Autonomous Monitoring of Wellbore Integrity Applying Time-Reverse Nonlinear-Elastic Wave Spectroscopy and Fiber Optic Sensing and Communication
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Society faces increasingly severe flood hazards, intensifying demand for flood early warning systems (FEWS) that deliver accurate and actionable information. However, most existing FEWS remain prediction‐centric, treating decision‐making as a downstream consumer of hazard forecasts while offering limited support for uncertainty interpretation, risk communication, and real‐world response. This Perspective presents a vision and blueprint for a novel inland FEWS‐decision‐making (FEWS‐DM) framework that repositions decision‐making as an equal partner in the forecasting process—not a passive recipient of its outputs. The framework is built on three tightly coupled, co‐evolving thrusts: Physical Science (T1), which advances flood prediction with quantified uncertainty informed by decision relevance; Human Science (T2), which incorporates psychology, behavior, and cultural and institutional context; and Decision Science (T3), which unifies physical predictions and human factors through principled, utility‐based decision support with end‐to‐end uncertainty management. Rather than treating T1 as a solved problem, FEWS‐DM recognizes that forecast development itself must be shaped by decision needs through continuous bidirectional feedback. We identify key scientific, behavioral, and operational challenges limiting such integration and discuss the enabling role of AI, while emphasizing human‐centered design and community feedback as essential for building trust and improving flood risk management.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's HPCC program is part of a new Presidential initiative aimed at producing a 1000-fold increase in supercomputing speed and a 1(X)-fold improvement in available communications capability by 1997. As more advanced technologies are developed under the HPCC program, they will be used to solve NASA's 'Grand Challenge' problems, which include improving the design and simulation of advanced aerospace vehicles, allowing people at remote locations to communicate more effectively and share information, increasing scientists' abilities to model the Earth's climate and forecast global environmental trends, and improving the development of advanced spacecraft. NASA's HPCC program is organized into three projects which are unique to the agency's mission: the Computational Aerosciences (CAS) project, the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) project, and the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) project. An additional project, the Basic Research and Human Resources (BRHR) project, exists to promote long term research in computer science and engineering and to increase the pool of trained personnel in a variety of scientific disciplines. This document presents an overview of the objectives and organization of these projects, as well as summaries of early accomplishments and the significance, status, and plans for individual research and development programs within each project. Areas of emphasis include benchmarking, testbeds, software and simulation methods.
This is the final report of a program that examined the fundamentals of education associated with space activities, promoted educational policy development in appropriate forums, and developed pathfinder products and services to demonstrate the utility of advanced communication technologies for space-based education. Our focus was on space astrophysics and planetary exploration, with a special emphasis on the themes of the Origins Program, with which the Principal Investigator (PI) had been involved from the outset. Teaching, Learning, and Planetary Exploration was also the core funding of the Space Telescope Science Institute's (ST ScI) Special Studies Office (SSO), and as such had provided basic support for such important NASA studies as the fix for Hubble Space Telescope (HST) spherical aberration, scientific conception of the HST Advanced Camera, specification of the Next-Generation Space Telescope (NGST), and the strategic plan for the second decade of the HST science program.
The Advanced Integration Matrix (AIM) Project u7ill study and solve systems-level integration issues for exploration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), through the design and development of a ground-based facility for developing revolutionary integrated systems for joint human-robotic missions. This paper describes a Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA) of human space missions that was developed to help define the direction and priorities for AIM. Risk analysis is required for all major NASA programs and has been used for shuttle, station, and Mars lander programs. It is a prescribed part of early planning and is necessary during concept definition, even before mission scenarios and system designs exist. PRA cm begin when little failure data are available, and be continually updated and refined as detail becomes available. PRA provides a basis for examining tradeoffs among safety, reliability, performance, and cost. The objective of AIM's PRA is to indicate how risk can be managed and future human space missions enabled by the AIM Project. Many critical events can cause injuries and fatalities to the crew without causing loss of vehicle or mission. Some critical systems are beyond AIM's scope, such as propulsion and guidance. Many failure-causing events can be mitigated by conducting operational tests in AIM, such as testing equipment and evaluating operational procedures, especially in the areas of communications and computers, autonomous operations, life support, thermal design, EVA and rover activities, physiological factors including habitation, medical equipment, and food, and multifunctional tools and repairable systems. AIM is well suited to test and demonstrate the habitat, life support, crew operations, and human interface. Because these account for significant crew, systems performance, and science risks, AIM will help reduce mission risk, and missions beyond LEO are far enough in the future that AIM can have significant impact.
