Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “user support”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,135 records · Page 63
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1988

Growth requirements for multidiscipline research and development on the evolutionary space station

The NASA Space Station Freedom is being designed to facilitate on-orbit evolution and growth to accommodate changing user needs and future options for U.S. space exploration. In support of the Space Station Freedom Program Preliminary Requirements Review, The Langley Space Station Office has identified a set of resource requirements for Station growth which is deemed adequate for the various evolution options. As part of that effort, analysis was performed to scope requirements for Space Station as an expanding, multidiscipline facility for scientific research, technology development and commercial production. This report describes the assumptions, approach and results of the study.

Meredith, Barry↗
NASA NTRS1990

University of Maryland walking robot: A design project for undergraduate students

The design and construction required that the walking robot machine be capable of completing a number of tasks including walking in a straight line, turning to change direction, and maneuvering over an obstable such as a set of stairs. The machine consists of two sets of four telescoping legs that alternately support the entire structure. A gear-box and crank-arm assembly is connected to the leg sets to provide the power required for the translational motion of the machine. By retracting all eight legs, the robot comes to rest on a central Bigfoot support. Turning is accomplished by rotating the machine about this support. The machine can be controlled by using either a user operated remote tether or the on-board computer for the execution of control commands. Absolute encoders are attached to all motors (leg, main drive, and Bigfoot) to provide the control computer with information regarding the status of the motors (up-down motion, forward or reverse rotation). Long and short range infrared sensors provide the computer with feedback information regarding the machine's relative position to a series of stripes and reflectors. These infrared sensors simulate how the robot might sense and gain information about the environment of Mars.

Olsen, Bob↗
NASA NTRS1994

Analysis of space network loading

The NASA Space Network (SN) consists of several geosynchronous communications satellites, in addition to ground support facilities. Space Network management must predict years in advance what network resources are necessary to adequately satisfy all SN users. Similarly, users of the Space Network must know throughout all stages of mission planning and operations to what extent their communication support requirements can be met. NASA, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, performs Space Network and Mission Modeling using The Network Planning and Analysis System (NPAS), to determine the answers to these questions.

Simons, Mark↗
NASA NTRS1995

Including auroral oval boundaries in the IRI model

At the last International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) Workshop it was decided that future editions of the model should include a representationof the aurroral oval boundaries. In this paper we review the different existing parameterizations of the auroral oval discussing their data base, boundary criteria, matematical formation, and overall usefulness for IRI. As a first candidate for incorporation into IRI we recomment the parameterization of the Feldstein ovals by Holzworth and Meng. Ways of implementing this model into IRI are discussed. We will also address adjustability with user-provided boundaries or boundary-related parameters, to better support strom-related studies.

Bilitza, A.↗
NASA NTRS1997

Restoration and reconstruction from overlapping images

This paper describes a technique for restoring and reconstructing a scene from overlapping images. In situations where there are multiple, overlapping images of the same scene, it may be desirable to create a single image that most closely approximates the scene, based on all of the data in the available images. For example, successive swaths acquired by NASA's planned Moderate Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) will overlap, particularly at wide scan angles, creating a severe visual artifact in the output image. Resampling the overlapping swaths to produce a more accurate image on a uniform grid requires restoration and reconstruction. The one-pass restoration and reconstruction technique developed in this paper yields mean-square-optimal resampling, based on a comprehensive end-to-end system model that accounts for image overlap, and subject to user-defined and data-availability constraints on the spatial support of the filter.

Reichenbach, Stephen E.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Support for Debugging Automatically Parallelized Programs

This viewgraph presentation provides information on support sources available for the automatic parallelization of computer program. CAPTools, a support tool developed at the University of Greenwich, transforms, with user guidance, existing sequential Fortran code into parallel message passing code. Comparison routines are then run for debugging purposes, in essence, ensuring that the code transformation was accurate.

Hood, Robert↗
NASA NTRS2005

Input Files and Procedures for Analysis of SMA Hybrid Composite Beams in MSC.Nastran and ABAQUS

A thermoelastic constitutive model for shape memory alloys (SMAs) and SMA hybrid composites (SMAHCs) was recently implemented in the commercial codes MSC.Nastran and ABAQUS. The model is implemented and supported within the core of the commercial codes, so no user subroutines or external calculations are necessary. The model and resulting structural analysis has been previously demonstrated and experimentally verified for thermoelastic, vibration and acoustic, and structural shape control applications. The commercial implementations are described in related documents cited in the references, where various results are also shown that validate the commercial implementations relative to a research code. This paper is a companion to those documents in that it provides additional detail on the actual input files and solution procedures and serves as a repository for ASCII text versions of the input files necessary for duplication of the available results.

