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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 1,153 records · Page 64
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1993

Mission Operations and Command Assurance: Automating an Operations TQM Task

Mission Operations and Command Assurance (MO&CA) is a Total Quality Management (TQM) task on JPL projects to instill quality into mission operations. The mission operations environment is inherently risky because each decision made is potentially mission critical. The flight operations environment generally requires operators to make rapid critical decisions and solve problems based on limited information, while closely following standard procedures. MO&CA's primary goal is to help improve the operational reliability and reduce risk of projects during flight. To achieve this goal, automation of the MO&CA task is required. MO&CA specifically embodies the TQM principle of continuous process improvement (CPI) in which processes are continually examined and analyzed for opportunities for improvement. The second way in which MO&CA implements CPI on JPL projects is on new projects or upgrades to existing projects.

mission↗
NASA NTRS2018

Exploring Synergistic Tools from NASA Satellite Data for Air Quality

Space-borne earth observation has been important to monitor the earth condition and played a critical role in validating other instruments or modeling's outputs. However, the data from satellite earth observation are usually very complex in terms of science contents, formats, and spatiotemporal granularities, making them difficult to use from many aspects. NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), one of the 12 official NASA data centers, archives and distributes rich collections of data from multiple satellite missions and model results. The GES DISC is also the official archive center for data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard NASA's Aura mission since 2004. Recently, the GES DISC has been evolving and improving its data management and services in order to promote NASA data to be easily discovered and accessed, as well as to facilitate interoperability. We'll show in this presentation how to explore and analyze NASA earth observation data for air quality through a suite of user-friendly tools - from Worldview to Giovanni, demonstrating in using this set of tools prepares us to serve the Sentinel 5P TROPOMI to the community.

air quality↗
NASA NTRS1975

Space transportation

User-oriented panels were formed to examine practical applications of information or services derived from earth orbiting satellites. Topics discussed include: weather and climate; uses of communication; land use planning; agriculture, forest, and range; inland water resources; retractable resources; environmental quality; marine and maritime uses; and materials processing in space. Emphasis was placed on the interface of the space transportation system (STS) with the applications envisioned by the user panels. User requirements were compared with expected STS capabilities in terms of availability, carrying payload to orbit, and estimated costs per launch. Conclusions and recommendations were reported.

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NASA NTRS1984

Intercenter Problem Reporting and Corrective Action System (PRACAS)

The Kennedy Space Center is transforming the PRACA bath automatic data processing (ADP) system of today into a fully integrated data base with on-line update and retrieval capabilities. The present manual system of reporting (Datafax, mail, and telephone) to the off-site design and engineering organizations is to be replaced by direct access to the most current information as it accrues at KSC or VAFB. Two major goals of the Intercenter PRACA are to provide a single data depository for both launch sites and to fully integrate the problem data with engineering data as well as other relevant information. The resulting ADP system can provide a closed loop system for problem reporting, corrective action and recurrence control that should serve the engineering community as well as reliability and quality assurance at the launch sites, KSC and VAFB, and at the design centers, JSC and MSFC.

Brock, G. H.↗
NASA NTRS1985

An evaluation of the performance of Umkehr stations by Solar Backscattered Ultraviolet (SBUV) experiment

Until recently, Umkehr data taken by 20 Dobson stations around the world have been the principal source of information about the behavior of upper stratospheric ozone. Umkehr results are used also for detecting drifts in satellite instruments and for determining intersatellite biases. However, a systematic evaluation of the quality of Umkehr data taken by the various stations has been lacking. Five years of ozone profile data from the Solar Backscattered Ultraviolet (SBUV) have been used to examine and intercompare the quality of Umkehr stations, and to assess the degradation of their performance after the El Chichon volcano eruption in southern Mexico. In contrast to Umkehr, the SBUV ozone measurments in layers 7 through 9 (1-8 mb) were unaffected by the massive amounts of dust and gases ejected by El Chichon.

Bhartia, P. K.↗
NASA NTRS1988

Automated software development workstation

A workstation is being developed that provides a computational environment for all NASA engineers across application boundaries, which automates reuse of existing NASA software and designs, and efficiently and effectively allows new programs and/or designs to be developed, catalogued, and reused. The generic workstation is made domain specific by specialization of the user interface, capturing engineering design expertise for the domain, and by constructing/using a library of pertinent information. The incorporation of software reusability principles and expert system technology into this workstation provide the obvious benefits of increased productivity, improved software use and design reliability, and enhanced engineering quality by bringing engineering to higher levels of abstraction based on a well tested and classified library.

Prouty, Dale A.↗
NASA NTRS1991

A research review of quality assessment for software

Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness.