The Aerosols, Clouds, Convection, and Precipitation Value Framework is used to introduce structure, transparency, and traceability into the decision-making process for a study formulating and assessing potential observing system concepts to respond to the 2017-2027 Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications. Within the Value Framework, visualizations play an important role in presenting information and structuring conversations around that information. This paper describes three guiding principles that were applied to the design of the visualizations of the Value Framework, presents examples of visualizations that serve at least one of several functions (structuring communication, facilitating elicitation and aggregation of data, and summarizing complex information), and identifies lessons learned from the development and implementation of those visualizations. The guiding principles and lessons learned have not only contributed to the success of the Value Framework and the ACCP study, but also can be applied in other decision-making activities.
The Aerosols, Clouds, Convection, and Precipitation Value Framework is used to introduce structure, transparency, and traceability into the decision-making process for a study formulating and assessing potential observing system concepts to respond to the 2017-2027 Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications. Within the Value Framework, visualizations play an important role in presenting information and structuring conversations around that information. This paper describes three guiding principles that were applied to the design of the visualizations of the Value Framework, presents examples of visualizations that serve at least one of several functions (structuring communication, facilitating elicitation and aggregation of data, and summarizing complex information), and identifies lessons learned from the development and implementation of those visualizations. The guiding principles and lessons learned have not only contributed to the success of the Value Framework and the ACCP study, but also can be applied in other decision-making activities.
Achieving the science exploration and defense goals of the following decades will require flight systems capable of operations with limited operator contact, system mode changes and retasking based on sensor data, and complex robotic operations. To support these capabilities, increasingly autonomous flight systems are required that can perform dedicated mission functions, e.g. payload targeting and communications, and system-level functions, e.g. planning and goal monitoring. Architecting an autonomous system requires a well-reasoned, self-consistent framework to avoid \textit{ad hoc} design choices that will introduce complexity and risk. The Framework for Robust Execution and Scheduling of Commands On-Board, FRESCO, is the result of lessons learned in developing a software architecture to enable autonomous solar system exploration. FRESCO generalizes this work to offer a modular, software-agnostic approach to developing verifiable architecture for autonomous space systems. FRESCO specifies guiding principles, functions, interfaces, and interactions from which mission-specific autonomous control architectures can be derived. FRESCO is a principled framework relying on explicit, state-based goal definitions, centralized management of state knowledge, clearly separated control boundaries, and hierarchical reasoning. Using components from FRESCO reference architecture, an autonomous decision-making architecture can be designed for spacecraft which can then be mapped to flight software architecture. FRESCO is flexibly defined to enable autonomous control of flight systems built using extensive software and hardware heritage. Finally, FRESCO-derived architectures support a spectrum of operator/spacecraft interactions, ranging from traditional commanding to goal-driven commanding with the ability to change mission goals autonomously. FRESCO has been used in defining the autonomy architectures for the ASTERIA mission and have been demonstrated in laboratory and software simulation for small body rendezvous and in-space servicing missions.
Surface water and pore water samples were collected at five sites along a shoreline transect of the Columbia River, southeastern WA, USA in 2017. This dataset is comprised of (1) high resolution characterization of dissolved organic matter via 12 Tesla Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FTICR-MS) analyzed through the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL; https://www.pnnl.gov/environmental-molecular-sciences-laboratory) and (2) a metadata csv file. The FTICR-MS files are .xml, and the data package includes instructions for using Formularity (https://omics.pnl.gov/software/formularity) and an R script to process the data based on the user’s specific needs. The data are associated with the publication “Using community assembly metrics from metacommunity ecology to understand environmental metabolomes” that will be published in Nature Communications (Danczak et al.). The study aimed to investigate gaps in understanding the spatiotemporal organization of environmental metabolomes to improve the ability to predict ecosystem function. Associated sequencing data will be published via NCBI. The access information for NCBI and the publication DOI will be added to this abstract when they are available. Please use the data package’s DOI to cite the data package. We ask that you acknowledge the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Subsurface Biogeochemical Research (SBR) program when using the data. All data are free to be used for any purpose, such as for manuscripts, presentations, and grant proposals. There is no obligation to include data package authors as co-authors.
