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At least 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

National Laboratories for Environmental Management and Stewardship (NNLEMS) National Lab Capabilities in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) (Revision 1)

The Network of National Laboratories for Environmental Management and Stewardship (NNLEMS) formed an Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (UAS) topical team in spring 2025 for the purpose of documenting the capabilities of the National Laboratories relevant to the goals and needs of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Legacy Management (LM). The team was comprised of representatives from eight National Laboratories (Table 1), thereby bringing diverse skillsets from across the DOE complex. Recognizing that LM has extensive experience working with UAS contractors and using data collected from UAS, the topical team focused on the National Laboratories’ unique capabilities and types of scientific investigations that are not yet commercially available or easily contracted as services.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2022

Landfill Emissions of Methane Inferred from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Mobile Ground Measurements

Municipal solid waste landfills are significant sources of atmospheric methane, the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. Large emissions of methane from landfills contribute not only to global climate change, but also to local ozone formation due to the enhancement of radical chain lengths in atmospheric reactions of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides. Several advanced techniques were deployed to measure methane emissions from two landfills in the Southeast Michigan ozone nonattainment area during the Michigan–Ontario Ozone Source Experiment (MOOSE). These techniques included mobile infrared cavity ringdown spectrometry, drone-mounted meteorological sensors and tunable diode laser spectrometry, estimation of total landfill emissions of methane based on flux plane measurements, and Gaussian plume inverse modeling of distributed methane emissions in the presence of complex landfill terrain. The total methane emissions measured at the two landfills were of the order of 500 kg/h, with an uncertainty of around 50%. The results indicate that both landfill active faces and leaking gas collection systems are important sources of methane emissions.

Olaguer, Eduardo P.↗
DOE OSTI2025

GreenSight WxHive Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Atmospheric Profiling at the SGP Central Facility

The GreenSight WxHive is capable of flying multiple nanodrones simultaneously to provide spatiotemporal atmospheric sampling. During the WH2yMSIE campaign, the WxHive would fly up to 5 nanodrones at once, performing profiling within the planetary boundary layer over the ARM SGP Central Facility site. The measurements provided by the WxHive include latitude, longitude, altitude, pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction. See the attached WeatherHive User Guide for more details about the instrument and measurements.

Air pressure↗
NASA NTRS2005

Insect-Inspired Flight Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Flight-control and navigation systems inspired by the structure and function of the visual system and brain of insects have been proposed for a class of developmental miniature robotic aircraft called "biomorphic flyers" described earlier in "Development of Biomorphic Flyers" (NPO-30554), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 28, No. 11 (November 2004), page 54. These form a subset of biomorphic explorers, which, as reported in several articles in past issues of NASA Tech Briefs ["Biomorphic Explorers" (NPO-20142), Vol. 22, No. 9 (September 1998), page 71; "Bio-Inspired Engineering of Exploration Systems" (NPO-21142), Vol. 27, No. 5 (May 2003), page 54; and "Cooperative Lander-Surface/Aerial Microflyer Missions for Mars Exploration" (NPO-30286), Vol. 28, No. 5 (May 2004), page 36], are proposed small robots, equipped with microsensors and communication systems, that would incorporate crucial functions of mobility, adaptability, and even cooperative behavior. These functions are inherent to biological organisms but are challenging frontiers for technical systems. Biomorphic flyers could be used on Earth or remote planets to explore otherwise difficult or impossible to reach sites. An example of an exploratory task of search/surveillance functions currently being tested is to obtain high-resolution aerial imagery, using a variety of miniaturized electronic cameras. The control functions to be implemented by the systems in development include holding altitude, avoiding hazards, following terrain, navigation by reference to recognizable terrain features, stabilization of flight, and smooth landing. Flying insects perform these and other functions remarkably well, even though insect brains contains fewer than 10(exp -4) as many neurons as does the human brain. Although most insects have immobile, fixed-focus eyes and lack stereoscopy (and hence cannot perceive depth directly), they utilize a number of ingenious strategies for perceiving, and navigating in, three dimensions. Despite their lack of stereoscopy, insects infer distances to potential obstacles and other objects from image motion cues that result from their own motions in the environment. The concept of motion of texture in images as a source of motion cues is denoted generally as the concept of optic or optical flow. Computationally, a strategy based on optical flow is simpler than is stereoscopy for avoiding hazards and following terrain. Hence, this strategy offers the potential to design vision-based control computing subsystems that would be more compact, would weigh less, and would demand less power than would subsystems of equivalent capability based on a conventional stereoscopic approach.