Turner, Travis L.↗
NASA NTRS2004

CTAS and NASA Air Traffic Management Fact Sheets for En Route Descent Advisor and Surface Management System

The Surface Management System (SMS) is a decision support tool that will help controllers, traffic managers, and NAS users manage the movements of aircraft on the surface of busy airports, improving capacity, efficiency, and flexibility. The Advanced Air Transportation Technologies (AATT) Project at NASA is developing SMS in cooperation with the FAA's Free Flight Phase 2 (FFP2) pro5ram. SMS consists of three parts: a traffic management tool, a controller tool, and a National Airspace System (NAS) information tool.

Lee, Katharine↗
NASA NTRS2007

Architecture and Data Management Challenges in GEOSS and IEOS

The international Group on Earth Observations (GEO) was initiated in 2003 to engage all the nations of the Earth in building a coordinated, comprehensive, and sustained Earth observation capability, known as the Global Earth Observation System (GEOSS). The GEO website describes GEOSS this way: "GEOSS will build on and add value to existing Earth-observation systems by coordinating their efforts, addressing critical gaps, supporting their interoperability, sharing information, reaching a common understanding of user requirements, and improving delivery of information to users." Each member nation has responded to GEO by establishing some sort of coordinating body; within the United States, that is the United States Group on Earth Observations (USGEO). This paper will describe the establishment of GEO and USGEO, will provide an overview of the activities and challenges in the area of architecture and data management, and will highlight some of the major efforts underway within USGEO today.

Fontaine, Kathleen S.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Mission and Assets Database

Mission and Assets Database (MADB) Version 1.0 is an SQL database system with a Web user interface to centralize information. The database stores flight project support resource requirements, view periods, antenna information, schedule, and forecast results for use in mid-range and long-term planning of Deep Space Network (DSN) assets.

Baldwin, John↗
NASA NTRS2007

Grid Task Execution

IPG Execution Service is a framework that reliably executes complex jobs on a computational grid, and is part of the IPG service architecture designed to support location-independent computing. The new grid service enables users to describe the platform on which they need a job to run, which allows the service to locate the desired platform, configure it for the required application, and execute the job. After a job is submitted, users can monitor it through periodic notifications, or through queries. Each job consists of a set of tasks that performs actions such as executing applications and managing data. Each task is executed based on a starting condition that is an expression of the states of other tasks. This formulation allows tasks to be executed in parallel, and also allows a user to specify tasks to execute when other tasks succeed, fail, or are canceled. The two core components of the Execution Service are the Task Database, which stores tasks that have been submitted for execution, and the Task Manager, which executes tasks in the proper order, based on the user-specified starting conditions, and avoids overloading local and remote resources while executing tasks.

Hu, Chaumin↗
NASA NTRS2010

Efficient Parallel Engineering Computing on Linux Workstations

A C software module has been developed that creates lightweight processes (LWPs) dynamically to achieve parallel computing performance in a variety of engineering simulation and analysis applications to support NASA and DoD project tasks. The required interface between the module and the application it supports is simple, minimal and almost completely transparent to the user applications, and it can achieve nearly ideal computing speed-up on multi-CPU engineering workstations of all operating system platforms. The module can be integrated into an existing application (C, C++, Fortran and others) either as part of a compiled module or as a dynamically linked library (DLL).

Lou, John Z.↗
NASA NTRS1999

Space-to-Space Communications System

The Space-to-Space Communications System (SSCS) is an Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Time-Division-Multiple Access (TDMA) system that is designed, developed, and deployed by the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) to provide voice, commands, telemetry and data services in close proximity among three space elements: International Space Station (ISS), Space Shuttle Orbiter, and Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU). The SSCS consists of a family of three radios which are, Space-to-Space Station Radio (SSSR), Space-to-Space Orbiter Radio (SSOR), and Space-to-Space Extravehicular Mobility Radio (SSER). The SSCS can support up to five such radios at a time. Each user has its own time slot within which to transmit voice and data. Continuous Phase Frequency Shift Keying (CPFSK) carrier modulation with a burst data rate of 695 kbps and a frequency deviation of 486.5 kHz is employed by the system. Reed-Solomon (R-S) coding is also adopted to ensure data quality. In this paper, the SSCS system requirements, operational scenario, detailed system architecture and parameters, link acquisition strategy, and link performance analysis will be presented and discussed

Kwei tU↗
NASA NTRS2010

Proposed Use of the NASA Ames Nebula Cloud Computing Platform for Numerical Weather Prediction and the Distribution of High Resolution Satellite Imagery

