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At least 145 records · Page 8

Mariner 9 Solar Array Design, Manufacture, and Performance

The mission of Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, was to make scientific observations of the surface of Mars. Throughout this unique mission, the Mariner 9 solar array successfully supported the power requirements of the spacecraft without experiencing anomalies. Basically, the design of the solar array was similar to those of Mariners 6 and 7; however, Mariner 9 had the additional flight operational requirement to perform in a Mars orbit environment mode. The array special tests provided information on the current-voltage characteristics and array space degradation. Tests indicated that total solar array current degradation was 3.5 percent, which could probably be attributed to the gradual degradation of the cover glass and/or the RTV 602 adhesive employed to cement the cover glass to the solar cell.

Sequeira, E. A.↗

Lunar gravity - A long-term Keplerian rate method

Nearside tracking data from Apollo subsatellites and Lunar Orbiter 5 are used to construct a model of the farside lunar gravity field. An indirect method of calculating the average effect of all the gravity anomalies which affect spacecraft orbits is reduced to a linear estimation problem by eliminating the integration of spacecraft dynamics. Doppler frequency shifts between the lunar satellite and earth-based tracking station are used to measure the line of sight velocity component between the orbiter and the tracker; gravity determination is then performed in a weighted least squares estimator which employs the orbital rates as data and formulates the normal equations using the associated Keplerian state. Simulations performed demonstrate that farside gravity features can be economically determined by use of gravity estimates obtained from long-period models of nearside orbiting tracks.

Ferrari, A. J.↗

Gravity Field of Venus and Comparison with Earth

The acceleration (gravity) anomaly estimates by spacecraft tracking, determined from Doppler residuals, are components of the gravity field directed along the spacecraft Earth line of sight (LOS). These data constitute a set of vector components of a planet's gravity field, the specific component depending upon where the Earth happened to be at the time of each measurement, and they are at varying altitudes above the planet surface. From this data set the gravity field vector components were derived using the method of harmonic splines which imposes a smoothness criterion to select a gravity model compatible with the LOS data. Given the piecewise model it is now possible to upward and downward continue the field quantities desired with a few parameters unlike some other methods which must return to the full dataset for each desired calculation.

Bowin, C.↗

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS)

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) was launched by the Space Shuttle on September 12, 1991 into a near circular orbit at 585 km altitude inclined 57 degrees to the Equator. Measurements were initiated a few days later, including solar energy inputs to the atmosphere and vertical profiles of temperature, important minor gas species, and wind fields. The orbital parameters, combined with the sensor measurements characteristics, yield a measurement pattern that produces near global coverage with a duty cycle that periodically favors the Northern or the Southern Hemispheres. A few spacecraft and instrument anomalies have impacted the total amount of data obtained to date, but the overall performance of the mission has been very good.

Reber, Carl A.↗

Comparison of the NASCAP/GEO, POLAR, SEE Charging Handbook, and NASCAP-2K.1 Spacecraft Charging Codes

The NASA Charging Analyzer Program (NASCAP) spacecraft charging software developed by Maxwell Technologies has been widely used for the past fifteen to twenty years in satellite design and investigation of spacecraft charging related anomalies. Individual versions of the NASCAP software are available for use in low inclination, low Earth orbit environments (NASCAP[LEO) and geostationary orbit environments (NASCAP/GEO). In addition, the Potentials of Large objects in the Auroral Region (POLAR) code is available for use in LEO polar orbit environments. NASCAP/GEO and POLAR were both written in the 1980's using algorithms appropriate for the computers of the time. They solve the Poisson-Vlasov system for currents and densities assuming limited speed and memory of computer systems standard for the day. In addition, use of the charging models requires individual input files that are not readily transported into the various codes to facilitate comparison of results by the user.

Neergaard, Linda E.↗

An Investigation of Low Earth Orbit Internal Charging

Built internal charging model for spacecraft design and anomaly assessment that calculates number of internal discharges given material properties and environment characteristics. As shielding decreases, the number of discharges increases. Ungrounded MLI produced a significant number of discharges even through thin layers.

