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For Deep Space Missions, the Radio-Frequency (RF) communications link provides both communications and navigation services. In this article we discuss the increased efficiency and reduced cost that can result from the potential consolidation of the two services into one suite of equipment, and the utilization of guaranteed delivery standard protocols to improve the communications service.
Provision of strategic scheduling and tactical separation services is vital to the safe and efficient operation of vehicles in the urban airspace. This paper describes the efforts made towards the integration of two such services in a simulation environment under ideal conditions and the subsequent studies done on evaluation of system performance. The scheduling and separation services are set up to complement each other to ensure safe separation between airborne aircraft. The utility of these services will become important as the level of traffic increases. This paper describes the simulation experiments conducted to identify cases where the system performance measured by the number of observed losses of separation degrades even with the scheduling and separation services active. From the results obtained, we identify conditions under which the required maneuvers increase and when we observe airborne conflicts even with separation service active. Results obtained will inform requirements for future advancements both in these services independently and in their joint operations.
Provision of strategic scheduling and tactical separation services is vital to the safe and efficient operation of vehicles in the urban airspace. This paper describes the efforts made towards the integration of two such services in a simulation environment under ideal conditions and the subsequent studies done on evaluation of system performance. The scheduling and separation services are set up to complement each other to ensure safe separation between airborne aircraft. The utility of these services will become important as the level of traffic increases. This paper describes the simulation experiments conducted to identify cases where the system performance measured by the number of observed losses of separation degrades even with the scheduling and separation services active. From the results obtained, we identify conditions under which the required maneuvers increase and when we observe airborne conflicts even with separation service active. Results obtained will inform requirements for future advancements both in these services independently and in their joint operations.
An interurban helicopter cost model having the capability of selecting an efficient helicopter network for a given city in terms of service and total operating costs was developed. This model which is based upon the relationship between total and direct operating costs and the number of block hours of helicopter operation is compiled in terms of a computer program which simulates the operation of an intracity helicopter fleet over a given network. When applied to specific urban areas, the model produces results in terms of a break-even air passenger market penetration rate, which is the percent of the air travelers in each of those areas that must patronize the helicopter network to make it break even commercially. A total of twenty major metropolitan areas are analyzed and are ranked initially according to cost per seat mile and then according to break-even penetration rate.
In an effort to adapt existing space flight operations services to new emerging Grid technologies we are developing a Grid-based prototype space flight operations Grid. This prototype is based on the operational services being provided to the International Space Station's Payload operations located at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama. The prototype services will be Grid or Web enabled and provided to four user communities through portal technology. Users will have the opportunity to assess the value and feasibility of Grid technologies to their specific areas or disciplines. In this presentation descriptions of the prototype development, User-based services, Grid-based services and status of the project will be presented. Expected benefits, findings and observations (if any) to date will also be discussed. The focus of the presentation will be on the project in general, status to date and future plans. The End-use services to be included in the prototype are voice, video, telemetry, commanding, collaboration tools and visualization among others. Security is addressed throughout the project and is being designed into the Grid technologies and standards development. The project is divided into three phases. Phase One establishes the baseline User-based services required for space flight operations listed above. Phase Two involves applying Gridlweb technologies to the User-based services and development of portals for access by users. Phase Three will allow NASA and end users to evaluate the services and determine the future of the technology as applied to space flight operational services. Although, Phase One, which includes the development of the quasi-operational User-based services of the prototype, development will be completed by March 2004, the application of Grid technologies to these services will have just begun. We will provide status of the Grid technologies to the individual User-based services. This effort will result in an extensible environment that incorporates existing and new spaceflight services into a standards-based framework providing current and future NASA programs with cost savings and new and evolvable methods to conduct science. This project will demonstrate how the use of new programming paradigms such as web and grid services can provide three significant benefits to the cost-effective delivery of spaceflight services. They will enable applications to operate more efficiently by being able to utilize pooled resources. They will also permit the reuse of common services to rapidly construct new and more powerful applications. Finally they will permit easy and secure access to services via a combination of grid and portal technology by a distributed user community consisting of NASA operations centers, scientists, the educational community and even the general population as outreach. The approach will be to deploy existing mission support applications such as the Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) and new applications under development, such as the Grid Video Distribution System (GViDS), together with existing grid applications and services such as high-performance computing and visualization services provided by NASA s Information Power Grid (IPG) in the MSFC s Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) HOSC Annex. Once the initial applications have been moved to the grid, a process will begin to apply the new programming paradigms to integrate them where possible. For example, with GViDS, instead of viewing the Distribution service as an application that must run on a single node, the new approach is to build it such that it can be dispatched across a pool of resources in response to dynamic loads. To make this a reality, reusable services will be critical, such as a brokering service to locate appropriate resource within the pool. This brokering service can then be used by other applications such as the TReK. To expand further, if the GViDS application is constructed using a services-based mel, then other applications such as the Video Auditorium can then use GViDS as a service to easily incorporate these video streams into a collaborative conference. Finally, as these applications are re-factored into this new services-based paradigm, the construction of portals to integrate them will be a simple process. As a result, portals can be tailored to meet the requirements of specific user communities.