The development of the Nebula Cloud Computing Platform at NASA Ames Research Center provides an open-source solution for the deployment of scalable computing and storage capabilities relevant to the execution of real-time weather forecasts and the distribution of high resolution satellite data to the operational weather community. Two projects at Marshall Space Flight Center may benefit from use of the Nebula system. The NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center facilitates the use of unique NASA satellite data and research capabilities in the operational weather community by providing datasets relevant to numerical weather prediction, and satellite data sets useful in weather analysis. SERVIR provides satellite data products for decision support, emphasizing environmental threats such as wildfires, floods, landslides, and other hazards, with interests in numerical weather prediction in support of disaster response. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model Environmental Modeling System (WRF-EMS) has been configured for Nebula cloud computing use via the creation of a disk image and deployment of repeated instances. Given the available infrastructure within Nebula and the "infrastructure as a service" concept, the system appears well-suited for the rapid deployment of additional forecast models over different domains, in response to real-time research applications or disaster response. Future investigations into Nebula capabilities will focus on the development of a web mapping server and load balancing configuration to support the distribution of high resolution satellite data sets to users within the National Weather Service and international partners of SERVIR.

Limaye, Ashutosh S.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Software for Allocating Resources in the Deep Space Network

TIGRAS 2.0 is a computer program designed to satisfy a need for improved means for analyzing the tracking demands of interplanetary space-flight missions upon the set of ground antenna resources of the Deep Space Network (DSN) and for allocating those resources. Written in Microsoft Visual C++, TIGRAS 2.0 provides a single rich graphical analysis environment for use by diverse DSN personnel, by connecting to various data sources (relational databases or files) based on the stages of the analyses being performed. Notable among the algorithms implemented by TIGRAS 2.0 are a DSN antenna-load-forecasting algorithm and a conflict-aware DSN schedule-generating algorithm. Computers running TIGRAS 2.0 can also be connected using SOAP/XML to a Web services server that provides analysis services via the World Wide Web. TIGRAS 2.0 supports multiple windows and multiple panes in each window for users to view and use information, all in the same environment, to eliminate repeated switching among various application programs and Web pages. TIGRAS 2.0 enables the use of multiple windows for various requirements, trajectory-based time intervals during which spacecraft are viewable, ground resources, forecasts, and schedules. Each window includes a time navigation pane, a selection pane, a graphical display pane, a list pane, and a statistics pane.

Wang, Yeou-Fang↗
NASA NTRS2011

NASA's Global Change Master Directory: Discover and Access Earth Science Data Sets, Related Data Services, and Climate Diagnostics

NASA's Global Change Master Directory provides the scientific community with the ability to discover, access, and use Earth science data, data-related services, and climate diagnostics worldwide. The GCMD offers descriptions of Earth science data sets using the Directory Interchange Format (DIF) metadata standard; Earth science related data services are described using the Service Entry Resource Format (SERF); and climate visualizations are described using the Climate Diagnostic (CD) standard. The DIF, SERF and CD standards each capture data attributes used to determine whether a data set, service, or climate visualization is relevant to a user's needs. Metadata fields include: title, summary, science keywords, service keywords, data center, data set citation, personnel, instrument, platform, quality, related URL, temporal and spatial coverage, data resolution and distribution information. In addition, nine valuable sets of controlled vocabularies have been developed to assist users in normalizing the search for data descriptions. An update to the GCMD's search functionality is planned to further capitalize on the controlled vocabularies during database queries. By implementing a dynamic keyword "tree", users will have the ability to search for data sets by combining keywords in new ways. This will allow users to conduct more relevant and efficient database searches to support the free exchange and re-use of Earth science data. http://gcmd.nasa.gov/

Aleman, Alicia↗
NASA NTRS2013

Lunar Data Node: Apollo Data Restoration and Archiving Update

The Lunar Data Node (LDN) of the Planetary Data System (PDS) is responsible for the restoration and archiving of Apollo data. The LDN is located at the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), which holds much of the extant Apollo data on microfilm, microfiche, hard-copy documents, and magnetic tapes in older formats. The goal of the restoration effort is to convert the data into user-accessible PDS formats, create a full set of explanatory supporting data (metadata), archive the full data sets through PDS, and post the data online at the PDS Geosciences Node. This will both enable easy use of the data by current researchers and ensure that the data and metadata are securely preserved for future use. We are also attempting to locate and preserve Apollo data which were never archived at NSSDC. We will give a progress report on the data sets we have been restoring and future work.

Williams, David R.↗