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At least 1,081 records · Page 60

Advanced data management design for autonomous telerobotic systems in space using spaceborne symbolic processors

The use of computers in autonomous telerobots is reaching the point where advanced distributed processing concepts and techniques are needed to support the functioning of Space Station era telerobotic systems. Three major issues that have impact on the design of data management functions in a telerobot are covered. It also presents a design concept that incorporates an intelligent systems manager (ISM) running on a spaceborne symbolic processor (SSP), to address these issues. The first issue is the support of a system-wide control architecture or control philosophy. Salient features of two candidates are presented that impose constraints on data management design. The second issue is the role of data management in terms of system integration. This referes to providing shared or coordinated data processing and storage resources to a variety of telerobotic components such as vision, mechanical sensing, real-time coordinated multiple limb and end effector control, and planning and reasoning. The third issue is hardware that supports symbolic processing in conjunction with standard data I/O and numeric processing. A SSP that currently is seen to be technologically feasible and is being developed is described and used as a baseline in the design concept.

Goforth, Andre↗

Design, Analysis, and On-Sun Evaluation of Reflective Strips Under Controlled Buckling

Solar concentrators are envisioned for use in a variety of space-based applications, including applications involving in situ resource utilization. Identifying solar concentrators that minimize mass and cost are of great interest, especially since launch cost is driven in part by the mass of the payload. Concentrators must also be able to survive the wide temperature excursions on the lunar surface. Identifying smart structures which compensate for changes in concentrator geometry brought about by temperature extremes are of interest. Some applications may benefit from the ability to change the concentrators focal pattern at will. This paper addresses a method of designing a single reflective strip to produce a desired focal pattern through the use of controlled buckling. Small variations in the cross section over the length of the reflective strip influence the distribution of light in the focal region. A finite element method of analysis is utilized here which calculates the curve produced for a given strip cross section and axial load. Varying axial force and strip cross section over the length of the reflective strip provide a means of optimizing ray convergence in the focal region. Careful selection of a tapered cross section yields a reflective strip that approximates a parabola. An array of reflective strips under controlled buckling produces a light weight concentrator and adjustments in the compression of individual strips provide a means of compensating for temperature excursions or changing the focal pattern at will.

solar collectors↗

Some Expected Characteristics of Lunar Dust: A Geological View Applied to Engineering

Compared to the Earth the geologic nature of the lunar regolith is quite distinct. Even though similar minerals exist on the Earth and Moon, they may have very different properties due to the absence of chemical modification in the lunar environment. The engineering properties of the lunar regolith reflect aspects of the parent rock and the consequences of hypervelocity meteor bombardment. On scales relevant to machinery and chemical processing for In-Situ Resource Utilization, ISRU (such as water production), the lunar regolith compositional range is much more restricted than terrestrial material. This fact impacts predictions of properties required by design engineers for constructing equipment for lunar use. In this paper two examples will be covered. 1) Abrasion is related to hardness and hardness is a commonly measured property for both minerals and engineering materials. Although different hardness scales are routinely employed for minerals and engineering materials, a significant amount of literature is available relating the two. As one example, we will discuss how to relate hardness to abrasion for the design of lunar equipment. We also indicate how abundant the various mineral phases are and typical size distributions for lunar regolith which will impact abrasive nature. 2) Mineral characteristics that may seem trivial to the non-geologist or material scientist may have significant bearing on ISRU processing technologies. As a second example we discuss the impact of traces of F-, Cl-, and OH-, H2O, CO2, and sulfur species which can radically alter melting points and the corrosive nature of reaction products thereby significantly changing bulk chemistry and associated processing technologies. For many engineering uses, a simulant s fidelity to bulk lunar regolith chemistry may be insufficient. Therefore, simulant users need to engage in continuing dialogue with simulant developers and geoscientists.

