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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 1,009 records · Page 56
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1997

Develop Advanced Nonlinear Signal Analysis Topographical Mapping System

During the development of the SSME, a hierarchy of advanced signal analysis techniques for mechanical signature analysis has been developed by NASA and AI Signal Research Inc. (ASRI) to improve the safety and reliability for Space Shuttle operations. These techniques can process and identify intelligent information hidden in a measured signal which is often unidentifiable using conventional signal analysis methods. Currently, due to the highly interactive processing requirements and the volume of dynamic data involved, detailed diagnostic analysis is being performed manually which requires immense man-hours with extensive human interface. To overcome this manual process, NASA implemented this program to develop an Advanced nonlinear signal Analysis Topographical Mapping System (ATMS) to provide automatic/unsupervised engine diagnostic capabilities. The ATMS will utilize a rule-based Clips expert system to supervise a hierarchy of diagnostic signature analysis techniques in the Advanced Signal Analysis Library (ASAL). ASAL will perform automatic signal processing, archiving, and anomaly detection/identification tasks in order to provide an intelligent and fully automated engine diagnostic capability. The ATMS has been successfully developed under this contract. In summary, the program objectives to design, develop, test and conduct performance evaluation for an automated engine diagnostic system have been successfully achieved. Software implementation of the entire ATMS system on MSFC's OISPS computer has been completed. The significance of the ATMS developed under this program is attributed to the fully automated coherence analysis capability for anomaly detection and identification which can greatly enhance the power and reliability of engine diagnostic evaluation. The results have demonstrated that ATMS can significantly save time and man-hours in performing engine test/flight data analysis and performance evaluation of large volumes of dynamic test data.

Jong, Jen-Yi↗
NASA NTRS2009

Extravehicular Activity Testing in Analog Environments: Evaluating the Effects of Center of Gravity and Environment on Human Performance

Center of gravity (CG) is likely to be an important variable in astronaut performance during partial gravity extravehicular activity (EVA). The Apollo Lunar EVA experience revealed challenges with suit stability and control. The EVA Physiology, Systems and Performance Project (EPSP) in conjunction with the Constellation EVA Systems Project Office have developed plans to systematically understand the role of suit weight, CG and suit pressure on astronaut performance in partial gravity environments. This presentation based upon CG studies seeks to understand the impact of varied CG on human performance in lunar gravity.

Chappell, Steve P.↗
NASA NTRS2019

Methods of Performing Large Scale, Multidimensional Parametric Studies for Space Launch System Mission Analysis

Optimizing a large number of trajectories over a wide range of parameters is a difficult and computationally intensive, particularly when the parametric space has a large number of dimensions. Solving parametric studies like these require good initial conditions for each optimization case, which results in a significant amount of manual interaction and human judgment and can be time consuming. The Space Launch System (SLS) uses POST2 (Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories II) to simulate different ascent trajectories and perform mission analysis. SLS mission analysis currently uses two types of large scale, multidimensional parameter spaces. The qualifying factor between these spaces is the grid density, which determines the set of applicable solution methodologies. One type has a relatively low number of dimensions (2-3), but a large number of grid coordinates (2000- 4000), whereas the second type has a relatively low number of grid coordinates (150-350), but a higher number of dimensions (7-10).

Stein, W. B.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Adaptive lighting for streets and residential areas

Adaptive lighting is an approach to lighting application in which the lighting levels are controlled based on the needs of the users of the lighted environment. Such systems are enabled by the instant-on and dimming capabilities of solid-state lighting and have been shown to have the potential to reduce energy consumption by over 50%, both through the use of maintained lighting levels without over-lighting and dimming. This investigation considered the impact of adaptive lighting within Cambridge NA. The impact of adaptive lighting on crashes and crime was considered using both the timing of the installation of the LED system in a before-and-after comparison, as well as a comparison to a neighboring non-dimming city. Industry practitioners and the public were also surveyed. As a follow-on to the first analysis, a human factors experiment was performed to investigate if the lighting levels could be further refined to improve energy performance. Overall, the energy savings from the dimming system range from 55% initially to 36% at the end of the life of the luminaire system