Lower body negative pressure testing in cardiac patients has been completed as well as the design and construction of a new leg negative unit for evaluating heart patients. This technology is based on NASA research, using vacuum chambers to stress the cardiovascular system during space flight. Additional laboratory tests of an intracranial pressure transducer, have been conducted. Three new biomedical problems to which NASA technology is applicable are also identified. These are: a communication device for the speech impaired, the NASA development liquid-cooled garment, and miniature force transducers for heart research.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) hardware complement includes six gas bearing, pulse rebalanced rate integrating gyros, any three of which are sufficient to conduct the science mission. After the loss of three gyros between April 1997 and April 1999 due to a known corrosion mechanism, NASA decided to split the third HST servicing mission into SM3A, accelerated to October 1999, and SM3B, scheduled for November 2001. SM3A was developed as a quick turnaround 'Launch on Need' mission to replace all six gyros. Loss of a fourth gyro in November 1999 caused HST to enter Zero Gyro Sunpoint (ZGSP) safemode, which uses sun sensors and magnetometers for attitude determination and momentum bias to maintain attitude stability during orbit night. Several instances of large attitude excursions during orbit night were observed, but ZGSP performance was adequate to provide power-positive sun pointing and to support low gain antenna communications. Body rates in ZGSP were estimated to exceed the nominal 0.1 deg/sec rendezvous limit, so rendezvous operations were restructured to utilize coarse, limited life, Retrieval Mode Gyros (RMGs) under Hardware Sunpoint (HWSP) safemode. Contingency procedures were developed to conduct the rendezvous in ZGSP in the event of RMGA or HWSP computer failure. Space Shuttle Mission STS-103 launched on December 19, 1999 after a series of weather and Shuttle-related delays. After successful rendezvous and grapple under HWSP/RMGA, the crew changed out all six gyros. Following deploy and systems checkout, HST returned to full science operations.
Fourier pseudo-spectral methods for nonlinear partial differential equations are of wide interest in many areas of advanced computational science, including direct numerical simulation of three-dimensional (3-D) turbulence governed by the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics. This paper presents a new capability for simulating turbulence at a new record resolution up to 35 trillion grid points, on the world's first exascale computer, Frontier, comprising AMD MI250x GPUs with HPE's Slingshot interconnect and operated by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Key programming strategies designed to take maximum advantage of the machine architecture involve performing almost all computations on the GPU which has the same memory capacity as the CPU, performing all-to-all communication among sets of parallel processes directly on the GPU, and targeting GPUs efficiently using OpenMP offloading for intensive number-crunching including 1-D Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) performed using AMD ROCm library calls. With 99% of computing power on Frontier being on the GPU, leaving the CPU idle leads to a net performance gain via avoiding the overhead of data movement between host and device except when needed for some I/O purposes. Memory footprint including the size of communication buffers for MPI_ALLTOALL is managed carefully to maximize the largest problem size possible for a given node count. Detailed performance data including separate contributions from different categories of operations to the elapsed wall time per step are reported for five grid resolutions, from 2048 3 on a single node to 32768 3 on 4096 or 8192 nodes out of 9408 on the system. Both 1D and 2D domain decompositions which divide a 3D periodic domain into slabs and pencils respectively are implemented. The present code suite (labeled by the acronym GESTS, GPUs for Extreme Scale Turbulence Simulations) achieves a figure of merit (in grid points per second) exceeding goals set in the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program for Frontier. The performance attained is highly favorable in both weak scaling and strong scaling, with notable departures only for 2048 3 where communication is entirely intra-node, and for 32768 3 , where a challenge due to small message sizes does arise. Communication performance is addressed further using a lightweight test code that performs all-to-all communication in a manner matching the full turbulence simulation code. Performance at large problem sizes is affected by both small message size due to high node counts as well as dragonfly network topology features on the machine, but is consistent with official expectations of sustained performance on Frontier. Overall, although not perfect, the scalability achieved at the extreme problem size of 32768 3 (and up to 8192 nodes — which corresponds to hardware rated at just under 1 exaflop/sec of theoretical peak computational performance) is arguably better than the scalability observed using prior state-of-the-art algorithms on Frontier's predecessor machine (Summit) at OLCF. New science results for the study of intermittency in turbulence enabled by this code and its extensions are to be reported separately in the near future.