Street, Kenneth W.↗

Some Expected Characteristics of Lunar Dust: A Geological View Applied to Engineering

Compared to the Earth the geologic nature of the lunar regolith is quite distinct. Even though similar minerals exist on the Earth and Moon, they may have very different properties due to the absence of chemical modification in the lunar environment. The engineering properties of the lunar regolith reflect aspects of the parent rock and the consequences of hypervelocity meteor bombardment. On scales relevant to machinery and chemical processing for In-Situ Resource Utilization, ISRU (such as water production), the lunar regolith compositional range is much more restricted than terrestrial material. This fact impacts predictions of properties required by design engineers for constructing equipment for lunar use. In this paper two examples will be covered. 1) Abrasion is related to hardness and hardness is a commonly measured property for both minerals and engineering materials. Although different hardness scales are routinely employed for minerals and engineering materials, a significant amount of literature is available relating the two. As one example, we will discuss how to relate hardness to abrasion for the design of lunar equipment. We also indicate how abundant the various mineral phases are and typical size distributions for lunar regolith which will impact abrasive nature. 2) Mineral characteristics that may seem trivial to the non-geologist or material scientist may have significant bearing on ISRU processing technologies. As a second example we discuss the impact of traces of fluoride, chloride, and hydroxide, water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur species which can radically alter melting points and the corrosive nature of reaction products thereby significantly changing bulk chemistry and associated processing technologies. For many engineering uses, a simulant's fidelity to bulk lunar regolith chemistry may be insufficient. Therefore, simulant users need to engage in continuing dialogue with simulant developers and geoscientists.

Street, Kenneth W.↗

Global Trends in Space Access and Utilization

In the not-so-distant past, space access and air/space technology superiority were within the purview of the U.S. and former Soviet Union's respective space agencies, both vying for global leadership in space exploitation. In more recent years, with the emergence of the European Space Agency (ESA) member countries and Asian countries joining the family of space-faring nations, it is truer now more than ever that space access and utilization has become a truly global enterprise. In fact, according to the Space Report 2007, this enterprise is a $251-billion economy. It is possible to gauge the vitality of worldwide efforts from open sources in today's transparent, media-based society. In particular, print and web broadcasters regularly report and catalog global space activities for defense and civil purposes. For the purposes of this paper, a representative catalog of missions is used to illustrate the nature of the emerging "globalization." This paper highlights global trends in terms of not only the providers of space access, but also the end-users for the various recently accomplished missions. With well over 50 launches per year, in recent years, the launch-log reveals a surprising percentage of "cooperative or co-dependent missions" where different agencies, countries, and/or commercial entities are so engaged presumably to the benefit of all who participate. Statistics are cited and used to show that recently over d0% of the 50-plus missions involved multiple nations working collectively to deliver payloads to orbit. Observers, space policy professionals, and space agency leaders have eloquently proposed that it might require the combined resources and talents of multiple nations to advance human exploration goals beyond low earth orbit. This paper does not intend to offer new information with respect to whether international collaboration is necessary but to observe that, in continuing to monitor global trends, the results seem to support the thesis that a global interdependent effort with all its likely complexities is an increasingly viable and pragmatic option. The discussion includes a breakdown of space missions into those of civil (scientific), military, and strictly commercial nature. It concludes that all three are robust components of a globally diversified portfolio of activities relying, essentially, on a common space industrial base and space infrastructure. As in other industries, the distribution of space industry assets and knowledge across countries and continents enables a diverse suite of options and arrangements, particularly in the areas of civil and commercial space utilization. A survey of several ongoing bilateral and multilateral space collaboration examples are provided to augment the observations regarding multinational work in space.

Rahman, Shamim A.↗

Design, Analysis, and On-Sun Evaluation of Reflective Strips Under Controlled Buckling

Solar concentrators are envisioned for use in a variety of space-based applications, including applications involving in situ resource utilization. Identifying solar concentrators that minimize mass and cost are of great interest, especially since launch cost is driven in part by the mass of the payload. Concentrators must also be able to survive the wide temperature excursions on the lunar surface. Identifying smart structures which compensate for changes in concentrator geometry brought about by temperature extremes are of interest. Some applications may benefit from the ability to change the concentrator's focal pattern at will. This paper addresses a method of designing a single reflective strip to produce a desired focal pattern through the use of controlled buckling. Small variations in the cross section over the length of the reflective strip influence the distribution of light in the focal region. A finite element method of analysis is utilized here which calculates the curve produced for a given strip cross section and axial load. Varying axial force and strip cross section over the length of the reflective strip provide a means of optimizing ray convergence in the focal region. Careful selection of a tapered cross section yields a reflective strip that approximates a parabola. An array of reflective strips under controlled buckling produces a light weight concentrator and adjustments in the compression of individual strips provide a means of compensating for temperature excursions or changing the focal pattern at will.