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
NASA NTRS2009

Management of Service Projects in Support of Space Flight Research

Goal:To provide human health and performance countermeasures, knowledge, technologies, and tools to enable safe, reliable, and productive human space exploration . [HRP-47051] Specific Objectives: 1) Develop capabilities, necessary countermeasures, and technologies in support of human space exploration, focusing on mitigating the highest risks to human health and performance. 2) Define and improve human spaceflight medical, environmental, and human factors standards. 3) Develop technologies that serve to reduce medical and environmental risks, to reduce human systems resource requirements (mass, volume, power, data, etc.) and to ensure effective human-system integration across exploration systems. 4) Ensure maintenance of Agency core competencies necessary to enable risk reduction in the following areas: A. Space medicine B. Physiological and behavioral effects of long duration spaceflight on the human body C. Space environmental effects, including radiation, on human health and performance D. Space "human factors" [HRP-47051]. Service projects can form integral parts of research-based project-focused programs to provide specialized functions. Traditional/classic project management methodologies and agile approaches are not mutually exclusive paradigms. Agile strategies can be combined with traditional methods and applied in the management of service projects functioning in changing environments. Creative collaborations afford a mechanism for mitigation of constrained resource limitations.

Love, J.↗
NASA NTRS1987

Lunar base surface mission operations. Lunar Base Systems Study (LBSS) task 4.1

The purpose was to perform an analysis of the surface operations associated with a human-tended lunar base. Specifically, the study defined surface elements and developed mission manifests for a selected base scenario, determined the nature of surface operations associated with this scenario, generated a preliminary crew extravehicular and intravehicular activity (EVA/IVA) time resource schedule for conducting the missions, and proposed concepts for utilizing remotely operated equipment to perform repetitious or hazardous surface tasks. The operations analysis was performed on a 6 year period of human-tended lunar base operation prior to permanent occupancy. The baseline scenario was derived from a modified version of the civil needs database (CNDB) scenario. This scenario emphasizes achievement of a limited set of science and exploration objectives while emplacing the minimum habitability elements required for a permanent base.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2008

The First Development of Human Factors Engineering Requirements for Application to Ground Task Design for a NASA Flight Program

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has long applied standards-derived human engineering requirements to the development of hardware and software for use by astronauts while in flight. The most important source of these requirements has been NASA-STD-3000. While there have been several ground systems human engineering requirements documents, none has been applicable to the flight system as handled at NASA's launch facility at Kennedy Space Center. At the time of the development of previous human launch systems, there were other considerations that were deemed more important than developing worksites for ground crews; e.g., hardware development schedule and vehicle performance. However, experience with these systems has shown that failure to design for ground tasks has resulted in launch schedule delays, ground operations that are more costly than they might be, and threats to flight safety. As the Agency begins the development of new systems to return humans to the moon, the new Constellation Program is addressing this issue with a new set of human engineering requirements. Among these requirements is a subset that will apply to the design of the flight components and that is intended to assure ground crew success in vehicle assembly and maintenance tasks. These requirements address worksite design for usability and for ground crew safety.

Dischinger, H. Charles, Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Brief report: designing life support systems for space habitats

Permanent human presence in space beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) is now technically feasible. To achieve this goal several requirements must be met, which can be summarized as: technologies, facilities, organization, vision, and will. This paper describes a recently published NASA Reference Publication, "Designing for Human Presence in Space: An Introduction to Environmental Control and Life Support Systems" that addresses how to achieve the goal of permanent human presence in space, specifically, how to design and develop environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) for space habitats. This includes the technologies that perform the required functions, the facilities where the systems will be developed, and the organization necessary to perform the numerous tasks efficiently.