The International Space Station uses high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters to remove particulate matter from the cabin atmosphere. Known as Bacteria Filter Elements (BFEs), there are 13 elements deployed on board the ISS's U.S. Segment. The pre-flight service life prediction of 1 year for the BFEs is based upon performance engineering analysis of data collected during developmental testing that used a synthetic dust challenge. While this challenge is considered reasonable and conservative from a design perspective, an understanding of the actual filter loading is required to best manage the critical ISS Program resources. Thus testing was conducted on BFEs returned from the ISS to refine the service life prediction. Results from this testing and implications to ISS resource management are discussed. Recommendations for realizing significant savings to the ISS Program are presented.
Mobile satellite systems being planned for introduction in the early 1990s are expected to be invariably of the multi-service type. Mobile Telephone Service (MTS), Mobile Radio Service (MRS), and Mobile Data Service (MDS) are the major classifications used to categorize the many user applications to be supported. The MTS and MRS services encompass circuit-switched voice communication applications, and may be efficiently implemented using a centralized Demand-Assigned Multiple Access (DAMA) scheme. Applications under the MDS category are, on the other hand, message-oriented and expected to vary widely in characteristics; from simplex mode short messaging applications to long duration, full-duplex interactive data communication and large file transfer applications. For some applications under this service category, the conventional circuit-based DAMA scheme may prove highly inefficient due to the long time required to set up and establish communication links relative to the actual message transmission time. It is proposed that by defining a set of basic bearer services to be supported in MDS and optimizing their transmission and access schemes independent of the MTS and MRS services, the MDS applications can be more efficiently integrated into the multi-service design of mobile satellite systems.
Major study areas treated in this volume are: 1) operations and control and 2) the telecommunication service system. The TDRS orbit selection, orbital deployment, ground station visibility, sequence of events from launch to final orbit position, and TDRS control center functions required for stationkeeping, repositioning, attitude control, and antenna pointing are briefly treated as part of the operations and control section. The last topic of this section concerns the operations required for efficiently providing the TDRSS user telecommunication services. The discussion treats functions of the GSFC control and data processing facility, ground station, and TDRS control center. The second major portion of this volume deals with the Telecommunication Service System (TSS) which consists of the ground station, TDRS communication equipment and the user transceiver. A summary of the requirements and objectives for the telecommunication services and a brief summary of the TSS capabilities is followed by communication system analysis, signal design, and equipment design. Finally, descriptions of the three TSS elements are presented.
This paper reports the findings of a simulation of the Aeronautical Mobile Satellite Service (AMSS) to be used in the ATN (Aeronautical Telecommunications Network). The models of the protocols used in this simulation were designed to be compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Standards and Recommended Practices (SARP). The focus of this research is on the data communication capabilities of the AMSS. The simulated performance characteristics for a region of the AMSS are presented. The results are analyzed to determine the efficiency, limitations, and behavior of this service for the foreseen data communication
Hyrax OPeNDAP services are widely used by the Earth Science data centers in NASA, NOAA and other organizations to serve end users. In this talk, we will present some key features added in the HDF5 Hyrax OPeNDAP handler that can help data centers to better serve the HDF5netCDF-4 data products. Among these new features, we will focus on the following:1.The DAP4 support 2.The memory cache and the disk cache support that can reduce the service access time 3.The enhancement that makes the swath-like HDF5 products visualized by CF-client tools. We will also discuss the role of the HDF5 handler in-depth in the recent study of the Hyrax service in the cloud environment.
Project Matsu is a collaboration between the Open Commons Consortium and NASA focused on developing open source technology for cloud-based processing of Earth satellite imagery with practical applications to aid in natural disaster detection and relief. Project Matsu has developed an open source cloud-based infrastructure to process, analyze, and reanalyze large collections of hyperspectral satellite image data using OpenStack, Hadoop, MapReduce and related technologies. We describe a framework for efficient analysis of large amounts of data called the Matsu "Wheel." The Matsu Wheel is currently used to process incoming hyperspectral satellite data produced daily by NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. The framework allows batches of analytics, scanning for new data, to be applied to data as it flows in. In the Matsu Wheel, the data only need to be accessed and preprocessed once, regardless of the number or types of analytics, which can easily be slotted into the existing framework. The Matsu Wheel system provides a significantly more efficient use of computational resources over alternative methods when the data are large, have high-volume throughput, may require heavy preprocessing, and are typically used for many types of analysis. We also describe our preliminary Wheel analytics, including an anomaly detector for rare spectral signatures or thermal anomalies in hyperspectral data and a land cover classifier that can be used for water and flood detection. Each of these analytics can generate visual reports accessible via the web for the public and interested decision makers. The result products of the analytics are also made accessible through an Open Geospatial Compliant (OGC)-compliant Web Map Service (WMS) for further distribution. The Matsu Wheel allows many shared data services to be performed together to efficiently use resources for processing hyperspectral satellite image data and other, e.g., large environmental datasets that may be analyzed for many purposes.