buckling↗

New Earth Science Data and Access Methods

NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, working with its domestic and international partners, provides scientific data and analysis to improve life here on Earth. NASA provides science data products that cover a wide range of physical, geophysical, biochemical and other parameters, as well as services for interdisciplinary Earth science studies. Management and distribution of these products is administered through the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), which all hold data within a different Earth science discipline. This paper will highlight selected EOS datasets and will focus on how these observations contribute to the improvement of essential services such as weather forecasting, climate prediction, air quality, and agricultural efficiency. Emphasis will be placed on new data products derived from instruments on board Terra, Aqua and ICESat as well as new regional data products and field campaigns. A variety of data tools and services are available to the user community. This paper will introduce primary and specialized DAAC-specific methods for finding, ordering and using these data products. Special sections will focus on orienting users unfamiliar with DAAC resources, HDF-EOS formatted data and the use of desktop research and application tools.

Moses, John F.↗

RNAV STAR Procedural Adherence

In this exploratory archival study we mined the performance of 24 major US airports area navigation standard terminal arrival routes (RNAV STARs) over the preceding three years. Overlaying radar track data on top of RNAV STAR routes provided a comparison between aircraft flight paths and the waypoint positions and altitude restrictions. NASA Ames Supercomputing resources were utilized to perform the data mining and processing. We investigated STARs by lateral transition path (full-lateral), vertical restrictions (full-lateral/full-vertical), and skipped waypoints (skips). In addition, we graphed altitudes and their frequencies of occurrence for altitude restrictions. Full-lateral compliance was generally greater than Full-lateral/full-vertical, but the delta between the rates was not always consistent. Full-lateral/full-vertical usage medians of the 2016 procedures ranged from 0 in KDEN (Denver) to 21 in KMEM (Memphis). Waypoint skips ranged from 0 to nearly 100 for specific waypoints. Altitudes restrictions were sometimes missed by systemic amounts in 1000 ft. increments from the restriction, creating multi-modal distributions. Other times, altitude misses looked to be more normally distributed around the restriction. This work is a preliminary investigation into the objective performance of instrument procedures and provides a framework to track how procedural concepts and design intervention function. In addition, this tool may aid in providing acceptability metrics as well as risk assessment information.

Stewart, Michael J.↗

Coordinating Shared Activities

Shared Activity Coordination (ShAC) is a computer program for planning and scheduling the activities of an autonomous team of interacting spacecraft and exploratory robots. ShAC could also be adapted to such terrestrial uses as helping multiple factory managers work toward competing goals while sharing such common resources as floor space, raw materials, and transports. ShAC iteratively invokes the Continuous Activity Scheduling Planning Execution and Replanning (CASPER) program to replan and propagate changes to other planning programs in an effort to resolve conflicts. A domain-expert specifies which activities and parameters thereof are shared and reports the expected conditions and effects of these activities on the environment. By specifying these conditions and effects differently for each planning program, the domain-expert subprogram defines roles that each spacecraft plays in a coordinated activity. The domain-expert subprogram also specifies which planning program has scheduling control over each shared activity. ShAC enables sharing of information, consensus over the scheduling of collaborative activities, and distributed conflict resolution. As the other planning programs incorporate new goals and alter their schedules in the changing environment, ShAC continually coordinates to respond to unexpected events.