Ecological Systems, Closed↗
DOE OSTI2021

Q-VR: System-Level Design for Future Mobile Collaborative Virtual Reality

High Quality Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) is what the incoming graphics technology era demands: users around the world, regardless of their hardware and network conditions, can all enjoy the immersive virtual experience. However, the state-of-the-art software-based mobile VR designs cannot fully satisfy the realtime performance requirements due to the highly interactive nature of user's actions and complex environmental constraints during VR execution. Inspired by the unique human visual system effects and the strong correlation between VR motion features and realtime hardware-level information, we propose Q-VR, a novel dynamic collaborative rendering solution via software-hardware co-design for enabling future low-latency high-quality mobile VR. At software-level, Q-VR provides flexible high-level tuning interface to reduce network latency while maintaining user perception. At hardware-level, Q-VR accommodates a wide spectrum of hardware and network conditions across users by effectively leveraging the computing capability of the increasingly powerful VR hardware. Extensive evaluation on real-world games demonstrates that Q-VR can achieve an average end-to-end performance speedup of 3.4x (up to 6.7x) over the traditional local rendering design in commercial VR devices, and a 4.1x frame rate improvement over the state-of-the-art static collaborative rendering.

Xie, Chenhao↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Medical System Requirements Development for Lunar Operations

The major health hazards of spaceflight include higher levels of damaging radiation, altered gravity, extended periods of isolation and confinement, a closed and potentially hostile living environment, and the stress associated with being a long distance from Earth. As we increase the duration of lunar stays with foreseeable communication latencies and disruptions, there will be a progressive need for crew to maintain their own health and independently respond to critical medical events. The Exploration Medical Capability element of the NASA Human Research Program is developing a set of Medical System requirements for lunar transit and surface operations. These requirements specify the capabilities, processes and procedures of a habitat Medical System needed for a range of conditions known to occur during spaceflight. Requirement text is written so as not to constrain innovative design solutions necessary for a resilient system. The requirement set includes attributes and functions the Medical System imposes on eight additional habitat systems. A key property of the Medical System is the provision of medical knowledge that will be stored, updated, analyzed, and secured within a Habitat Data System. A Task Performance Support System will aid in medical data acquisition and interpretation, crew training, medical condition prevention, diagnosis and treatment, provide interactive procedures, and track medical inventory. A Wellness System will focus on the provision of countermeasures to prevent, mitigate or treat adverse physical and behavioral health effects while the Medical System recommends adjustments to these countermeasures to maintain crew health. An Environmental Monitoring System will share out-of-bounds readings of air and water quality, acoustics, and radiation exposure levels with the Medical System to help identify issues before they affect crew health and performance. A Communications System will provide secured and private consultations between crew and the ground medical team and their loved ones on Earth. The Medical System also imposes requirements on a Research & Testbed System, fostering advanced medical science such as human research. A Waste Management System provides biohazard waste containment and waste disposal options (recycle and reuse). An Extravehicular Activity System supports crew health during lunar surface activities. And finally, a Maintenance Support System ensures that medical equipment is performing as expected. These requirements are being specifically developed for lunar surface operations but could help to identify Medical System requirements for any space habitat (e.g., I-Hab, commercial endeavors, etc.).

technology↗
NASA NTRS2005

An operational approach to long-duration mission behavioral health and performance factors

NASA's participation in nearly 10 yr of long-duration mission (LDM) training and flight confirms that these missions remain a difficult challenge for astronauts and their medical care providers. The role of the astronaut's crew surgeon is to maximize the astronaut's health throughout all phases of the LDM: preflight, in flight, and postflight. In support of the crew surgeon, the NASA-Johnson Space Center Behavioral Health and Performance Group (JSC-BHPG) has focused on four key factors that can reduce the astronaut's behavioral health and performance. These factors are defined as: sleep and circadian factors; behavioral health factors; psychological adaptation factors; and human-to-system interface (the interface between the astronaut and the mission workplace) factors. Both the crew surgeon and the JSC-BHPG must earn the crewmember's trust preflight to encourage problem identification and problem solving in these four areas. Once on orbit, the crew medical officer becomes a valuable extension of the crew surgeon and BHPG on the ground due to the crew medical officer's constant interaction with crewmembers and preflight training in these four factors. However, the crew surgeon, BHPG, and the crew medical officer need tools that will help predict, prevent, monitor, and respond to developing problems. Objective data become essential when difficult mission termination decisions must be made. The need for behavioral health and performance tool development creates an environment rich for collaboration between operational healthcare providers and researchers. These tools are also a necessary step to safely complete future, more autonomous exploration-class space missions.

