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At least 1,387 records · Page 77

Ice Shelves and Landfast Ice on the Antarctic Perimeter: Revised Scope of Work

Ice shelves respond quickly and profoundly to a warming climate. Within a decade after mean summertime temperature reaches approx. O C and persistent melt pending is observed, a rapid retreat and disintegration occurs. This link was documented for ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula region (the Larsen 'A', 'B' and Wilkins Ice shelves) by the results of a previous grant under ADRO-1. Modeling of ice flow and the effects of meltwater indicated that melt pending accelerates shelf breakup by increasing fracture penetration. SAR data supplemented an AVHRR- and SSM/I-based image analysis of extent and surface characteristic changes. This funded grant is a revised, scaled-down version of an earlier proposal under the ADRO-2 NRA. The overall objective remains the same: we propose to build on the previous study by examining other ice shelves of the Antarctic and incorporate an examination of the climate-related characteristics of landfast ice. The study now considers just a few shelf and fast ice areas for study, and is funded for two years. The study regions are the northeastern Ross Ice Shelf, the Larsen 'B' and 'C' shelves, fast ice and floating shelf ice in the Pine Island Glacier area, and fast ice along the Wilkes Land coast. Further, rather than investigating a host of shelf and fast ice processes, we will home in on developing a series of characteristics associated with climate change over shelf and fast ice areas. Melt pending and break-up are the end stages of a response to a warming climate that may begin with increased melt event frequency (which changes both albedo and emissivity temporarily), changing firn backscatter (due to percolation features), and possibly increased rifting of the shelf surface. Fast ice may show some of these same processes on a seasonal timescale, providing insight into shelf evolution.

Scambos, Ted↗

Weather Associated with the Fall-2000 Turbulence Flight Tests

This viewgraph presentation provides information on three flight tests in which NASA Langley's ARIES B-757 research aircraft was intentionally piloted into areas with a high risk for severe atmospheric turbulence. During its encounter with turbulence, instruments aboard the aircraft monitored wind, temperature and acceleration, and onboard Doppler radar detected forward turbulence. Data was collected along a spectrum, from smooth air to severe turbulence.

Hamilton, David W.↗

The NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center: A Collaborative Model for Accelerating Research into Operations

The NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center in Huntsville, Alabama was created to accelerate the infusion of NASA earth science observations, data assimilation and modeling research into NWS forecast operations and decision-making. The principal focus of experimental products is on the regional scale with an emphasis on forecast improvements on a time scale of 0-24 hours. The SPoRT Center research is aligned with the regional prediction objectives of the US Weather Research Program dealing with 0-1 day forecast issues ranging from convective initiation to 24-hr quantitative precipitation forecasting. The SPoRT Center, together with its other interagency partners, universities, and the NASA/NOAA Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, provides a means and a process to effectively transition NASA Earth Science Enterprise observations and technology to National Weather Service operations and decision makers at both the global/national and regional scales. This paper describes the process for the transition of experimental products into forecast operations, current products undergoing assessment by forecasters, and plans for the future.

Goodman, S. J.↗

Solving Large Problems Quickly: Progress in 2001-2003

This document describes the progress we have made and the lessons we have learned in 2001 through 2003 under the NASA grant entitled "Solving Important Problems Faster". The long-term goal of this research is to accelerate large, irregular scientific applications which have enormous data sets and which are difficult to parallelize. To accomplish this goal, we are exploring two complementary techniques: (i) using compiler-inserted prefetching to automatically hide the I/O latency of accessing these large data sets from disk; and (ii) using thread-level data speculation to enable the optimistic parallelization of applications despite uncertainty as to whether data dependences exist between the resulting threads which would normally make them unsafe to execute in parallel. Overall, we made significant progress in 2001 through 2003, and the project has gone well.