Parker, Linda Neergaard↗

Introduction to NASA Goddard Workshop on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a collection of advanced technologies that allows machines to think and act, both humanly and rationally, through sensing, comprehending, acting and learning. AI's foundations lie at the intersection of several traditional fields Philosophy, Mathematics, Economics, Neuroscience, Psychology and Computer Science. Although the inception of AI started in the 1950's, it has recently made a strong comeback in all aspects of society and all over the world; this is mainly due to the timely combination of increased data volumes, advanced and mature algorithms, and improvements in computing power and storage. Current AI applications include big data analytics, robotics, intelligent sensing, assisted decision making, and speech recognition just to name a few.This workshop will be investigating how AI technologies can be adapted or developed to address the following challenges: Discover events of interest and correlations in large amounts of science data; improve the outcomes of science modeling and data assimilation using improved data processing, integration, and analysis. Design advisors for mission planning and operations, including anomaly detection and spacecraft health monitoring. Develop tools for engineering support, including advanced manufacturing, orbit determination, new component design and system engineering. Customize intelligent user interfaces, including visual analytics and natural language processing.

Le Moigne, Jacqueline↗

Automated Software for Crewed Spacecraft - Bridging the Gap from Sci Fi to Reality

With a voice command or a few taps on the console, the spacecraft pivots on a dime at high velocity and gently docks to an orbiting space platform. This is the image most people have of the complex software computations and integrated hardware performance necessary for a spacecraft to successfully perform an automated launch, rendezvous, and docking. Today’s reality is that while computer operations are advancing rapidly, science fiction over-simplifies and over-sells current capabilities. This paper discusses the integration of spacecraft computer automation into the operation of one of the United States’ new Commercial Crew vehicles - the Boeing CST-100 Starliner. Lessons learned by the Boeing Mission Operations team, a unique private-public partnership with NASA, from conceptual design through real-time operation of the first test flight will be discussed along with evolution of the system in preparation for the second uncrewed test flight. Focus will center on how operations has learned to use the automated software to their advantage while also knowing how to adjust the automation in response to spacecraft or mission anomalies.

Robert C. Dempsey↗

Space environmental effects on the SKYNET 2B spacecraft

References are made to environmentally induced electrical anomalies which are known to occur on geosynchronous spacecraft, and in particular to those which have occurred on the SKYNET 2B communications spacecraft. Details are given of the investigation made into anomalous telemetry data received from SKYNET 2B during its first 23 months of operation. The frequency and timing of these anomalous events appear to differ from those described in earlier reports of such phenomena. Attempts are made to correlate the anomalous telemetry data with data describing the spacecraft environment. Some details are given of the spacecraft configuration and comments made on its susceptibility to anomalies of this type.

Robbins, A.↗

Utilization of Machine Learning Techniques for Managing the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite Constellation

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) operates a constellation of ten geosynchronous Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS). The TDRS constellation consists of multiple geosynchronous communication relay satellites located around the equator so they can provide continual coverage of any mission in low earth orbit. The TDRS are located primarily in three oceanic regions around the earth. NASA’s White Sands Complex provides the ground communication support for TDRS located over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Another TDRS ground station in Guam supports the TDRS over the Indian Ocean. With these satellites the TDRS network can provide continuous coverage of satellites in low-earth orbit. The NASA Space Network (SN) project office at GSFC manages the constellation of spacecraft. Major customers of the TDRS constellation include, but are not limited to, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. The TDRS constellation has three generations of satellites and has been active for over 30 years providing reliable communication links between customer satellites and corresponding ground stations. However, one of the major concerns for TDRS, and in any space mission, is to ensure the health and safety of the spacecraft. Generally, engineers use telemetry data to monitor and analyze the performance and state of health of the spacecraft. Telemetry data contains hundreds of parameters that monitor each important component in the spacecraft, which can be utilized to recognize and characterize the behavior of the spacecraft. Each parameter contains considerable information to represent time-dependent properties of each spacecraft subsystem and component. During the entire life of a TDRS spacecraft, thousands of gigabytes of telemetry data are transmitted in real-time from the spacecraft to the ground station at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and recorded as historical data sets for engineers to process and analyze the events that occurred on-orbit. These parameters contain the function of multiple spacecraft subsystems, such as the attitude control system (ACS), Thermal, Electrical Power Subsystem (EPS), etc. . The first and second generations have exceeded their required lifetime and NASA is keen to manage these spacecrafts carefully in order to maximize the remaining life using the spacecraft telemetry. The challenge is to know when the risk of losing a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit exceeds the benefit of continued operations for customer support. In the TDRS fleet, the EPS is the most critical subsystem related to spacecraft operations. Failure of the EPS would strand a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. Since EPS provides power to the spacecraft, component failures ultimately lead to the inability to support the spacecraft loads and the communications payload. For instance, TDRS-8 has several anomalies in EPS including the Bus Voltage Limiter (BVL) shunt current, solar array loss of circuits, and failed battery cells. Any of these anomalies can cause critical issues to the spacecraft. Therefore, developing a system to analyze and perform early detection of a potential anomaly is an important issue in telemetry data analysis. In recent years, Telemetry Mining (TM) has been proposed to process telemetry data by using Data Mining (DM) techniques such as classification, clustering, regression and anomaly detection. Anomaly detection, also known as outlier detection, has been widely used in many data mining areas such as remote sensing, medical data processing and digital image processing. The goal of anomaly detection is to detect abnormal data, which contains a relatively low probability of occurrence among the entire data set. Early detection of anomalies is one of the most significant issues in managing the spacecraft configuration. If anomalies can be detected early enough, then the redundant resources can be used to extend the life of the operational spacecraft. We present an unsupervised anomaly detection method to process the EPS data extracted from TDRS-8. This is different from traditional analytical methods, which use telemetry data to illustrate behavior and physical meaning of each spacecraft component. TM connects multiple parameters as a vector and then conducts data analysis on this high dimension telemetry vector. This method is looking at the properties of a high dimensional vector that is able to consider the relationship between different parameters in the anomaly detection problem. This kind of method performs much better than the traditional limit checking method. In addition, we propose a new approach of real-time anomaly detection to process telemetry data in real-time, which can then be applied to spacecraft monitoring with high reliability, low cost and high accuracy.