Review↗
NASA NTRS1993

Simulation of the human-telerobot interface on the Space Station

Many issues remain unresolved concerning the components of the human-telerobot interface presented in this work. It is critical that these components be optimally designed and arranged to ensure, not only that the overall system's goals are met, but but that the intended end-user has been optimally accommodated. With sufficient testing and evaluation throughout the development cycle, the selection of the components to use in the final telerobotic system can promote efficient, error-free performance. It is recommended that whole-system simulation with full-scale mockups be used to help design the human-telerobot interface. It is contended that the use of simulation can facilitate this design and evaluation process.

Stuart, Mark A.↗
NASA NTRS1984

Avionics/crew station integration

The U.S. Navy has been encouraging advanced development concepts aimed at increasing the aircraft instrumentation performance for multi-platform applications of 1990's weapons systems. The three areas covered by the Navy's research and development effort are: System Integration, Technology, and Human Factors. The System Integration objectives are to produce a system architecture easily adaptable to many platforms. Technology objectives are to determine the state of the art for displays, electronics, and controls. The Human Factors objectives are to determine the proper human-machine interfaces so that the ultimate crew station will be capable of providing the pilot with the proper display and controls performance to satisfy the diverse requirements of a fighter, attack, ASW, fixed-wing, rotary-wing, and V/STOL platforms in both a one-man crew or two-man crew matrix. All data/control interface among units of this crew station and other platform subsystems will be via digital data buses and video multiplex buses. No individual discrete signal, data, or control lines will be needed. This paper discusses the six interfaces necessary to ensure the optimum development of this crew station, the predicted platform mission improvements, and the requisite life-cycle cost considerations. This concept will serve as a basis for planning the integration of the necessary hardware and software features in current and future weapons systems.

Mulley, W. G.↗
NASA NTRS2013

Performance Characterization of the Air Force Transformational Satellite 12 kW Hall Thruster

The STMD GCD ISP project is tasked with developing, maturing, and testing enabling human exploration propulsion requirements and potential designs for advanced high-energy, in-space propulsion systems to support deep-space human exploration and reduce travel time between Earth's orbit and future destinations for human activity. High-power Hall propulsion systems have been identified as enabling technologies and have been the focus of the activities at NASA Glenn-In-house effort to evaluate performance and interrogate operation of NASA designed and manufactured Hall thrusters. Evaluate existing high TRL EP devices that may be suitable for implementation in SEP TDM.

Propulsion↗
NASA NTRS2017

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration in the National Airspace System (NAS) Project: Advanced Collision Avoidance System for UAS (ACAS Xu) Interoperability White Paper Presentation

The Phase 1 DAA Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) provided requirements for two classes of DAA equipment: equipment Class 1 contains the basic DAA equipment required to assist a pilot in remaining well clear, while equipment Class 2 integrates the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance (TCAS) II system. Thus, the Class 1 system provides RWC functionality only, while the Class 2 system is intended to provide both RWC and Collision Avoidance (CA) functionality, in compliance with the Minimum Aviation System Performance (MASPS) for the Interoperability of Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems. The FAAs TCAS Program Office is currently developing Airborne Collision Avoidance System X (ACAS X) to support the objectives of the Federal Aviation Administrations (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System Program (NextGen). ACAS X has a suite of variants with a common underlying design that are intended to be optimized for their intended airframes and operations. ACAS Xu being is designed for UAS and allows for new surveillance technologies and tailored logic for platforms with different performance characteristics. In addition to Collision Avoidance (CA) alerting and guidance, ACAS Xu is being tuned to provide RWC alerting and guidance in compliance with the SC 228 DAA MOPS. With a single logic performing both RWC and CA functions, ACAS Xu will provide industry with an integrated DAA solution that addresses many of the interoperability shortcomings of Phase I systems. While the MOPS for ACAS Xu will specify an integrated DAA system, it will need to show compliance with the RWC alerting thresholds and alerting requirements defined in the DAA Phase 2 MOPS. Further, some functional components of the ACAS Xu system such as the remote pilots displayed guidance might be mostly references to the corresponding requirements in the DAA MOPS. To provide a seamless, integrated, RWC-CA system to assist the pilot in remaining well clear and avoiding collisions, several issues need to be addressed within the Phase 2 SC-228 DAA efforts. Interoperability of the RWC and CA alerting and guidance, and ensuring pilot comprehension, compliance and performance, will be a primary research area.