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NASA NTRS1990

Transition research using flight experiments

The paper deals with flight experiments as a means of obtaining proper transition information in an uncontaminated environment. Flight transition experiments performed in the early to middle 1950s using rocket-propelled vehicles are outlined. It is noted that the standards for research quality experiments on stability and transition are no different for flight studies than for wind-tunnel experiments. The guidelines formulated by the U.S. Boundary Layer Transition Study Group are listed. Attention is focused on the relationship between the model design and the measurement of disturbance environment, the maintenance and monitoring of test and model-surface conditions, and a need for high data-sampling rates.

Reshotko, Eli↗
NASA NTRS1993

The NASA Lewis Research Center SBIR program: An assessment

An assessment was made of the NASA Lewis Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program for the years 1983 to 1989. The assessment was based on the study of 99 Phase 1 contracts and 39 Phase 2 contracts. The overall impact of SBIR was found to be very positive, contributing strongly to many NASA programs. In addition, many successful efforts were commercialized benefiting the small business, federal agencies, and the aerospace industry. The program was evaluated in terms of contract quality, innovativeness, comparison to the state-of-the-art, achievement of goals, difficulty, and impact. Program difficulties were also identified, which could suggest possible program improvements. Much of the information gained in this assessment provided a basis for a SBIR data base which will be updated every year. This data base is computerized and will provide an excellent source of information about past SBIR efforts and company capabilities.

Grimes, Hubert H.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Soil conservation applications with C-band SAR

Soil conservation programs are becoming more important as the growing human population exerts greater pressure on this non-renewable resource. Indeed, soil degradation affects approximately 10 percent of Canada's agricultural land with an estimated loss of 6,000 hectares of topsoil annually from Ontario farmland alone. Soil loss not only affects agricultural productivity but also decreases water quality and can lead to siltation problems. Thus, there is a growing demand for soil conservation programs and a need to develop an effective monitoring system. Topography and soil type information can easily be handled within a geographic information system (GIS). Information about vegetative cover type and surface roughness, which both experience considerable temporal change, can be obtained from remote sensing techniques. For further development of the technology to produce an operational soil conservation monitoring system, an experiment was conducted in Oxford County, Ontario which investigated the separability of fall surface cover type using C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data.

Brisco, B.↗
NASA NTRS1995

Fault recovery in the reliable multicast protocol

The Reliable Multicast Protocol (RMP) provides a unique, group-based model for distributed programs that need to handle reconfiguration events at the application layer. This model, called membership views, provides an abstraction in which events such as site failures, network partitions, and normal join-leave events are viewed as group reformations. RMP provides access to this model through an application programming interface (API) that notifies an application when a group is reformed as the result of a some event. RMP provides applications with reliable delivery of messages using an underlying IP Multicast (12, 5) media to other group members in a distributed environment even in the case of reformations. A distributed application can use various Quality of Service (QoS) levels provided by RMP to tolerate group reformations. This paper explores the implementation details of the mechanisms in RMP that provide distributed applications with membership view information and fault recovery capabilities.

Callahan, John R.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Specification and Design of a Fault Recovery Model for the Reliable Multicast Protocol

The Reliable Multicast Protocol (RMP) provides a unique, group-based model for distributed programs that need to handle reconfiguration events at the application layer. This model, called membership views, provides an abstraction in which events such as site failures, network partitions, and normal join-leave events are viewed as group reformations. RMP provides access to this model through an application programming interface (API) that notifies an application when a group is reformed as the result of a some event. RMP provides applications with reliable delivery of messages using an underlying IP Multicast media to other group members in a distributed environment even in the case of reformations. A distributed application can use various Quality of Service (QoS) levels provided by RMP to tolerate group reformations. This paper explores the implementation details of the mechanisms in RMP that provide distributed applications with membership view information and fault recovery capabilities.

Montgomery, Todd↗
NASA NTRS1999

Simulation of Ozone and Long Lived Tracers in the GSFC Two-Dimensional Model

The GSFC two-dimensional transport and chemistry model has been used for a wide variety of scientific and assessment studies of stratospheric ozone. Transport is a key element in the ozone simulations, and we have recently upgraded our model transport formulation to include much of the information about atmospheric transport processes available from existing data sets. To properly evaluate the model transport, it is desirable to examine the effects of transport and photochemistry separately. Recently, high quality observations of several long lived stratospheric tracers have become available from aircraft, balloon, and satellite measurement systems. This data provides a means to do a detailed model transport evaluation, as has been done in the recent Models and Measurements Intercomparison Project II. In this paper, we will discuss the GSFC 2D model simulations of ozone together with model-data comparisons of long lived tracers such as methane and the age of air transport diagnostic. We will show that the model can reproduce many of the transport-sensitive features observed in the stratosphere, and can compare reasonably well with measurements of both total ozone and long lived tracers simultaneously. We will also discuss the model deficiencies in simulating some of the detailed aspects of the observations.

