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At least 19 records

Space Act Agreement Maker (SAAM) With Electronic Routing System (ERouter) Developed

Members of the Commercial Technology Office at the NASA Glenn Research Center have developed an exciting new tool that greatly reduces the lead time in creating and routing Space Act Agreements. The Space Act Agreement Maker (SAAM) is an e-government Web-based system that automates the initial drafting of Space Act Agreements by technical and program personnel. SAAM also is used for editing and will be used later for maintaining electronic copies of all Space Act Agreements. During the initial drafting, the software prompts NASA personnel proposing an agreement to answer questions regarding the agreement. On the basis of the answers, the software selects from a matrix of NASA standard clauses to produce a first draft of the agreement. The draft agreement and information submitted by the NASA personnel are electronically routed to Glenn s Commercial Technology Office for review and, where necessary, editing. The final version of the agreement, along with any supporting documentation, is then routed for electronic concurrence/approval to the necessary internal review participants using the electronic routing system (e-router). SAAM was developed cooperatively by Glenn s Commercial Technology Office and Glenn s Office of Chief Counsel. Currently, SAAM is being evaluated by the NASA Headquarters General Counsel Office for use at all NASA centers. This system allows for the effective processing of Space Act Agreements for NASA s internal and external customers. Document control is maintained by a database. With SAAM s electronic routing, review times can be reduced significantly, allowing Glenn to more rapidly establish partnerships with industry. Prior to the creation of SAAM, it took several hours to draft a Space Act Agreement. With SAAM in place, the document can be written in about 30 min. Using the e-router also saves time in determining where the agreement is in the routing process. The document can be tracked easily, and delays can be avoided. Important research with industry partners can commence quickly after preliminary discussions have been held. The development of these products is in line with the expanding e-government initiative that is part of the Presidential Management Agenda. By using this product, NASA researchers can secure greater support from industry and academia partners. The Space Act Agreement Maker has been very well received at NASA Headquarters and at some of the other NASA centers as well. We anticipate that the NASA Ames Research Center will have the system in place very soon, and that some of the other centers will use SAAM in the near future. The General Counsel s office at NASA Headquarters has encouraged the Glenn team to develop a similar system for processing patent licenses. Find out more about Glenn's Technology Transfer & Partnership Office http://technology.grc.nasa.gov/.

Stauber, Laurel J.↗

Agency Agreements Process Champion Support Intern

This document will provide information on the 2018 Spring semester NIFS Intern who represented the Office of Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) as a Reimbursable Accountant at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). This intern supported the Agency Agreements Process Champions and Team Lead, Susan Kroskey, Sandy Massey and Mecca Murphy, with major initiatives to advance the KSC OCFO's vision of creating and innovating healthy financial management practices that maximize the value of resources entrusted to NASA. These initiatives include, but are not limited to: updating the Agency Guidance and NASA Procedural Guidance 9090.1 Agreements, implementing a new budget structure to be utilized across all centers, submitting a Call Request (CRQ) to enhance non-federal customer reporting, initiating a discussion to incorporate a 3-year funding program for NASA agreements, and undertaking the Office of Inspector General (OIG) Audit. In support of these initiatives, this intern identified technical methods to enhance and reduce the workload of financial processes for reimbursable and non-reimbursable agreements, prepared reports in support of accounting functions, and performed administrative work and miscellaneous technical tasks in support of the OCFO as requested. In conclusion of the internship, the intern will become knowledgeable on reimbursable accounting, reimbursable policy, types of reimbursable agreements, the agreements process, estimated pricing reports, and the roles and responsibilities of the Financial Accounting and Financial Services offices.

Process Champion↗

Application Agreement and Integration Services

Application agreement and integration services are required by distributed, fault-tolerant, safety critical systems to assure required performance. An analysis of distributed and hierarchical agreement strategies are developed against the backdrop of observed agreement failures in fielded systems. The documented work was performed under NASA Task Order NNL10AB32T, Validation And Verification of Safety-Critical Integrated Distributed Systems Area 2. This document is intended to satisfy the requirements for deliverable 5.2.11 under Task 4.2.2.3. This report discusses the challenges of maintaining application agreement and integration services. A literature search is presented that documents previous work in the area of replica determinism. Sources of non-deterministic behavior are identified and examples are presented where system level agreement failed to be achieved. We then explore how TTEthernet services can be extended to supply some interesting application agreement frameworks. This document assumes that the reader is familiar with the TTEthernet protocol. The reader is advised to read the TTEthernet protocol standard [1] before reading this document. This document does not re-iterate the content of the standard.

Driscoll, Kevin R.↗

Editing wild points in isolation - Fast agreement for reliable systems (Preliminary version)

Consideration is given to the intuitively appealing notion of discarding sensor values which are strongly suspected of being erroneous in a modified approximate agreement protocol. Approximate agreement with editing imposes a time bound upon the convergence of the protocol - no such bound was possible for the original approximate agreement protocol. This new approach is potentially useful in the construction of asynchronous fault tolerant systems. The main result is that a wild-point replacement technique called t-worst editing can be shown to guarantee convergence of the approximate agreement protocol to a valid agreement value. Results are presented for a four-processor synchronous system in which a single processor may be faulty.