Thakoor, Sarita↗
NASA NTRS2012

High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer for the Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Microwave imaging radiometers operating in the 50-183 GHz range for retrieving atmospheric temperature and water vapor profiles from airborne platforms have been limited in the spatial scales of atmospheric structures that are resolved not because of antenna aperture size, but because of high receiver noise masking the small variations that occur on small spatial scales. Atmospheric variability on short spatial and temporal scales (second/ km scale) is completely unresolved by existing microwave profilers. The solution was to integrate JPL-designed, high-frequency, low-noise-amplifier (LNA) technology into the High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR), which is an airborne microwave sounding radiometer, to lower the system noise by an order of magnitude to enable the instrument to resolve atmospheric variability on small spatial and temporal scales. HAMSR has eight sounding channels near the 60-GHz oxygen line complex, ten channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen line, and seven channels near the 183.31-GHz water vapor line. The HAMSR receiver system consists of three heterodyne spectrometers covering the three bands. The antenna system consists of two back-to-back reflectors that rotate together at a programmable scan rate via a stepper motor. A single full rotation includes the swath below the aircraft followed by observations of ambient (roughly 0 C in flight) and heated (70 C) blackbody calibration targets located at the top of the rotation. A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is used to read the digitized radiometer counts and receive the reflector position from the scan motor encoder, which are then sent to a microprocessor and packed into data files. The microprocessor additionally reads telemetry data from 40 onboard housekeeping channels (containing instrument temperatures), and receives packets from an onboard navigation unit, which provides GPS time and position as well as independent attitude information (e.g., heading, roll, pitch, and yaw). The raw data files are accessed through an Ethernet port. The HAMSR data rate is relatively low at 75 kbps, allowing for real-time access over the Global Hawk high-data-rate downlink. Once on the ground, the raw data are unpacked and processed through two levels of processing. The Level 1 product contains geo-located, time-stamped, calibrated brightness temperatures for the Earth scan. These data are then input to a lD variational retrieval algorithm to produce temperature, water vapor, and cloud liquid water profiles, as well as several derived products such as potential temperature and relative humidity.

Brown, Shannon T.↗
NASA NTRS2016

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM): Enabling Civilian Low-Altitude Airspace and Unmanned Aerial System Operations

Just a year ago we laid out the UTM challenges and NASA's proposed solutions. During the past year NASA's goal continues to be to conduct research, development and testing to identify airspace operations requirements to enable large-scale visual and beyond visual line-of-sight UAS operations in the low-altitude airspace. Significant progress has been made, and NASA is continuing to move forward.

UTM↗
NASA NTRS2016

National Unmanned Aerial System Standardized Performance Testing and Rating (NUSTAR)

The overall objective of the NUSTAR Capability is to offer standardized tests and scenario conditions to assess performance of the UAS. The following are goals of the NU-STAR: 1. Create a prototype standardized tests and scenarios that vehicles can be tested against. 2. Identify key performance parameters of all UAS and their standardized measurement strategy. 3. Develop standardized performance reporting method (e.g., consumer report style) to assist prospective buyers. 4. Identify key performance metrics that could be used by judged towards overall safety of the UAS and operations. 5. If vehicle certification standard is made by a regulatory agency, the performance of individual UAS could be compared against the minimum requirement (e.g., sense and avoid detection time, stopping distance, kinetic energy, etc.).

Testing↗