Fleming, Eric L.↗
NASA NTRS2000

The SR-71 Test Bed Aircraft: A Facility for High-Speed Flight Research

The SR-71 test bed aircraft is shown to be a unique platform to flight-test large experiments to supersonic Mach numbers. The test bed hardware mounted on the SR-71 upper fuselage is described. This test bed hardware is composed of a fairing structure called the "canoe" and a large "reflection plane" flat plate for mounting experiments. Total experiment weights, including the canoe and reflection plane, as heavy as 14,500 lb can be mounted on the aircraft and flight-tested to speeds as fast as Mach 3.2 and altitudes as high as 80,000 ft. A brief description of the SR-71 aircraft is given, including details of the structural modifications to the fuselage, modifications to the J58 engines to provide increased thrust, and the addition of a research instrumentation system. Information is presented based on flight data that describes the SR-71 test bed aerodynamics, stability and control, structural and thermal loads, the canoe internal environment, and reflection plane flow quality. Guidelines for designing SR-71 test bed experiments are also provided.

Corda, Stephen↗
NASA NTRS2000

Picturing Video

Video Pics is a software program that generates high-quality photos from video. The software was developed under an SBIR contract with Marshall Space Flight Center by Redhawk Vision, Inc.--a subsidiary of Irvine Sensors Corporation. Video Pics takes information content from multiple frames of video and enhances the resolution of a selected frame. The resulting image has enhanced sharpness and clarity like that of a 35 mm photo. The images are generated as digital files and are compatible with image editing software.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2015

Evaluation of a Gas Chromatograph-Differential Mobility Spectrometer for Potential Water Monitoring on the International Space Station

Environmental monitoring for manned spaceflight has long depended on archival sampling, which was sufficient for short missions. However, the longer mission durations aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have shown that enhanced, real-time monitoring capabilities are necessary in order to protect both the crewmembers and the spacecraft systems. Over the past several years, a number of real-time environmental monitors have been deployed on the ISS. Currently, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the station air are monitored by the Air Quality Monitor (AQM), a small, lightweight gas chromatograph-differential mobility spectrometer. For water monitoring, real-time monitors are used for total organic carbon (TOC) and biocide analysis. No information on the actual makeup of the TOC is provided presently, however. An improvement to the current state of environmental monitoring could be realized by modifying a single instrument to analyze both air and water. As the AQM currently provides quantitative, compound-specific information for VOCs in air samples, this instrument provides a logical starting point to evaluate the feasibility of this approach. The major hurdle for this effort lies in the liberation of the target analytes from the water matrix. In this presentation, we will discuss our recent studies, in which an electro-thermal vaporization unit has been interfaced with the AQM to analyze target VOCs at the concentrations at which they are routinely detected in archival water samples from the ISS. We will compare the results of these studies with those obtained from the instrumentation routinely used to analyze archival water samples.

Wallace, William T.↗
NASA NTRS2015

Dose Tracker Application for Monitoring Crew Medication Usage, Symptoms, and Adverse Effects During Missions

Medication usage records can be used as a relatively nonintrusive means of monitoring health. This has been attempted previously through crew medical records, but these records are incomplete from the perspective of a research pharmacologist. During the shuttle era, NASA operations did not include routine questioning of crewmembers about their medication use until after missions were complete. The (long!) questionnaire was on paper. Asking crewmembers to recall medication use from weeks before questioning made getting complete and accurate information virtually impossible. This study will document medication usage of crewmembers before and during their missions. It will capture previously unrecorded data regarding medication use during spaceflight, including side effect qualities, frequencies and severities. The research-oriented data will be collected for research purposes, separate from medical records. Dose Tracker employs an iOS application (app) for fast & easy collection of medication usage data from crewmember participants during their missions.

Wotring, Virginia↗
NASA NTRS2015

Holiday in Lights: Tracking Cultural Patterns in Demand for Energy Services

Successful climate change mitigation will involve not only technological innovation, but also innovation in how we understand the societal and individual behaviors that shape the demand for energy services. Traditionally, individual energy behaviors have been described as a function of utility optimization and behavioral economics, with price restructuring as the dominant policy lever. Previous research at the macro-level has identified economic activity, power generation and technology, and economic role as significant factors that shape energy use. However, most demand models lack basic contextual information on how dominant social phenomenon, the changing demographics of cities, and the sociocultural setting within which people operate, affect energy decisions and use patterns. Here we use high-quality Suomi-NPP VIIRS nighttime environmental products to: (1) observe aggregate human behavior through variations in energy service demand patterns during the Christmas and New Year's season and the Holy Month of Ramadan and (2) demonstrate that patterns in energy behaviors closely track sociocultural boundaries at the country, city, and district level. These findings indicate that energy decision making and demand is a sociocultural process as well as an economic process, often involving a combination of individual price-based incentives and societal-level factors. While nighttime satellite imagery has been used to map regional energy infrastructure distribution, tracking daily dynamic lighting demand at three major scales of urbanization is novel. This methodology can enrich research on the relative importance of drivers of energy demand and conservation behaviors at fine scales. Our initial results demonstrate the importance of seating energy demand frameworks in a social context.

VIIRS night sky↗