Kearns, Phil↗

Techno-Political Space Cooperation: A Longitudinal Analysis of NASA's Bilateral and Multilateral Agreements

NASA's international programs are both numerous and successful, with over two thousand international agreements forming a foundation of U.S. government cooperation that involved over half the United Nation's membership. Previous research, by the author, into these agreements has identified five variables underlying NASA's international cooperation efforts and these variables form a framework for explaining international cooperation behavior on a macro-level. This paper builds upon that research to effectively explain lower-level patterns of cooperation in NASA's experience. Two approaches for analyzing the space agency's history are used: aggregation of all agreements and a cluster (disaggregated) analysis of four key segments. While researchers of NASA's international cooperation often considered individual cases first, and then generalize to macro-level explanations. This study, in contrast, begins by considering all agreements together in order to explain as much as possible at the macro level before proceeding to lower tier explanations. These lower tier assessments are important to understanding regional and political influences on bilateral and multilateral cooperation. In order to accomplish this lower-tier analysis, the 2000 agreements are disaggregated into logical groupings enabling an analysis of important questions and clearer focus on key patterns concerning developing states, such as the role of international institutions or privatization on international cooperation in space technology.

Hudiburg, John J.↗

Global Water Cycle Agreement in the Climate Models Assessed in the IPCC AR4

This study examines the fidelity of the global water cycle in the climate model simulations assessed in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. The results demonstrate good model agreement in quantities that have had a robust global observational basis and that are physically unambiguous. The worst agreement occurs for quantities that have both poor observational constraints and whose model representations can be physically ambiguous. In addition, components involving water vapor (frozen water) typically exhibit the best (worst) agreement, and fluxes typically exhibit better agreement than reservoirs. These results are discussed in relation to the importance of obtaining accurate model representation of the water cycle and its role in climate change. Recommendations are also given for facilitating the needed model improvements.

climate change↗

Participating in commercial space ventures: Introduction to NASA Centers for the Commercial Development of Space and the Cooperative Agreements Programs

In response to a Presidential directive, NASA has implemented a space policy which actively supports and encourages U.S. industry investment and participation in commercial space ventures. NASA's Office of Commercial Programs (OCP) has played a significant role in stimulating the growth of commercial space activity. Through a variety of programs, OCP encourages commercial interest and involvement in space endeavors by providing access to NASA resources and opportunities for the emerging space industry to reduce the technical, financial, and business risks associated with space-related activities. This manual describes NASA's Commercial Uses of Space Program and introduces participants to four major OCP Commercial programs: Technology Utilization (TU), Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), Centers for the Commercial Development of Space Flight Agreement (CCDSFA), and Cooperative Agreements Programs. The objective of this manual is to assist U.S. industry identify and pursue the appropriate agreement for participation in a commercial space venture.

Source record↗

Accelerated convergence for synchronous approximate agreement

The protocol for synchronous approximate agreement presented by Dolev et. al. exhibits the undesirable property that a faulty processor, by the dissemination of a value arbitrarily far removed from the values held by good processors, may delay the termination of the protocol by an arbitrary amount of time. Such behavior is clearly undesirable in a fault tolerant dynamic system subject to hard real-time constraints. A mechanism is presented by which editing data suspected of being from Byzantine-failed processors can lead to quicker, predictable, convergence to an agreement value. Under specific assumptions about the nature of values transmitted by failed processors relative to those transmitted by good processors, a Monte Carlo simulation is presented whose qualitative results illustrate the trade-off between accelerated convergence and the accuracy of the value agreed upon.

Kearns, J. P.↗

International Space Station ECLSS Technical Task Agreement Summary Report

A summary of work accomplished under Technical Task Agreement by the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) documents activities regarding the Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) of the International Space Station (ISS) program. These MSFC activities were in-line to the designing, the development, the testing, and the flight of ECLSS equipment. MSFC's unique capabilities for performing integrated system testing and analyses, and its ability to perform some tasks cheaper and faster to support ISS program needs are the basis for the Technical Task Agreement activities. Tasks were completed in the Water Recovery Systems, Air Revitalization Systems, and microbiology areas. The results of each task is described in this summary report.

Minton-Summers, S.↗

International Space Station ECLSS Technical Task Agreement Summary Report

This Technical Memorandum provides a summary of current work accomplished under Technical Task Agreement (TTA) by the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) regarding the International Space Station (ISS) Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). Current activities include ECLSS component design and development, computer model development, subsystem/integrated system testing, life testing, and general test support provided to the ISS program. Under ECLSS design, MSFC was responsible for the six major ECLSS functions, specifications and standard, component design and development, and was the architectural control agent for the ISS ECLSS. MSFC was responsible for ECLSS analytical model development. In-house subsystem and system level analysis and testing were conducted in support of the design process, including testing air revitalization, water reclamation and management hardware, and certain nonregenerative systems. The activities described herein were approved in task agreements between MSFC and NASA Headquarters Space Station Program Management Office and their prime contractor for the ISS, Boeing. These MSFC activities are in line to the designing, development, testing, and flight of ECLSS equipment planned by Boeing. MSFC's unique capabilities for performing integrated systems testing and analyses, and its ability to perform some tasks cheaper and faster to support ISS program needs, are the basis for the TTA activities.

