpus. At query time, relevant chunks are embedded, retrieved, and fused into the model context, with interactive features such as token streaming, persistent chat history, and dynamic RAG (retrieval triggered by user input or intermediate model output). Deployment is flexible: MOOSEenger runs with local Ollama models or remote Hugging Face/OpenAI backends—typically coordinating generation, lightweight tagging/summarization, and embeddings across three models—and it also supports a server mode and integration with the VS Code Continue interface.

Li, Mengnan [Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idah↗

Personalized Learning Software

Analysis and Simulation Inc. products, IEPLANNER and TPLAN, make use of C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS), a NASA-developed expert system shell which originated at Johnson Space Center. Both products are interactive computer-based systems. They can be run independently or together as one complete system. Utilized as an Individual Education Plan tool, a user of IEPLANNER and TPLAN can define a goals list, while identifying a host of student demands in motor skills, socials skills, life skills, even legal and leisure needs in the user's area. This computerized, expert tutor and advisor allows assessment of the status of the student and the degree to which his/her needs are being met. NASA Small Business Innovation Research contracts have also supported the company Human Memory Extension technology and the creation of a World Wide Web 3D browser.

Source record↗

Project trades model for complex space missions

A Project Trades Model (PTM) is a collection of tools/simulations linked together to rapidly perform integrated system trade studies of performance, cost, risk, and mission effectiveness. An operating PTM captures the interactions between various targeted systems and subsystems through an exchange of computed variables of the constituent models. Selection and implementation of the order, method of interaction, model type, and envisioned operation of the ensemble of tools rpresents the key system engineering challenge of the approach. This paper describes an approach to building a PTM and using it to perform top-level system trades for a complex space mission. In particular, the PTM discussed here is for a future Mars mission involving a large rover.

web services↗