Machine Learning (ML)↗

Assessment of in-flight anomalies of long life outer plant mission

Thee unmanned planetary spacecraft to the outer planets have been controlled and operated successfully in space for an accumulated total of 66 years. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft each have been in space for more than 26 years. The Galileo spacecraft was in space for 14 years, including eight years in orbit about Jupiter. During the flight operations for these missions, anomalies for the ground data system and the flight systems have been tracked using the anomaly reporting tool at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A total of 3300 incidents, surprises, and anomaly reports have been recorded in the database. This paper describes methods and results for classifying and identifying trends relative to ground system vs. flight system, software vs. hardware, and corrective actions. There are several lessons learned from these assessments that significantly benefit the design and planning for long life missions of the future. These include the necessity for having redundancy for successful operation of the spacecraft, awareness that anomaly reporting is dependent on mission activity not the age of the spacecraft, and the need for having a program to maintain and transfer operation knowledge and tools to replacement flight team members.

anomalies↗

Impacts of Spontaneous Hot Flow Anomalies on the Magnetosheath and Magnetopause

Spacecraft observations and global hybrid (kinetic ions and fluid electrons) simulations have demonstrated that ion dissipation processes at the quasi-parallel bow shock are associated with the formation of structures called spontaneous hot flow anomalies (SHFAs). Previous simulations and recent spacecraft observations have also established that SHFAs result in the formation of magnetosheath filamentary structures(MFS). In this paper we demonstrate that in addition to MFS, SHFAs also result in the formation of magnetos heath cavities that are associated with decreases in density, velocity, and magnetic field and enhancements in temperature. We use the results of a global MHD run to determine the change in the magnetosheath properties associated with cavities due to ion kinetic effects. The results also show the formation of regions of high flow speed called magnetosheath jets whose properties as a function of solar wind Mach number are described in this study. Comparing the properties of the simulated magnetosheath cavities and jets to past spacecraft observations provides good agreement in both cases. We also demonstrate that pressure variations associated with cavities and SHFAs in the sheath result in a continuous sunward and anti sunward magnetopause motion. This result is consistent with previous suggestions that SHFAs may be responsible for the generation of ion cyclotron waves and precipitation of ring current protons in the outer magnetosphere.

