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NASA NTRS2019

Time Series Analysis in the Search for Other Worlds Through Transit Photometry

The Kepler Mission launched in June 2009 to commence NASA's first mission to search for potentially habitable, Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars. Kepler discovered explanets via the transit method: searching for minute (100 ppm) drops in brightness lasting 1 - 13 hours corresponding to occasions where the planet crosses the face of its host star from Kepler's point of view. The exquisite precision required to carry out the Kepler mission (20 ppm in 6.5 hours) pushed astronomical time series analysis to the limits, and motivated the development of novel algorithmic approaches. Transit signatures of rocky planets are often dwarfed by the intrinsic stellar variability, which is not white noise, and often is non-stationary, and by instrumental systematic effects, which can include transients and electronic artifacts. Surmounting this challenging regime of weak, temporally compact, periodic signals in observation noise with strong systematics and other sources of variability motivated the development of 1) an overcomplete, non-decimated, wavelet-based matched filter to jointly estimate the properties of the non-stationary, non-white observation noise process, and 2) a multi-scale, maximum a posteriori (msMAP) approach to identifying and removing instrumental systematic effects. After over nine years of observations, the Kepler spacecraft finally ran out of fuel in November 2018, ending its data collection activities. Over 2300 planets were discovered by Kepler in its primary mission, and over 355 have been discovered by K2, the repurposed mission that followed Kepler's primary mission after the loss of a second reaction wheel in May 2013. We have ported the Kepler science pipeline for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission, which began science observations in July 2019, and report initial results and performance of the modified science pipeline.The Kepler and TESS Missions are supported by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

transit surveys↗

NASA NTRS2018

NASA Earth eXchange (NEX) App Store

NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), and her public cloud version OpenNEX, have become platforms supporting scientific collaboration, knowledge sharing and research for the entire Earth science community. To date, a number of custom tools and capabilities have been integrated into the platforms. However, such integration has to undergo a case-by-case manual process thus lacks scalability. This timely project builds an App Store onto OpenNEX as a building block. Climate data analytics tools/programs can be easily uploaded, shared, organized, searched, and recommended like photos and videos on the YouTube. The foundation of our App Store is a provenance server, which not only records metadata but also execution history of climate data analytics apps including the input data and parameters, output data and products, who runs the app for which purpose, and how apps may be chained into workflows. Researchers can thus understand, reproduce, and repurpose existing apps and workflows. Machine learning approaches are applied to mine provenance to provide recommend-as-you-go services for Earth scientists, such as to recommend suitable apps and workflow snippets. A browser-based workflow tool is also provided for researchers to explore the provenance server and design value-added workflows. Scalability, sustainability, extensibility, usability, adaptability, security and privacy are considered in the App Store.

eXchange↗

NASA NTRS2018

Astrobee Guest Science Interface

At the end of 2018, Astrobee will launch three free-flying robots that will navigate the entire US segment of the ISS (International Space Station) and serve as a payload facility. The mechanical and electrical interfaces are now established and several payloads are being developed. Payload Interface: Astrobee is designed to host third party guest science program payloads (GSP payloads). Some GSP payloads may be software only, such as the Zero Robotics Finals Competition, which is currently hosted on SPHERES, and which will transition to Astrobee in 2019. Several GSP payloads with custom hardware, such as the Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Logistics Reduction and Repurposing (LRR) Project RFID reader, are already under development. These payloads will attach in the Astrobee payload bay.

Barlow, J.↗

NASA NTRS2018

Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio: A Prognostic Indicator for Astronaut Health