Mowry, Todd C.↗

Phobos Ephemeris Improvement from Recent Spacecraft Observations

Despite 127 years of observations, there is still room for improvement in the ephemeris of the Martian satellite Phobos. Early in this history, Earth-based astrometric observations of Phobos and Deimos were used to estimate the mass and oblateness of Mars. As more data accumulated, it became clear that a secular acceleration in the longitude of Phobos was occurring, and this was attributed to tidal dissipation within Mars, yielding rough estimates of the tidal quality factor, or Q. At the epoch of the earliest spacecraft observations of Phobos, from Mariner 9 and the Viking Orbiters and Landers, the gravitational field of Mars, and resulting forces on Phobos, were still not particularly well known. Thus observations of natural and artificial satellite motions continued to contribute, each in their own way, to knowledge of the mass distribution within Mars. Improvements in tracking system accuracy, and the placement of satellites, like the 1996 Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey, in circular polar orbits has lead to dramatic improvements to knowledge of the Mars gravity field. The direct gravitational influence on Phobos is no longer expected to be a limiting factor in predicting its orbital motion. Despite that progress, a variety of observations of Phobos from recent orbiters and landers suggest that the best satellite ephemeris still has along-track orbit errors which are accumulating at a rate of 1.75 kilometers per year, with Phobos gaining on the predicted positions. These recent observations alone do not span sufficient time to separately resolve the positional error into changes in mean motion and changes in secular acceleration. However, combining them with earlier observations will allow improvements in both the mean motion and its first derivative. This latter parameter is particularly interesting, as it relates to tidal dissipation, and thus uniquely constrains the internal structure of Mars. The current best estimate of the secular acceleration rate of Mars implies a surprisingly low value for the tidal dissipation factor Q = (94 plus or minus 1). For the Earth, most tidal dissipation occurs within the oceans. The terrestrial mantle tidal Q is 280. An issue of interest is then: why, where, and how does Mars dissipate tidal energy so effectively.

Bills, B. G.↗

Measured Success: The Microgravity Measurement and Analysis Project

In microgravity, even minute forces can affect experiments: therefore, investigators need to know the precise strength of the gravitational levels and vibrations affecting their experiments to interpret results correctly and to develop an understanding of the effects caused by these forces. The Microgravity Measurement and Analysis Project (MMAP) at the NASA Lewis Research Center was established to provide a single source for measuring the microgravity environment on various orbiting spacecraft, providing support for scientists, and microgravity environment data. As part of this project, the Space Acceleration Measurement System (SAMS) and the Orbital Acceleration Research Experiment (OARE) have supported 15 shuttle missions. In addition, one SAMS unit has been operated on Russia's Mir Space Station since September 1994.

DeLombard, Richard↗

Crash Test of Three Cessna 172 Aircraft at NASA Langley Research Center's Landing and Impact Research Facility

During the summer of 2015, three Cessna 172 aircraft were crash tested at the Landing and Impact Research Facility (LandIR) at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). The three tests simulated three different crash scenarios. The first simulated a flare-to-stall emergency or hard landing onto a rigid surface such as a road or runway, the second simulated a controlled flight into terrain with a nose down pitch on the aircraft, and the third simulated a controlled flight into terrain with an attempt to unsuccessfully recover the aircraft immediately prior to impact, resulting in a tail strike condition. An on-board data acquisition system captured 64 channels of airframe acceleration, along with acceleration and load in two onboard Hybrid II 50th percentile Anthropomorphic Test Devices, representing the pilot and co-pilot. Each test contained different airframe loading conditions and results show large differences in airframe performance. This paper presents test methods used to conduct the crash tests and will summarize the airframe results from the test series.

Littell, Justin D.↗

Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation

This document discloses, among other things, a system and method for implementing an algorithm to determine pose, velocity, acceleration or other navigation information using feature tracking data. The algorithm has computational complexity that is linear with the number of features tracked.

Roumeliotis, Stergios I.↗

Global-to-local air quality forecasts using the NASA GEOS Composition Forecast System

Since 2019, the NASA Global Earth Observing System (GEOS) model has been used to generate global, near-real-time estimates and daily five-day forecasts of atmospheric composition at a horizontal resolution of 0.25 degrees (~25 km) from the surface up to the lower mesosphere. This composition forecast system (“GEOS-CF”) combines the GEOS weather forecasting model with the state-of-the-science GEOS-Chem chemistry module to deliver detailed analysis of a wide range of air pollutants, including the policy-relevant species such as ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Because GEOS-CF includes atmospheric levels up through the stratosphere, this system has been leveraged to support the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) satellite mission and provide stratospheric intrusion alerts to ground-based monitoring stations. We will present recent advances to GEOS-CF which target increased computational efficiency and accuracy. These include the incorporation of simplified chemistry mechanisms to accelerate model forecasts, use of model-observation data fusion techniques to provide highly localized forecasts, and assimilation of satellite observations to produce more accurate model analyses. We further discuss our attempts to make these tools publicly available on platforms outside the NASA domain, such as Google Earth Engine and Amazon Web Services with the goal to facilitate the integration of state-of-the-science air quality information onto platforms used by stakeholders, air quality managers, and the public.

Emma Knowland↗

Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center

SPoRT: Translating science to user-centered products and capabilities that enable Earth Action. SPoRT was established in 2002 as part of the ESD R&A Weather Focus Area with the mission to accelerate the adoption of NASA Earth Science satellite data within the National Weather Service (NWS).

