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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2011

Integrated Modeling, Mapping, and Simulation (IMMS) Framework for Exercise and Response Planning

EmergenCy management personnel at federal, stale, and local levels can benefit from the increased situational awareness and operational efficiency afforded by simulation and modeling for emergency preparedness, including planning, training and exercises. To support this goal, the Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate is funding the Integrated Modeling, Mapping, and Simulation (IMMS) program to create an integrating framework that brings together diverse models for use by the emergency response community. SUMMIT, one piece of the IMMS program, is the initial software framework that connects users such as emergency planners and exercise developers with modeling resources, bridging the gap in expertise and technical skills between these two communities. SUMMIT was recently deployed to support exercise planning for National Level Exercise 2010. Threat, casualty. infrastructure, and medical surge models were combined within SUMMIT to estimate health care resource requirements for the exercise ground truth.

Mapar, Jalal↗
NASA NTRS1990

An upward compatible spectrum sharing architecture for existing, actively planned and emerging mobile satellite systems

Existing and actively planned mobile satellite systems are competing for a viable share of the spectrum allocated by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to the satellite based mobile services in the 1.5/1.6 GHz range. The limited amount of spectrum available worldwide and the sheer number of existing and planned mobile satellite systems dictate the adoption of an architecture which will maximize sharing possibilities. A viable sharing architecture must recognize the operational needs and limitations of the existing systems. Furthermore, recognizing the right of access of the future systems as they will emerge in time, the adopted architecture must allow for additional growth and be amenable to orderly introduction of future systems. An attempt to devise such a sharing architecture is described. A specific example of the application of the basic concept to the existing and planned mobile satellite systems is also discussed.

Azarbar, Bahman↗
NASA NTRS1993

Emergency preparedness and planning

Monsanto's emergency response plan in dealing with hazardous materials at their facilities is presented. Topics discussed include the following: CPR training; emergency medial training; incident reports; contractor injuries; hazardous materials transport; evacuation; and other industrial safety concerns.

Bouvier, Kenneth↗
NASA NTRS2002

Intelligent Pilot Aids for Flight Re-Planning in Emergencies

Experimental studies were conducted with pilots to investigate the attributes of automation that would be appropriate for aiding pilots in emergencies. The specific focus of this year was on methods of mitigating automation brittleness. Brittleness occurs when the automatic system is used in circumstances it was not designed for, causing it to choose an incorrect action or make an inaccurate decision for the situation. Brittleness is impossible to avoid since it is impossible to predict every potential situation the automatic system will be exposed to over its life. However, operators are always ultimately responsible for the actions and decisions of the automation they are monitoring or using, which means they must evaluate the automation's decisions and actions for accuracy. As has been pointed out, this is a difficult thing for human operators to do. There have been various suggestions as to how to aid operators with this evaluation. In the study described in this report we studied how presentation of contextual information about an automatic system's decision might impact the ability of the human operators to evaluate that decision. This study focused on the planning of emergency descents. Fortunately, emergencies (e.g., mechanical or electrical malfunction, on-board fire, and medical emergency) happen quite rarely. However, they can be catastrophic when they do. For all predictable or conceivable emergencies, pilots have emergency procedures that they are trained on, but those procedures often end with 'determine suitable airport and land as quickly as possible.' Planning an emergency descent to an unplanned airport is a difficult task, particularly under the time pressures of an emergency. Automatic decision aids could be very efficient at the task of determining an appropriate airport and calculating an optimal trajectory to that airport. This information could be conveyed to the pilot through an emergency descent procedure listing all of the actions necessary to safely land the plane. However, there is still the potential problem of brittleness. This study examined the impact of contextual information in presentations of emergency descent procedures to see if they might impact the pilot's evaluation of the feasibility of the presented procedure. The study and its results are described in detail.

Pritchett, Amy R.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Intelligent Pilot Aids for Flight Re-Planning in Emergencies

Effective and safe control of an aircraft may be difficult or nearly impossible for a pilot following an unexpected system failure. Without prior training, the pilot must ascertain on the fly those changes in both manual control technique and procedures that will lead to a safe landing of the aircraft. Sophisticated techniques for determining the required control techniques are now available. Likewise, a body of literature on pilot decision making provides formalisms for examining how pilots approach discrete decisions framed as the selection between options. However, other aspects of behavior, such as the task of route planning and guidance, are not as well studied. Not only is the pilot faced with possible performance changes to the aircraft dynamics, but he or she is also tasked to create a plan of actions that will effectively take the aircraft down to a safe landing. In this plan, the many actions that the pilot can perform are closely intertwined with the trajectory of the aircraft, making it difficult to accurately predict the final outcome. Coupled with the vast number of potential actions to be taken, this problem may seem intractable. This is reflected in the lack of a pre-specified procedure capable of giving pilots the ability to find a resolution for this task. This report summarizes a multi-year effort to examine methods to aid pilots in planning an approach and arrival to an airport following an aircraft systems failure. Ultimately, we hypothesize that automatic assistance to pilots can be provided in real-time in the form of improving pilot control of a damaged aircraft and providing pilots with procedural directives suitable for critical flight conditions; such systems may also benefit pilot training and procedure design. To achieve this result, a systematic, comprehensive research program was followed, building on prior research. This approach included a pencil-and-paper study with airline pilots examining methods of representing a flight route in an immediately understandable manner, and in a manner that would allow the pilot to modify an automatically-generated route and/or detect any inappropriate elements in an automatically-generated route. Likewise, a flight simulator study examined different cockpit systems for the relative merits of providing pilots with any of a variety of automated functions for emergency flight planning. The results provide specific guidance for the design of such systems.

