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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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The MARCOR GPS mobile data system

Market research revealed several key demands for an Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) Global Positioning System (GPS) radio. The demands were for minimization of urban building blockage, easy programmability to minimize mobile data transmission costs, high accuracy for street map level coordination, interface capability with non-digital Specialized Mobile Radios (SMR), and a selling price close to that of alternatives such as Signposts and Loran-C. A team of experts was assembled to surmount these challenges and deliver a GPS radio for $500 to $1000, which operates at high accuracy in an urban environment and is plug-compatible with nearly all vehicle radios. Among the engineering and production breakthroughs described here are a unique Simultrac (Trademark) approach to satellite tracking, enabling up to eight GPS satellites to be used for position determination with a 2-channel receiver, and a receiver-in-a-microphone design. A powerful Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) allowed GPS to be brought within easy reach of millions of AVL users such as bus, taxi, and delivery vehicle fleets.

Rothblatt, Martin↗

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)↗

Promoting Real-Time Science in the Classroom using Wireless PDA Technology

The year is 2004, NASA has landed and deployed a fleet of rovers on the surface of Mars to continue the exploration of that planet and prepare the way for human visitors. Middle school students at Milton Elementary have been following the mission through the media and Internet as part of Mr. Johnson's Earth and space sciences class. The kids have been working in teams to track the rovers as they move across the surface of Mars on a scale model of the landing site they built from sand and rocks using pictures and video downloaded from the Internet. They also built their own version of a rover that can be driven around the model. The time is 3:36pm. Jim and a couple of his fellow students from class are sitting in the cafeteria waiting for a student council meeting to begin. Mary and several others are on the bus riding home. Kathy is in her father's car waiting to leave the parking lot. On Mars, Rover-3 has just stopped and issued an alert to ground control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Back at Milton Elementary chimes can be heard going off in the cafeteria, on the school bus, and in Kathy's car. The students are familiar with the drill and each brings up the Mars mission status display on their hand-held PDA device. They've been using their PDAs (those Palm devices that seem to be everywhere today) to obtain real-time position information for each of the rovers throughout the mission. The mission status display tells them that Rover-3 has stopped on the edge of a small gully and isn't quite sure what to do. The students begin considering the options amongst themselves. Should the rover just drive through the gully? If it does, what happens if it gets stuck? Maybe it should turnaround and look for away around the gully? Trough questions. Real questions. Real problems. The students know they will need to be prepared to discuss the options and conduct their own simulations using the models they built in Mr. Johnson's class tomorrow. Much the same way engineers and scientists will be working to solve the problem at NASA. It's a couple of days later, NASA has made a decision on what to do and has issued new commands for Rover-3 to execute at 9:15am Milton Elementary time. Interestingly, NASA's solution to the problem differs from the one favored by the students. 9:16am, chimes can be heard going off throughout Milton Elementary.

Matusow, David↗