Clement, Bradley↗

Investigation of Supercritical Water Phenomena for Space and Extraterrestrial Application

The cost of carrying or resupplying life support resources for long duration manned space exploration missions such as a mission to Mars is prohibitive and requires the development of suitable recycling technologies. Supercritical Water Oxidation (SCWO) has been identified as an attractive candidate for these extended missions because (i) pre-drying of wet waste streams is not required, (ii) product streams are relatively benign, microbially inert, and easily reclaimed, (iii) waste conversion is complete and relatively fast, and (iv) with proper design and operation, reactions can be self-sustaining. Initial work in this area at NASA was carried out at the Ames Research Center in the 1990 s with a focus on understanding the linkages between feed stock preparation (i.e., particle size and distribution) of cellulosic based waste streams and destruction rates under a range of operating temperatures and pressures. More recently, work in SCWO research for space and extra-terrestrial application has been performed at NASA s Glenn Research Center where various investigations, with a particular focus in the gravitational effects on the thermo-physical processes occurring in the bulk medium, have been pursued. In 2010 a collaborative NASA/CNES (the French Space Agency) experiment on the critical transition of pure water was conducted in the long duration microgravity environment on the International Space Station (ISS). A follow-on experiment, to study the precipitation of salt in sub-critical, trans-critical and supercritical water is scheduled to be conducted on the ISS in 2013. This paper provides a brief history of NASA s earlier work in SCWO, discusses the potential for application of SCWO technology in extended space and extraterrestrial missions, describes related research conducted on the ISS, and provides a list of future research activities to advance this technology in both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial applications.

Hicks, Michael C.↗

The Standard Autonomous File Server, a Customized, Off-the-Shelf Success Story

The Standard Autonomous File Server (SAFS), which includes both off-the-shelf hardware and software, uses an improved automated file transfer process to provide a quicker, more reliable, prioritized file distribution for customers of near real-time data without interfering with the assets involved in the acquisition and processing of the data. It operates as a stand-alone solution, monitoring itself, and providing an automated fail-over process to enhance reliability. This paper will describe the unique problems and lessons learned both during the COTS selection and integration into SAFS, and the system's first year of operation in support of NASA's satellite ground network. COTS was the key factor in allowing the two-person development team to deploy systems in less than a year, meeting the required launch schedule. The SAFS system his been so successful, it is becoming a NASA standard resource, leading to its nomination for NASA's Software or the Year Award in 1999.

Semancik, Susan K.↗

RNAV STAR Procedural Adherence

Flight crews and air traffic controllers have reported many safety concerns regarding area navigation standard terminal arrival routes (RNAV STARs). However, our information sources to quantify these issues are limited to subjective reporting and time consuming case-by-case investigations. This work is a preliminary study into the objective performance of instrument procedures and provides a framework to track procedural concepts and assess design functionality. We created a tool and analysis methods for gauging aircraft adherence as it relates to RNAV STARs. This information is vital for comprehensive understanding of how our air traffic behaves. In this exploratory archival study, we mined the performance of 24 major US airports over the preceding three years. Overlaying radar track data on top of RNAV STAR routes provided a comparison between aircraft flight paths and the waypoint positions and altitude restrictions. NASA Ames Supercomputing resources were utilized to perform the data mining and processing. We assessed STARs by lateral transition path (full-lateral), vertical restrictions (full-lateralfull-vertical), and skipped waypoints (skips). In addition, we graphed aircraft altitudes relative to the altitude restrictions and their occurrence rates. Full-lateral adherence was generally greater than Full-lateralfull-vertical, but the difference between the rates was not always consistent. Full-lateralfull-vertical adherence medians of the 2016 procedures ranged from 0 in KDEN (Denver) to 21 in KMEM (Memphis). Waypoint skips ranged from 0 to nearly 100 for specific waypoints. Altitudes restrictions were sometimes missed by systematic amounts in 1000 ft. increments from the restriction, creating multi-modal distributions. Other times, altitude misses looked to be more normally distributed around the restriction. This tool may aid in providing acceptability metrics as well as risk assessment information.