Pritchett, Amy R.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Emergency Landing Planning for Damaged Aircraft

Considerable progress has been made over the last 15 years on building adaptive control systems to assist pilots in flying damaged aircraft. Once a pilot has regained control of a damaged aircraft, the next problem is to determine the best site for an emergency landing. In general, the decision depends on many factors including the actual control envelope of the aircraft, distance to the site, weather en route, characteristics of the approach path, characteristics of the runway or landing site, and emergency facilities at the site. All of these influence the risk to the aircraft, to the passengers and crew, and to people and property on the ground. We describe an ongoing project to build and demonstrate an emergency landing planner that takes these various factors into consideration and proposes possible routes and landing sites to the pilot, ordering them according to estimated risk. We give an overview of the system architecture and input data, describe our preliminary modeling of risk, and describe how we search the space of landing sites and routes.

Meuleau, Nicolas↗
NASA NTRS2018

Evaluating the Socioeconomic Impacts of Rapid Assembly and Deployment of Geospatial Data in Wildfire Emergency Response Planning: A Case Study Using the NASA RECOVER Decision Support System (DSS)

Today’s extended fire seasons and large fire footprints have prompted state and federal land management agencies to devote increasingly larger portions of their budget to wildfire management. As fire costs continue to rise, timely and comprehensive fire information becomes increasingly critical to response and rehabilitation efforts. The NASA Rehabilitation Capability Convergence for Ecosystem Recovery (RECOVER) post-fire decision support system is a server-based application designed to rapidly provide land managers with the information needed to develop a comprehensive rehabilitation plan. This study tested the efficacy of RECOVER through structured interviews with land managers (n=15) who used RECOVER and were responsible for post-fire rehabilitation efforts on over 645 000 ha of fire-affected lands. Although the benefit of better-informed decisions is difficult to quantify, the results of this study illustrate RECOVER’s decision support capabilities provided information to land managers that either validated or altered their decisions on post-fire treatments estimated at over $1.2 million (USD) and saved nearly 800 hours of staff time by streamlining data collection as well as communication with local stakeholders and partnering agencies.

William Toombs↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Evolution of Hardware and Philosophy of Emergency Response Actions on the International Space Station and Future Spacecrafts

Human spaceflight is dangerous for numerous reasons. This ranges from the dynamic environment of launching on a rocket, flying in space among the thousands and thousands pieces of space debris, to the hazards of re-entry & landing, as well as being surrounded by vehicle systems containing hazardous materials or gasses. In-flight emergencies fall into four categories: Rapid Depressurization, Fire, Toxic Spill, and Medical emergency. This paper will address the first three, which fall under the responsibility of the Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) Systems flight control and engineering teams. It will review the evolution of the International Space Station’s emergency response philosophy, procedures, training, and equipment changes over the years. The International Space Station (ISS) emergency equipment has evolved over the last two decades of operations in many ways, but in some it has remained the same. The core actions the flight crew takes to ensure team safety, personal safety, vehicle safety, and equipment safety has not changed. However, the equipment and capabilities provided to them have. From early days of minimal capability when the ISS consisted of a few modules, to today’s 30,000 ft^3 vehicle with over a dozen isolatable segments. From use of positive pressure O2 masks, to the development of respirators. From a lack of procedures for a deadly ammonia leak scenario to a memorized response utilizing numerous atmosphere measurement systems. This paper will review all these various areas that fall under the umbrella of “on-board emergencies”. In addition, the comparison to the planned emergency operations on the Orion vehicle will be reviewed. The Orion vehicle differs from the ISS in that it has no isolatable volume, being approximately 2% the size of ISS, as well as not having a quick return to earth capability.