Short-term and long-term spaceflight missions can cause immune system dysfunction in astronauts. Recent studies indicate elevated white blood cells (WBC) and polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN) in astronaut blood, along with unchanged or reduced lymphocyte counts, and reduced T cell function, during short-(days) and long-(months) term spaceflight. A high PMN to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) can acts as a strong predictor of poor prognosis in cancer, and as a biomarker for subclinical inflammation in humans and chronic stress in mouse models, however, the NLR has not yet been identified as a predictor of astronaut health during spaceflight. For this, complete blood cell count data collected from astronauts and rodents that have flown for short- and long-term missions on board the International Space Station (ISS) was repurposed to determine the NLR pre-, in-, and post-flight. The results displayed that the NLR progressively increased during spaceflight in both human and mice, while a spike in the NLR was observed at post-flight landing, suggesting stress-induced factors may be involved. In addition, the ground-based chronic microgravity analog, hindlimb unloading in mice, indicated an increased NLR, along with induced myeloperoxidase expression, as measured by quantitative (q)PCR. The mechanism for increased NLR was further assessed in vitro using the NASA-developed rotating wall vessel (RWV) cell culture suspension system with human WBCs. The results indicated that simulated microgravity led to increased mature PMN counts, NLR profiles, and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Collectively, these studies show that an increased NLR is observed in spaceflight missions, and in chronic microgravity-analog simulation in mice, and that this effect may be potentiated by the oxidative stress response in blood cells under microgravity conditions. Furthermore, these results suggest that a disrupted NLR profile in spaceflight may further disrupt immune homeostasis, potentially causing chronic immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. Thus, we propose that the health status of astronauts during short- and long-term space missions can be monitored by their NLR profile, in addition to utilizing this measurement as a tool for interventions and countermeasure development to restore homeostatic immunity.

biomarker↗

NASA NTRS2019

Utilization of Micro Tube Heat Exchanger for Next Generation Phase Change Material Heat Exchanger Development

Abstract and not the Final document is attached. Low Lunar orbit presents a unique thermal environment with high planetary and high solar IR requirements. Orion requires a phase change material heat exchanger (PCM HX) to act as a supplemental heat rejection device (SHReD) during this orbit. As a result, Orion currently uses a PCMHX to meet heat rejection demands in low lunar orbit. This PCM HX weighs 145 lbs, a significant amount of weight on the Crew Module Adaptor. To reduce this weight, a new PCM HX and phase change material is being proposed. This new PCM HX, constructed by Mezzo technologies, was originally designed as a water based PCM HX but is now be repurposed for phase change materials with transition temperatures in Orion's set points and different freeze front propagations. Mezzo's PCM HX utilizes micro tubes which greatly increase the overall heat transfer efficiency allowing for a compact design and significant weight savings. A new phase change material is also being proposed which has a higher latent heat of fusion as well as a higher density. This paper investigates the design, testing, and analysis done on the new Mezzo PCM HX as well as the corresponding phase change material.

Foley, Lauren A.↗

NASA NTRS2019

Mitigation Strategies for Space Radiation Health Risks

Astronauts embarking on missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) will be exposed to a radiation field that may increase the risks of developing cancer, cardiovascular diseases, central nervous system disorders, and immune decrements. Operational parameters will be the primary determinants of crew radiation exposure. NASA uses integrated design tools and risk models to optimize these parameters to minimize radiation exposure. NASA is also considering medical countermeasures (MCMs) to reduce radiation-associated health risks. MCMs for potential use in space-based applications can be developed from a variety of sources, including: a) population-based chemoprevention trials against targeted diseases b) drug development efforts focused on treating acute effects from accidental radiation exposures c) drug development to mitigate side effects of radiotherapy d) mechanistic studies of distinct damage caused by high charge (Z) and energy (HZE) radiation. Use of agents developed for other applications, or repurposed, is advantageous because long-term safety in humans is already established.

Huff, Janice L.↗

NASA NTRS2019

Reduced Gravity Contributes to Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio Shifting and Promotion of the Oxidative Stress Response