rnav↗

Using Satellite Data to Characterize Land Surface Processes in Morocco

This study endeavors to produce a comprehensive land cover map for Morocco, addressing the absence of such a detailed map in the country. Our research encompasses ecological and climatic aspects specific to Morocco, while the methods used can be adapted to various regions and countries, considering their unique climatic conditions and land cover types. A combination of MODIS and Landsat datasets was employed to create a 5 km resolution Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) map for the entire nation. The process involved the aggregation and advanced processing of these datasets using surface processes algorithms. The resulting LULC map is the first of its kind for Morocco, shedding light on land cover distribution nationwide. It shows that approximately 13.5% of the country is covered by forests, predominantly in the Atlas and Rif mountains, Rabat–Sale, and the southern regions. Grasslands occupy over 16% of the study area, mainly in the north-east and west. Urban areas, including major cities like Casablanca, Rabat, and Marrakech, span nearly 3400 km². Moreover, large areas of shrublands and bare lands are evident across the country, while agricultural lands account for almost 20% of the national territory, mainly in the interior plains and north-western Atlantic coast. This study forms a crucial basis for ecological and climatic research in Morocco and serves as a valuable reference for various disciplines such as agriculture, natural resource management, and climate modeling. The mapping of biophysical parameters for each land cover class is a key feature of our research, and these parameters will be instrumental in a subsequent study examining the impact of urban development on surface climate in Morocco. Overall, our study underscores the importance of understanding biophysical parameters in addressing environmental and societal challenges.

Mohammed Thaiki↗

Polyphony: A Workflow Orchestration Framework for Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing has delivered unprecedented compute capacity to NASA missions at affordable rates. Missions like the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Mars Science Lab (MSL) are enjoying the elasticity that enables them to leverage hundreds, if not thousands, or machines for short durations without making any hardware procurements. In this paper, we describe Polyphony, a resilient, scalable, and modular framework that efficiently leverages a large set of computing resources to perform parallel computations. Polyphony can employ resources on the cloud, excess capacity on local machines, as well as spare resources on the supercomputing center, and it enables these resources to work in concert to accomplish a common goal. Polyphony is resilient to node failures, even if they occur in the middle of a transaction. We will conclude with an evaluation of a production-ready application built on top of Polyphony to perform image-processing operations of images from around the solar system, including Mars, Saturn, and Titan.

Space Exploration,↗

The roughness of the Martian surface: A scale dependent model

In the coming decade, several lander missions to Mars are planned (e.g., MESUR Pathfinder, MESUR). One of the dangers facing planners of these missions is the rough topography observed at both Viking Lander sites. Both landing sites are ubiquitously covered with meter-scale boulders. Objects of this size pose obvious threats to soft landers, especially at Mars where the distance from Earth causes prohibitive time lags between the transmission of commands and feedback from the spacecraft. An obvious solution is to scout for a 'smooth' site prior to the landing. However, the best resolutions realizable on current and future missions (i.e., Mars Observer) are on the order of several meters. Even at this scale, boulders of 1-2 meters in size are unresolvable. Additionally, the amount of time and spacecraft resources required to search even a small area of the planet are unrealistic given other mission objectives. An alternative is to determine the 'roughness' of the surface at a subpixel scale using bidirectional reflectance observations. Much larger areas of the planet can be searched, and much of the search can easily be automated. The morphology of the martian plains observed by the Viking Landers is physically simple. The surface is covered with a layer (approximately flat lying) of aeolian sediment from which numerous outcrops of bedrock and boulders protrude. This morphology, while simple, will be difficult to characterize from orbit using traditional bidirectional reflectance models for two reasons. First, modeling the surface as facets with Gaussian or exponential slope distributions is not realistic given the morphology described above. Second, the roughness parameter is an 'average' of the roughness at scales ranging from the wavelength of light being scattered to the pixel size of the observation. Thus, there is no definite scale of roughness that can be extracted from the Hapke roughness parameter. Using the concepts of geometric and boolean models developed by several workers, we have developed a model for the bidirectional reflectance of a surface morphology comparable to that observed at the Viking Lander sites.