Barry Tobias↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Evolution of Hardware and Philosophy of Emergency Response Actions on the International Space Station and Future Spacecrafts

Human spaceflight is dangerous for numerous reasons. This ranges from the dynamic environment of launching on a rocket, flying in space among the thousands and thousands pieces of space debris, to the hazards of re-entry & landing, as well as being surrounded by vehicle systems containing hazardous materials or gasses. In-flight emergencies fall into four categories: Rapid Depressurization, Fire, Toxic Spill, and Medical emergency. This paper will address the first three, which fall under the responsibility of the Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) Systems flight control and engineering teams. It will review the evolution of the International Space Station’s emergency response philosophy, procedures, training, and equipment changes over the years. The ISS emergency equipment has evolved over the last two decades of operations in many ways, but in some it has remained the same. The core actions the flight crew takes to ensure team safety, personal safety, vehicle safety, and equipment safety has not changed. However, the equipment and capabilities provided to them have. From early days of minimal capability when the ISS consisted of a few modules, to today’s 30,000 ft^3 vehicle with over a dozen isolatable segments. From use of Russian gas masks to positive pressure O2 masks, to the development of respirators. From a lack of procedures for a deadly ammonia leak scenario to a memorized response utilizing numerous atmosphere measurement systems. This paper will review all these various areas that fall under the umbrella of “on-board emergencies”. In addition, the comparison to the planned emergency operations on the Orion vehicle will be reviewed. The Orion vehicle differs from the ISS in that it has no isolatable volume, being approximately 2% the size of ISS, as well as not having a quick return to earth capability.

Emergency↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Use of Autonomous Vehicles in Emergency Situations - Wildfire Planning and Mitigation

Unmanned vehicles can be useful in emergency situations for many applications such as surveillance, access to harsh environments, and delivery of supplies. However, efforts to use drones in these situations has not been well-coordinated. This project is looking at multiple aspects of the problem with sub-teams addressing: establishing a method and database network to identify and communicate resources for deployment during major incidents and disasters; identifying how drones and other aviation assets can be useful in wildfire-specific emergencies, including mitigation and prevention planning; and considering safety, rules, and behavior of autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous Vehicles↗
NASA NTRS2009

Human Research Program Human Health Countermeasures Element Cardiovascular Risks Standing Review Panel (SRP)

The Cardiovascular Risk Standing Review Panel (SRP) evaluated several cardiovascular risks associated with space flight along with the ongoing and emerging plans to study these issues and potentially propose and/or develop countermeasures. The areas of focus included: 1) The risk of cardiac rhythm problems during prolonged space flight, and 2) Issues related to the risk of orthostatic intolerance during re-exposure to gravity. An emerging area of concern is radiation associated vascular injury. The risk of cardiac rhythm disturbances has emerged based on case reports only. No systematic study of this risk has been published. However, concerns about this risk are heightened by the age range of astronauts, the structural changes in the heart that occur during space flight, and the potential shifts in fluids and electrolytes. The current plan is to use prolonged Holter monitor EKG records made as part of the "Integrated Cardiovascular SMO" in space to determine more about the frequency and magnitude of this problem and to link this data to complementary data from the nutrition group on electrolytes. The SRP was supportive of this approach. The SRP also felt that any data related to cardiovascular risk in space should be better coordinated with the medical screening data that all astronauts undergo at regular intervals. Additionally, while there are potential privacy issues related to this suggestion, many of the current barriers to better coordination of experimental and clinical data appear to reflect longstanding cultural traditions at NASA that need rethinking. The risk of orthostatic intolerance during re-exposure to gravity was seen by the SRP as an area supported by a wealth of published physiological evidence. The SRP also felt that moving forward with the planned approach to countermeasures was reasonable and that extensive additional hypothesis testing on the physiology of orthostatic intolerance was not needed at this time. There was support for developing ground based models of limited (e.g. 1/6 th) G environments on Earth that generated a number of ideas for consideration by NASA investigators.