Emily Berndt↗

High-Throughput Ion Irradiation and Microstructural Characterization of Multi-Principal-Element Alloys

Multi-principal-element alloys (MPEAs) have garnered interest in the nuclear community for their apparent resistance to microstructural damage under irradiation. While both experimentation and simulation have demonstrated reduced hardening and void swelling in MPEAs, the relationship between composition and irradiation response is still poorly understood since a rich experimental database for MPEAs does not yet exist. In this work, to accelerate the generation of experimental irradiation-response data for MPEAs, high-throughput synthesis, irradiation, and characterization techniques have been employed. Specifically, additive manufacturing has been used to produce arrays of various MPEAs (1-cm2 coupons), which have been subsequently irradiated using 4-MeV Ni2+ ions to a peak damage of 200 dpa at 500 °C. Hardening and void swelling have been assessed using nanoindentation and trenching via plasma focused ion beam (PFIB), respectively. Trends in the experimental data relating hardening and void swelling behavior to composition have been analyzed using different machine learning approaches.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Treyson Ricks - Intern Showcase Poster

Quinone-based sorbents offer a tunable, energy-efficient route to electrochemical CO2 capture, but systematic guidance for molecular design is lacking. Here, we report a high-throughput computational workflow that combines density functional theory (DFT) screening with machine-learning (ML) modeling to evaluate CO2 binding thermodynamics across several quinone derivatives, spanning benzoquinones, naphthoquinones, and anthraquinones. In addition to using solvents to stabilize the quinone anion and dianion, we studied the effect of ion-pairing on the reduction potentials and the CO2 binding energy. Automated Python scripts handled geometry optimizations and adduct-formation energies on an HPC cluster, reducing manual effort significantly. This integrated platform can uncover structure–property relationships and enables rapid in silico evaluation of untested candidates. We present one example from our workflow to showcase the capability of using quinones with ion-pairing to effectively capture CO2. Our approach paves the way for the rational selection of optimal quinone sorbents and can be extended with experimental thermochemical and kinetic data, alternative redox cycles, and stability assessments to accelerate development of next-generation electrochemical CO2 capture materials.

37 - INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL AND ANALYTICAL C↗

Experimental Study of Large-Amplitude Faraday Waves in Rectangular Cylinders

Experiment on single-mode Faraday waves having two, thee, and four wavelengths across a rectangular cylinder of high aspect ratio is the subject of discussion. Previous experiments recently done by Henderson & Miles (1989) and by Lei Jiang et. a1 (1996) focused on Faraday waves with one and two wavelengths across rectangular cylinders. In this experimental study the waves steepness ranges from small at threshold levels to a large amplitude which according to Penny & Price theory (1952) approaches the maximum sustainable amplitude for a standing wave. The waves characteristics for small amplitudes are evaluated against an existing well known linear theory by Benjamin & Ursell (l954) and against a weakly nonlinear theory by J. Miles (1984) which includes the effect of viscous damping. The evaluation includes the wave neutral stability and damping rate. In addition, a wave amplitude differential equation of a linear theory including viscous effect by Cerda & Tirapegui (1998) is solved numerically to yield prediction of temporal profiles of both wave damping and wave formation at the threshold. An interesting finding from this exercise is that the fluid kinematic viscosity needs to increase ten times in order to obtain good agreement between the theoretical prediction and the experimental data for both wave damping and wave starting. For large amplitude waves, the experimental data are evaluated against the theory of Penny & Price which predicts wave characteristics of any amplitude up to the point at which the wave reaches its maximum amplitude attainable for a standing wave. The theory yields two criteria to show the maximum wave steepness, the vertical acceleration at the wave crest of half the earth gravity field acceleration and the including angle at the crest of 90 degrees. Comparison with experimental data shows close agreement for the wave crest acceleration but a large discrepancy for the including angle. Additional information is included in the original extended abstract.

Iek, Chanthy↗

Comparing Measured Driver Behavior Distributions to Results from Car-Following Models using SUMO and Real-World Vehicle Trajectories from Radar: SUMO Default vs. Radar-Measured CF model Parameters

In this study, the physical principles governing car-following (CF) behavior and their impact on traffic flow at signalized intersections are investigated. High temporal-resolution radar data is used to provide valuable insights into actual CF behavior, including acceleration, deceleration, and time headway distribution. Demand-calibrated SUMO simulations are run using empirical CF parameter distributions, and three CF models are evaluated: IDM, EIDM, and Krauss. By emulating radar data in SUMO and processing simulated vehicle traces, discrepancies between empirical and simulated parameter distributions are identified. Further analysis includes comparisons with default SUMO CF model parameters. The findings reveal that measured accelerations differ from CF model parameter accelerations and using the empirical value ($\mu = 0.89m/s^2$) leads to unrealistic simulations that fail volume-based calibration. Default parameters for all three models reasonably approximate the mean and median of measured parameters, but fail to capture the true distribution shape, partly due to homogeneity when using default parameters. The results show that it is more effective to simulate with the default parameters provided by SUMO rather than using measurements of real-world distributions without additional calibration. Future work will investigate closing the loop between the measured real-world and SUMO distributions using traditional calibration tactics, as well as assess the impact of calibrated vs. default CF parameters on simulation outputs like fuel consumption.