Omidi, N.↗

Spacecraft Risk Posed by the 2016 Perseid Outburst

The Perseids are one of the more prolific annual showers, known for high rates and for producing bright meteors. Outbursts of this shower have been noted in the 1860s, the early 1990s, 2004, and 2009, with the 1993 outburst being especially active (peak ZHR above 300). The 1993 Perseids also affected the space-faring nations, as the launch of the STS-51 mission was delayed by NASA until after the shower maximum due to an inability to predict the shower intensity, and the ESA telecommunications satellite Olympus suffered a mission-ending anomaly attributed to a static discharge caused by a Perseid impact [1]. Rates were again high (peak ZHR around 200) in 2009, when the NASA/USGS imaging satellite Landsat-5 experienced a gyro anomaly just before the shower peak; however in this case, the satellite was recovered and normal operations resumed one week later [2]. It is interesting to note that both spacecraft anomalies were not what is typically expected from meteoroid strikes, i.e., physical damage or an attitude displacement due to transfer of momentum. It would appear that the very fast Perseids (59 km s(sup -1) have a marked ability to produce plasma upon impact, which can then serve as a conductive path for discharge currents. The shower is expected to outburst again in 2016, and we present the results from the MSFC Meteoroid Stream Model [4], which predicts enhanced activity on a level similar to that of 2009 as the Earth passes through several debris trails on the night of August 11-12 (UT). We then compare our results to those of other modelers.

Cooke, W. J.↗

Mission Summary of Cassini Spacecraft Guidance and Control Hardware Health and Performance

The Cassini-Huygens mission ended on September 15, 2017, after nearly two decades in ight. The well-designed Cassini spacecraft had robust hardware that permitted two extended missions, lasting nine years longer than the expected prime mission. At the end of the mission, the Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS) was using two pieces of redundant back-up of hardware, one reaction wheel and the hydrazine thruster branch, due to hardware anomalies earlier in the mission. The back-up hardware performed nominally through the rest of mission. The prime reaction wheels at the end of the mission had reached more than 130% of the consumable limit for number of revolutions. No thruster on either thruster branch accumulated more than 45% of the consumable limits. The inertial reference unit slightly exceeded the pre-launch requirements on bias error, but as the software continuously estimated this value in ight, the attitude estimation was not adversely a ected. The star trackers performed nominally, and though there was a spacecraft anomaly in 1998 related to the star trackers, the origin was not in hardware itself. The Sun sensors and accelerometer both performed as expected and met all requirements throughout the mission. Ultimately, the lifetime of the Cassini spacecraft was not limited by hardware performance. Planetary protection requirements necessitated the end of the mission as the spacecraft's propellant reserves depleted, and Cassini plunged into Saturn's atmosphere with a healthy attitude control system.

Stupik, Joan↗

Nutation control during precession of a spin-stabilized spacecraft

Precession maneuver control laws for single-spin spacecraft are investigated so that nutation is concurrently controlled. Analysis has led to the development of two types of control laws employing precession modulation for concurrent nutation control. Results were verified through digital simulation of a Synchronous Meteorological Satellite (SMS) configuration. An addition research effort was undertaken to investigate the cause and elimination of nutation anomalies in dual-spin spacecraft. A literature search was conducted and a dual-spin configuration was simulated to verify that nutational anomalies are not predicted by the existing nonlinear model. No conclusions were drawn as to the cause of the observed nutational anomalies in dual-spin spacecraft.

Source record↗

Stress distribution and topography of Tellus Regio, Venus

The Tellus Regio area of Venus represents a subset of a narrow latitude band where Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PVO) altimetry data, line-of-sight (LOS) gravity data, and Venera 15/16 radar images have all been obtained with good resolution. Tellus Regio also has a wide variety of surface morphologic features, elevations ranging up to 2.5 km, and a relatively low LOS gravity anomaly. This area was therefore chosen in order to examine the theoretical stress distributions resulting from various models of compensation of the observed topography. These surface stress distributions are then compared with the surface morphology revealed in the Venera 15/16 radar images. Conclusions drawn from these comparisons will enable constraints to be put on various tectonic parameters relevant to Tellus Regio. The stress distribution is calculated as a function of the topography, the equipotential anomaly, and the assumed model parameters. The topography data is obtained from the PVO altimetry. The equipotential anomaly is estimated from the PVO LOS gravity data. The PVO LOS gravity represents the spacecraft accelerations due to mass anomalies within the planet. These accelerations are measured at various altitudes and angles to the local vertical and therefore do not lend themselves to a straightforward conversion. A minimum variance estimator of the LOS gravity data is calculated, taking into account the various spacecraft altitudes and LOS angles and using the measured PVO topography as an a priori constraint. This results in an estimated equivalent surface mass distribution, from which the equipotential anomaly is determined.

Williams, David R.↗