This slide presentation reviews the application of middleware in space exploration, and satellite communications. The aim of the use of Space middleware is ot use remote sensors and other resources more efficiently.
The Ames Multi-Mission Operations Center (MMOC) enables and supports flight and science operations for Ames' spaceflight missions. The MMOC is composed of the facilities, networks, information technology equipment, software, and system administration services needed by flight projects to effectively and efficiently perform all mission functions, including planning, scheduling, command, telemetry processing, and science analysis. The MMOC's ready-to-use services reduce start-up time, shorten procurement and provisioning and allow mission planning efforts to focus more on science and less on infrastructure. The architecture of the MMOC was designed from the start for flexibility, so that it can readily support multiple missions of greatly varying size and complexity while simultaneously keeping costs low.
This report presents a survey of the traffic management Issues in the design and implementation of satellite Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. The report focuses on the efficient transport of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic over satellite ATM. First, a reference satellite ATM network architecture is presented along with an overview of the service categories available in ATM networks. A delay model for satellite networks and the major components of delay and delay variation are described. A survey of design options for TCP over Unspecified Bit Rate (UBR), Guaranteed Frame Rate (GFR) and Available Bit Rate (ABR) services in ATM is presented. The main focus is on traffic management issues. Several recommendations on the design options for efficiently carrying data services over satellite ATM networks are presented. Most of the results are based on experiments performed on Geosynchronous (GEO) latencies. Some results for Low Earth Orbits (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) latencies are also provided.
NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) provides access to a wide range of global climate data from various satellite missions and models. However, the visualization and analysis of these data can be challenging due to their large volume, complex structure, and diverse formats. This study presents the implementation of interoperable map services (API-Maps) with performance tuning using API-Tiles and dynamic API-Styles. API-Maps is a standard for defining and exposing map services through RESTful (representational state transfer) APIs (application programming interfaces). API-Tiles is a technique for generating and delivering map tiles on demand from any data source. API-Styles is a method for dynamically applying styles to map tiles based on user preferences or data attributes. The use of API-Tiles and dynamic API-Styles enhances the performance and scalability of the map services, allowing for smooth and interactive visualization of large datasets. Two types of Earth Science data sources from the NASA GES DISC are used in the experiment: regularly gridded data, such as Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) precipitation data, and low processing level data, such as low-level data of atmospheric composite measurements from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) mission. Re-gridding of swath data (low level data - e.g. Level 2) of atmospheric composites (e.g. TROPOMI products, such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone and aerosol optical depth) is applied to enable the Web-based, interoperable, tiled, and styled mapping (rendering) services of such data. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in providing fast and efficient access to Earth science data through interoperable map services.
The following future directions in civil aviation are considered: (1) greater economy and efficiency in passenger and cargo air service at subsonic speeds, and improved utility and safety for general aviation, (2) greatly improved short haul air transportation using turbofan or turboprop aircraft, and subsequently, rotorcraft and V/STOL aircraft, and (3) supersonic, and ultimately hypersonic, air transportation for transoceanic long range flight. Attention is also given to new directions in research and technology.
Laminar flow control is a technology with great potential for aircraft drag reduction. Stabilization of laminar boundary layers became known as natural laminar flow (NLF) and research led to the development of NLF airfoils. Research was also conducted on stabilization by suction, referred to as laminar flow control (LFC). Experiments demonstrated that extensive laminar flow could be achieved in flight. However, there remained doubts regarding the practicality of producing, with the technology then available, wing surfaces sufficiently smooth and wavefree to meet laminar-flow criteria and maintaining the wing surface quality in normal service. In 1976, the Aircraft Energy Efficiency (ACEE) program was begun by NASA to develop fuel-conservative technology for commercial transports. The progress of the ACEE program is discussed. Attention is given to LFC wing structures, and LFC leading-edge systems.
The NASA Space Station will employ alkaline regenerative fuel cells (RFCs) as its sole electrochemical energy storage system, in virtue of demonstrated technology readiness and a high degree of system-level design flexibility. NASA Johnson and NASA Lewis are currently engaged in the development of a 10-kW alkaline engineering model system, for 1987 delivery, which will encompass a fully autonomous 120-V system with 55 percent overall electrical efficiency and a 20,000-hr service life.