Ray, C. D.↗

Assessment of MSFCs Process for the Development and Activation of Space Act Agreement

Space Act Agreements (SAAs) are contractual agreements that NASA utilizes to form partnerships with researchers, industry, and academia to stimulate cutting-edge innovation within the science and technology communities. center dot This study assessed the current SAA development and activation process at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) to determine if improvements could be implemented to increase productivity, decrease time to activation, and improve the quality of deliverables.

Daugherty, Rachel↗

Digitizing Named Entities Found Within Letters of Agreement

Letters of Agreement (LOAs) are text-based air traffic control documents that contain procedures and actions agreed upon by the different parties, typically two or more FAA facilities, that are subject to an agreement. The documents contain among other things generic constraints, which are explicit and implicit combinations of procedures that limit a flight’s trajectory and affects pilot actions. For example, a controller may be required, to assign a specific altitude to an aircraft crossing the boundary between two airspaces. Although LOA generic constraints directly impact the trajectory of an aircraft, they are not currently available in a digital form that can be used for (or directly ingested into automated) flight planning. Instead, the constraints are manually input into an onboard or ground based system. LOA documents are primarily stored at a controlling facility and the generic constraints are implemented by experienced air traffic controllers and pilots primarily using voice instructions. This increases the workload of the controllers, likelihood of error (e.g., due to noisy communication) and makes it impractical for implementation with unmanned aircraft. Therefore, steps must be taken to make existing constraints machine interpretable to enable e.g., automated handoffs which in turn would reduce controller workload. With recent advances in natural language processing, especially the rise in digitization of text documents (e.g., medical documents) and automated extraction of information therein, it is now possible to extract flight specific constraints from LOAs. The goal of this work is to digitize named entities through a combination of natural language processing tasks: named entity disambiguation, toponym resolution, and numeric parsing to extract general constraint components contained within LOAs, herein referred to as Entity Enhancement (EE). Starting with a small list of named entities (e.g., ARTCC, Tower, Altitude and Speed), EE can extract the named entities while simultaneously converting the string-based output into a digital format using an ensemble of processes like rule-based gazetteers and syntactic-lexical patterns. The digital format contains a diverse set of information based on the entity label in question, ranging from standardized facility names to units of measure (e.g., feet) and other numeric information. Upon validating our approach using a truth dataset, we show an overall F1-Score of 0.71 for the extraction process. Looking beyond entity enhancement, we are also working towards the goal of completely digitizing the general constraints by performing EE and fitting them into a standardized exchange model (XM) such as the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM). This will allow for easy distribution and dissemination of LOA constraints to air users, better searchability within documents, and enable ingestion into automated flight planning. Finally, we show a preliminary version of the proposed XM architecture and demonstrate how the model can be populated from the EE output.

Stephen S. B. Clarke↗

US - Soviet agreement

Agreements between US and USSR on spacecraft design and systems compatibility

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US - Soviet agreement

Agreement between NASA and Academy of Sciences of USSR for data exchange

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Satellite Power System (SPS) international agreements

The problems in obtaining international agreements on geostationary orbit availability, microwave frequency allocations and microwave frequency standards for satellites transmitting solar power are considered. The various U.S. policy options, strategies and time frames with respect to key issues are analyzed.

Grove, S.↗

Agreement between the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics concerning scientific-technical cooperation

An agreement between the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics concerning scientific technical cooperation is disclosed. The parties to the treaty agree to promote scientific and technical cooperation on a basis of equality, reciprocity and mutual advantage.

Source record↗

Agreement between experimental and theoretical effects of nitrogen gas flowrate on liquid jet atomization

Two-phase flows were investigated by using high velocity nitrogen gas streams to atomize small-diameter liquid jets. Tests were conducted primarily in the acceleration-wave regime for liquid jet atomization, where it was found that the loss of droplets due to vaporization had a marked effect on drop size measurements. In addition, four identically designed two-fluid atomizers were fabricated and tested for similarity of spray profiles. A scattered-light scanner was used to measure a characteristic drop diameter, which was correlated with nitrogen gas flowrate. The exponent of 1.33 for nitrogen gas flowrate is identical to that predicted by atomization theory for liquid jet breakup in the acceleration-wave regime. This is higher than the value of 1.2 which was previously obtained at a sampling distance of 4.4 cm downstream of the atomizer. The difference is attributed to the fact that drop-size measurements obtained at a 2.2 cm sampling distance are less effected by vaporization and dispersion of small droplets and therefore should give better agreement with atomization theory. Profiles of characteristic drop diameters were also obtained by making at least five line-of-sight measurements across the spray at several horizontal positions above and below the center line of the spray.

Ingebo, Robert D.↗