Librarians at a large, federally funded, multidisciplinary research organization sought to assess the value provided by the library’s collections. One method for capturing this value includes determining how well their library’s collections meet researcher needs, as expressed by the materials those researchers choose to cite in the production of new scholarly communications. A cited reference analysis was performed on the publications originating from the institution to provide the necessary data for the assessment, as well as to aid in the creation of a core list of journals which will inform future collection development efforts. Overall, this paper fills a gap in the library and information science literature by addressing the citation behaviors of researchers at a large multidisciplinary government research facility, a setting that has not been examined previously.
The unique properties of the Mariner 10 radio system, and the preliminary scientific results obtained from the analysis of the radio signals are described. In the normal two-way communication mode, a command- and range-modulated 2115-MHz signal is transmitted to the spacecraft for reception on its omnidirectional antenna. As implemented for Mariner 10, the dual-frequency system has proven fully capable of performing interplanetary columnar electron content measurements while achieving the prime goals of the celestial mechanics and radio science team. The determination of the mass and gravitational potential of Venus is one of the major objectives of the radio science experiments. Information on Venus's atmosphere was deduced from analysis of the radio signals during occultation. Open-loop receiver differential Doppler data were used to measure the nightside and dayside ionospheres of Venus.
The proceedings of a symposium on significant accomplishments in science and technology are presented. The symposium was held at the Goddard Space Flight Center in December 1973. The subjects discussed are as follows: (1) cometary physics, (2) X-ray and gamma ray astronomy, (3) solar and terrestrial physics, (4) spacecraft technology, (5) Earth Resources Technology Satellite, (6) earth and ocean physics, (6) communications and navigation, (7) mission operations and data systems, and (8) networks systems and operations.
A number of natural constraints have led to a highly autonomous Lander system design. Almost all communications to and from the Lander are via the Orbiter. A functional description of the Lander mission is given, taking into account deorbit and descent, entry, terminal descent, landing, and landed operations. The challenges of the system design are considered along with the mechanical configuration and aspects of thermal control. Attention is given to science data return, aspects of reliability and redundancy, and details regarding the software.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's HPCC program is part of a new Presidential initiative aimed at producing a 1000-fold increase in supercomputing speed and a 100-fold improvement in available communications capability by 1997. As more advanced technologies are developed under the HPCC program, they will be used to solve NASA's 'Grand Challenge' problems, which include improving the design and simulation of advanced aerospace vehicles, allowing people at remote locations to communicate more effectively and share information, increasing scientist's abilities to model the Earth's climate and forecast global environmental trends, and improving the development of advanced spacecraft. NASA's HPCC program is organized into three projects which are unique to the agency's mission: the Computational Aerosciences (CAS) project, the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) project, and the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) project. An additional project, the Basic Research and Human Resources (BRHR) project exists to promote long term research in computer science and engineering and to increase the pool of trained personnel in a variety of scientific disciplines. This document presents an overview of the objectives and organization of these projects as well as summaries of individual research and development programs within each project.
SEDSAT-1 is designed to be a low cost scientific satellite which is to be used to perform a minimum of five tasks which include: (1) the acquisition of a number of important parameters associated with the tethering processes from the payloads perspective (such as accelerations incurred and imaging data of the tether during deployment), (2) to act as a remote sensing platform for making measurements of the Earth's Atmosphere (allowing research to be performed in such areas as vertical lightning observation, visible light spectrography, and cloud cover studies, (3) to act as a general purpose amateur radio communication satellite relaying information back to earth, (4) to demonstrate the feasibility of the deployment in low earth orbit of advanced technology such as the Gallium Arsenide Solar Cells, Nickel Metal Hydride batteries, and multi-chip module technology and, (5) to support student's active participation in applying the disciplines of engineering and science to space-based hardware platforms. The project includes the Three-axis Accelerometer System, TAS, Experiment which is designed to report the accelerations that the satellite undergoes during the tethering operations and during the second phase of the mission when the free floating satellite comes in contact with orbit debris. The SEASIS (SEDS Earth, Atmosphere, and Space Imaging System) is another SEDSAT experiment designed to provide images of the tether during its deployment and the earth during the second phase of the mission. To control these experiments and virtually all other satellite operations the Command Data System, CDS is employed. This system utilizes a moderate complexity micro-controller controlled by tasks operating under a real-time operating system to dynamically monitor and control the satellite. The scope of this researchers efforts has been in the general area of coordinating and assisting the student researchers with the development of the CDS and ground station interfaces. This included the low level CDS hardware design and the formulization of a general software plan and schedule for both the CDS and ground station portions of the project.