detect and avoid↗
NASA NTRS2023

Risk Trade-Space Analysis for Safe Human Expeditions to Mars

We assessed the integrated safety, health, and performance risk to crews on long-duration missions, specifically to Mars. Using a systems approach rather than one focused on individual countermeasures, we examined the trade space around several such risks to identify high-potential risk mitigation strategies and characterize aspects of Mars mission architectures that could lower aggregated risk. Current Mars Design Reference missions would require durations well over two years and would increase crew exposure to radiation and microgravity well beyond ISS levels, likely resulting in significantly reduced performance beyond our current capability to mitigate that could jeopardize mission success. A “fast Mars transit” round-trip mission concept was studied using an innovative flight dynamics approach to quantify the minimum total mission energy required for a Mars transit with total mission duration less than 400 days. This approach holds promise for sending humans to Mars and returning them safely with acceptable, potentially mitigatable, exposure to microgravity and radiation using current or near-term technologies. The fast transit concept would also result in fewer time-driven vehicle failures and enable sustainable deployment of humans and infrastructure to Mars on a regular cadence, allowing steady exploration and colonization of Mars. Finally, we conclude that reliance on the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) mission operations paradigm – i.e., one of near-complete real-time dependence on experts at Mission Control to manage the combined state of the mission, vehicle, and crew – is high risk given the communication delays and limited resupply of any Mars mission, and this risk is not eliminated by the shorter missions durations of fast transit scenarios. Based on historical trends, it is highly likely that the crew will face a high-consequence problem of uncertain origin during Mars transit when ground support will be greatly reduced. While it may be possible to reduce anomaly rates through improved reliability analysis and testing, and to reduce anomaly impacts through added robustness, such mitigations address only known failure modes and known uncertainties. Therefore, a radical shift in the Human-Systems Integration Architecture (HSIA) that defines the operational paradigm, systems design, and human-systems interactions is required to improve the risk posture to an acceptable level regardless of mission duration.

Mars↗
NASA NTRS2019

NASA’s Space Launch System: Enabling a New Generation of Lunar Exploration

Following two decades of operational experience in low-Earth orbit (LEO), NASA has turned its focus once again to deep space exploration. The Agency is building the Space Launch System (SLS) to take astronauts and cargo to the Moon and send robotic spacecraft deep into the solar system. Offering unmatched performance, departure energy and payload capacity, SLS is designed to evolve into progressively more powerful configurations, enabling a new generation of human exploration of the Moon in preparation for future missions to Mars. The first build of the Block 1 vehicle is nearly complete for Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), the first integrated flight of SLS and the Orion crew vehicle. EM-1 will send an uncrewed Orion to a distant retrograde lunar orbit in order to test and verify new systems, and along the way will deploy 13 6U-class CubeSats in deep space along the upper stage disposal trajectory after separation from Orion. The Agency’s current plans call for the first three missions on the SLS manifest to utilize the Block 1 vehicle in crew and cargo configurations. A more powerful evolved vehicle, Block 1B, will provide additional mass and volume performance using a new Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). Block 1B will lift 34 to 40 metric tons (t) to trans-lunar injection (TLI), depending on crew or cargo configuration. The Block 1B crew configuration will offer as much payload volume as industry-standard 5 m-diameter fairings to co-manifested payloads in a Universal Stage Adapter (USA). The Block 1B cargo variant will accommodate 8.4 meter-diameter fairings in 62.7-foot (19.1 meter) or 90-foot (27.4 meter) lengths. Adding smallsat secondary payloads to ride along with primary and co-manifested payloads on future flights may be possible, depending on mass margins. Leveraging a flight-proven, well-understood propulsion system, SLS’s flexible architecture, unmatched performance and expansive payload accommodations will open exciting new mission possibilities in deep space. Launches of habitat modules for NASA’s new Gateway lunar outpost, the next generation of robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of the solar system, large-aperture deep space telescopes, probes to interstellar space and the return of astronauts to the Moon are all possible with SLS.

Creech, Stephen D.↗