Shepard, M. K.↗

Recent Progress on Rans-Based Transition Model Verification

The current efforts to assess and improve the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)-coupled transition models in the NASA FUN3D and OVERFLOW codes are summarized in this study. The first AIAA Transition Modeling Workshop and the NATO AVT-313 Transition Workshop both emphasized the need for code verification for transport equations based transition models as a top priority. We discuss the methods used for the model verification, the resulting grid families, the flow solutions, and other supporting information collected with at least two established NASA flow solvers, namely, FUN3D and OVERFLOW. These results, which will be uploaded onto the NASA Turbulence Modeling Resource, should assist other members of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community in verifying their own implementations of various transition models, such as the Langtry-Menter (LM2009) model, the one-equation γ model, and Coder’s amplification factor transport (AFT) model. Grid convergence is assessed using both global and local flow metrics of interest such as lift and drag as well as local skin-friction coefficients. We also explore the anisotropic unstructured metric-based adaptive mesh refinement library known as refine with the NASA FUN3D solver to determine if this capability can achieve the same accuracy as handcrafted structured grids with a significantly smaller node count and to learn the characteristics of the resulting grid distribution, especially in the vicinity of the transition zone.

Transition↗

Recent Progress on RANS-Based Transition Model Verification

The current efforts to assess and improve the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)-coupled transition models in the NASA FUN3D and OVERFLOW codes are summarized in this study. The first AIAA Transition Modeling Workshop and the NATO AVT-313 Transition Workshop both emphasized the need for code verification for transport equations based transition models as a top priority. We discuss the methods used for the model verification, the resulting grid families, the flow solutions, and other supporting information collected with at least two established NASA flow solvers, namely, FUN3D and OVERFLOW. These results, which will be uploaded onto the NASA Turbulence Modeling Resource, should assist other members of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community in verifying their own implementations of various transition models, such as the Langtry-Menter (LM2009) model, the one-equation γ model, and Coder’s amplification factor transport (AFT) model. Grid convergence is assessed using both global and local flow metrics of interest such as lift and drag as well as local skin-friction coefficients. We also explore the anisotropic unstructured metric-based adaptive mesh refinement library known as refine with the NASA FUN3D solver to determine if this capability can achieve the same accuracy as handcrafted structured grids with a significantly smaller node count and to learn the characteristics of the resulting grid distribution, especially in the vicinity of the transition zone.

RANS↗

Clouds and Earth Radiant Energy System (CERES), a Review: Past, Present and Future

The Clouds and Earth Radiant Energy System (CERES) project s objectives are to measure the reflected solar radiance (shortwave) and Earth-emitted (longwave) radiances and from these measurements to compute the shortwave and longwave radiation fluxes at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) and the surface and radiation divergence within the atmosphere. The fluxes at TOA are to be retrieved to an accuracy of 2%. Improved bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) have been developed to compute the fluxes at TOA from the measured radiances with errors reduced from ERBE by a factor of two or more. Instruments aboard the Terra and Aqua spacecraft provide sampling at four local times. In order to further reduce temporal sampling errors, data are used from the geostationary meteorological satellites to account for changes of scenes between observations by the CERES radiometers. A validation protocol including in-flight calibrations and comparisons of measurements has reduced the instrument errors to less than 1%. The data are processed through three editions. The first edition provides a timely flow of data to investigators and the third edition provides data products as accurate as possible with resources available. A suite of cloud properties retrieved from the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) by the CERES team is used to identify the cloud properties for each pixel in order to select the BRDF for each pixel so as to compute radiation fluxes from radiances. Also, the cloud information is used to compute radiation at the surface and through the atmosphere and to facilitate study of the relationship between clouds and the radiation budget. The data products from CERES include, in addition to the reflected solar radiation and Earth emitted radiation fluxes at TOA, the upward and downward shortwave and longwave radiation fluxes at the surface and at various levels in the atmosphere. Also at the surface the photosynthetically active radiation and ultraviolet radiation (total, UVA and UVB) are computed. The CERES instruments aboard the Terra and Aqua spacecraft have served well past their design life times. A CERES instrument has been integrated onto the NPP platform and is ready for launch in 2011. Another CERES instrument is being built for launch in 2014, and plans are being made for a series of follow-on missions.

Smith, G. L.↗