Schrader, Max (ORCID:0000000336737672)↗

OLCF’s Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE): FY25 Update for Ongoing Efforts

The advent of widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models in science, coupled with fast data production rates of scientific instruments strain the traditional batch-oriented high-performance computing (HPC) environment. As scientific exploration continues to require more data and faster processing and analysis, new emerging technologies and capabilities to enable cross-facility and time-sensitive workflows are required for seamless integration of HPC and experimental facilities. The Advanced Computing Ecosystem (ACE) is a strategic initiative within the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) established in 2024 to support the development of cutting-edge technologies to advance computational research and infrastructure at OLCF and across the Department of Energy (DOE). Several DOE initiatives are spearheading the evolution of the scientific landscape by blurring facility boundaries and connecting the user facilities to advance scientific capabilities and ensure energy dominance. The DOE Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) program is one example that is laying a foundation to support complex cross-facility workflows. The IRI program aims to integrate diverse computational resources, data infrastructures, and scientific instruments to facilitate collaboration and accelerate scientific discovery. The Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is another example that aims to revolutionize scientific research through AI-driven, interconnected autonomous laboratories and research facilities. Finally, the American Science Cloud (AmSC), recently announced in the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, aims to leverage prior infrastructure efforts of the IRI and automation and AI efforts of INTERSECT (and others) to build a federated, AI-augmented AmSC platform to unify the DOE’s computing, experimental, and data resources to catalyze scientific innovation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The microphysics of particle acceleration in the auroral ionosphere: Why sounding rocket measurements are essential

Through the combination of attitude controlled, high altitude rockets (altitudes greater than 600 km), high telemetry rates (several megabits/sec), pitch angle imaging particle sensors and interferometric wave measurements giving wavelength in addition to frequency data, the series of TOPAZ flights have uncovered a low altitude acceleration mechanism by which ionospheric ions receive their initial energy transverse to B in order to leave the ionosphere and populate the trapped radiation. The transverse acceleration of oxygen and hydrogen ionospheric ions is the result of Landau resonance of these ions with intense (up to 400 mv/m) lower hybrid waves on the resonance cone within caviton structures. Future work is directed toward trying to measure the size of the solitary wave structures. From a statistical argument, they appear to be the order of 100 m across B and much longer in dimension along B. Important questions remain: are there other low altitude heating mechanisms acting as well; is the dayside ion outflow driven differently. To answer these questions, it is intended to make sounding rocket measurements in the cusp/cleft region. The proposed Norwegian rocket launch facility at Svalbard could play a very important role by providing easy access to the cusp/cleft region.

Arnoldy, Roger L.↗

Evaluation of Composite Airframe Dynamic Impact Modeling Using Hawker 4000 Fuselage Drop Test Data

Two drop tests of partial Hawker 4000 fuselage sections were conducted at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center (LaRC) to characterize the response of representative composite aerospace structure to dynamic impact loads. Test conditions were selected to induce damage into the composite structure in order to study material failure within a composite fuselage and evaluate the capability of finite element (FE) model analysis to predict that failure. The tests were simulated using FE models which were generated to isolate the effect of developmental data availability on predictive capability. FE Models of the tested fuselage sections were generated using two limited data sets. The first model configuration was reverse engineered from the test article with no information related to design or fabrication details which would be known only by the manufacturer. The second model was generated from data provided by the manufacturer but without additional material characterization test data. Models were developed using these methodologies for both fuselage sections tested. Correlation of each model to the tests conducted was evaluated in terms of damage, deformation, and cabin acceleration measurements. Correlation between the developed models and the tested fuselage sections showed that the reverse engineered model predicted the composite damage and cabin acceleration measured during test though it was limited due to lack of detail in the composite layup changes through the structure. The model developed using manufacturer specifications did not predict damage, due to limited material and component model characterization data, but it did predict acceleration on par with the reverse engineered model. Model capability and limitation sources identified were verified through correlation of a final model which was developed by combining the individual data sets. The combined model demonstrated that the addition of calibrated composite material models to accurate composite layup definitions and detailed geometry led to improved correlation of damage and acceleration response within the composite fuselage structures.

Crashworthiness↗