Joyner, Michael↗
NASA NTRS2012

Information Systems Coordinate Emergency Management

The rescue crews have been searching for the woman for nearly a week. Hurricane Katrina devastated Hancock County, the southernmost point in Mississippi, and the woman had stayed through the storm in her beach house. There is little hope of finding her alive; the search teams know she is gone because the house is gone. Late at night in the art classroom of the school that is serving as the county s emergency operations center, Craig Harvey is discussing the search with the center s commander. Harvey is the Chief Operating Officer of a unique company called NVision Solutions Inc., based at NASA s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, only a couple of miles away. He and his entire staff have set up a volunteer operation in the art room, supporting the emergency management efforts using technology and capabilities the company developed through its NASA partnerships. As he talks to the commander, Harvey feels an idea taking shape that might lead them to the woman s location. Working with surface elevation data and hydrological principles, Harvey creates a map showing how the floodwaters from the storm would have flowed along the topography of the region around the woman s former home. Using the map, search crews find the woman s body in 15 minutes. Recovering individuals who have been lost is a sad reality of emergency management in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the sooner answers can be provided, the sooner a community s overall recovery can take place. When damage is extensive, resources are scattered, and people are in dire need of food, shelter, and medical assistance, the speed and efficiency of emergency operations can be the key to limiting the impact of a disaster and speeding the process of recovery. And a key to quick and effective emergency planning and response is geographic information. With a host of Earth-observing satellites orbiting the globe at all times, NASA generates an unmatched wealth of data about our ever-changing planet. This information can be captured, analyzed, and visualized by geographic information systems (GIS) to produce maps, charts, and other tools that can reveal information essential to a wide variety of applications including emergency management. Knowing precise, real-time information about the size, location, environmental conditions, and resulting damage of an event like a flood or wildfire as well as the location and numbers of emergency responders and other resources contributes directly to the effectiveness of disaster mitigation. The need for such information is also evident when responding to homeland security threats, such as a terrorist attack. Recognizing the value of its geospatial information resources for this and other purposes, in 1998 Stennis and the state of Mississippi partnered to form what became the Enterprise for Innovative Geospatial Solutions (EIGS) industry cluster, supporting the growth of remote sensing and GIS-based research and business. As part of EIGS, several companies partnered with NASA through dual use and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts. Among those was NVision.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2000

Spatial expression of Hox cluster genes in the ontogeny of a sea urchin

The Hox cluster of the sea urchin Strongylocentrous purpuratus contains ten genes in a 500 kb span of the genome. Only two of these genes are expressed during embryogenesis, while all of eight genes tested are expressed during development of the adult body plan in the larval stage. We report the spatial expression during larval development of the five 'posterior' genes of the cluster: SpHox7, SpHox8, SpHox9/10, SpHox11/13a and SpHox11/13b. The five genes exhibit a dynamic, largely mesodermal program of expression. Only SpHox7 displays extensive expression within the pentameral rudiment itself. A spatially sequential and colinear arrangement of expression domains is found in the somatocoels, the paired posterior mesodermal structures that will become the adult perivisceral coeloms. No such sequential expression pattern is observed in endodermal, epidermal or neural tissues of either the larva or the presumptive juvenile sea urchin. The spatial expression patterns of the Hox genes illuminate the evolutionary process by which the pentameral echinoderm body plan emerged from a bilateral ancestor.

Non-NASA Center↗
NASA NTRS1972

Long range planning for the development of space flight emergency systems.

The importance of long-range planning for space flight emergency systems is pointed out. Factors in emergency systems planning are considered, giving attention to some of the mission classes which have to be taken into account. Examples of the hazards in space flight include fire, decompression, mechanical structure failures, radiation, collision, and meteoroid penetration. The criteria for rescue vehicles are examined together with aspects regarding the conduction of rescue missions. Future space flight programs are discussed, taking into consideration low earth orbit space stations, geosynchronous orbit space stations, lunar operations, manned planetary missions, future space flight vehicles, the space shuttle, special purpose space vehicles, and a reusable nuclear shuttle.

Bolger, P. H.↗
NASA NTRS1992

High-lift aerodynamics: Prospects and plans

The emergence of high-lift aerodynamics is reviewed as one of the key technologies to the development of future subsonic transport aircraft. Airport congestion, community noise, economic competitiveness, and safety - the drivers that make high-lift an important technology - are discussed. Attention is given to the potentially synergistic integration of high-lift aerodynamics with two other advanced technologies: ultra-high bypass ratio turbofan engines and hybrid laminar flow control. A brief review of the ongoing high-lift research program at Ames Research Center is presented. Suggestions for future research directions are made with particular emphasis on the development and validation of computational codes and design methods. It is concluded that the technology of high-lift aerodynamics analysis and design should move boldly into the realm of high Reynolds number, three-dimensional flows.

Olson, Lawrence E.↗
NASA NTRS2009

A Comparison of Risk Sensitive Path Planning Methods for Aircraft Emergency Landing

Determining the best site to land a damaged aircraft presents some interesting challenges for standard path planning techniques. There are multiple possible locations to consider, the space is 3-dimensional with dynamics, the criteria for a good path is determined by overall risk rather than distance or time, and optimization really matters, since an improved path corresponds to greater expected survival rate. We have investigated a number of different path planning methods for solving this problem, including cell decomposition, visibility graphs, probabilistic road maps (PRMs), and local search techniques. In their pure form, none of these techniques have proven to be entirely satisfactory - some are too slow or unpredictable, some produce highly non-optimal paths or do not find certain types of paths, and some do not cope well with the dynamic constraints when controllability is limited. In the end, we are converging towards a hybrid technique that involves seeding a roadmap with a layered visibility graph, using PRM to extend that roadmap, and using local search to further optimize the resulting paths. We describe the techniques we have investigated, report on our experiments with these techniques, and discuss when and why various techniques were unsatisfactory.

Meuleau, Nicolas↗