Spaceflight can cause immune system dysfunction, such as elevated white blood cells (WBC) and polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN), along with unchanged or reduced lymphocyte counts. A high PMN to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) can acts as a poor prognosis in cancer and a biomarker for subclinical inflammation however, the NLR has not been identified as a predictor of astronaut health during spaceflight. CBC data collected on board the International Space Station (ISS) was repurposed to determine the granulocyte to lymphocyte ratio (GLR) in humans and the NLR in rodents. The results displayed a progressive increase in GLR and NLR during spaceflight and at landing. The mechanism for increased NLR was assessed in vitro using the microgravity-analog, rotating wall vessel (RWV), with human WBCs. The results indicated that simulated microgravity led to increased GLR and NLR profiles, and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and myeloperoxidase (MPO). Interestingly, simulated microgravity increased the number of matured PMNs that showed impaired phagocytic function, while treatment with tert-Butyl hydroperoxide (TBHP), also reduced PMN phagocytosis. In addition, 30-days of simulated microgravity (hindlimb unloading) in mice, indicated an increased NLR and MPO gene expression, which were mitigated in mitochondrial catalase overexpressing transgenic mice, suggesting ROS scavenging is essential for maintaining homeostatic immunity. Collectively, we propose that the health status of astronauts during future short- and long-term space missions can be monitored by their NLR profile, in addition to utilizing this measurement as a tool for oxidative stress response countermeasure development to restore homeostatic immunity.

Paul, Amber M.↗

NASA NTRS2020

Characterization and Commissioning of a Ka-Band Ground Station for Cognitive Algorithm Development

In 2018, the Cognitive Communications and Propagation projects completed installation and checkout testing of a new Ka-Band ground station at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cognitive Algorithms Demonstration Testbed (CADeT) was developed to provide a fully characterized and controllable dynamic link environment to researchers looking to demonstrate hardware and software aligned with atmospheric sensing and cognitive algorithms. CADeT integrates a host of precision control and measurement systems in addition to repurposing a 5.5 meter beam-waveguide dish platform previously used with the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS). This paper will discuss the laboratory testing of ground station components with a emphasis on elements vital to achieving link budget requirements including characterization of the new Gallium Nitride (GaN) Solid State Power Amplifier (SSPA) and far-field measurements of the new antenna feed. Finally, the paper discusses in-situ tests conducted with CADeT and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) to validate laboratory results and make necessary link budget adjustments before reviewing the lessons learned.

Cameron M Seidl↗

NASA NTRS2017

Medical Countermeasures for Radiation Induced Health Effects: Reports of an Interagency Panel Session Held at the NASA Human Research Program Investigator's Workshop, January 26, 2017

An Interagency Panel Session organized by the NASA Human Research Program Space Radiation Program Element (SRPE) was held during the NASA Human Research Program (HRP) Investigator’s Workshop (IWS) in Galveston, Texas on January 26, 2017 to identify complementary research areas that will advance the testing and development of medical countermeasures (MCM) in support of radioprotection and radiation mitigation on the ground and in space. There were several areas of common interest identified among the various participating agencies. This report provides a summary of the topics discussed by each agency along with potential areas of intersection for mutual collaboration opportunities. Common goals included repurposing of pharmaceuticals, neutraceuticals for use as radioprotectors and/or mitigators, low-dose/chronic exposure paradigms, late effects post-radiation exposure, mixed-field exposures of gamma-neutron, performance decrements, and methods to determine individual exposure levels.

Carnell, Lisa S.↗

NASA NTRS2020

Building the RS-25 Engine for NASA’s Next Generation of Exploration.

NASA is aggressively pursuing a human lunar return to the Moon with the Artemis Program. The Space Launch System (SLS) is critical to the transportation architecture, providing both crew and cargo capability. To accelerate SLS development, NASA settled on space shuttle heritage propulsion technologies. Early missions will use repurposed RS-25 engines from the Shuttle Program adapted to SLS requirements. For future missions, however, NASA and engine contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne are restarting RS-25 production with a goal of using the latest manufacturing technologies to produce an RS-25 variant that will cost at least 30 percent less than the shuttle-era engines developed and flown for almost 30 years. The prospect of restarting the production line on these engines after many years and modifying the engine to reduce cost and better match the needs of the SLS vehicle presented unique challenges and opportunities for NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne. NASA and AR are now deep into the process of adapting 16 RS-25 engines for the first four SLS Artemis flights and building the first RS-25 “Restart” engines for future Artemis missions. In addition to navigating programmatic, technical, and logistical challenges with the current RS-25 production work, NASA and AR have partnered to pursue new methods of building this engine through advanced manufacturing techniques to further reduce the cost and schedule required to build each RS-25 engine to contribute to the long-term affordability of the SLS vehicle. This presentation will discuss the goals for the restart program, the challenges, and results to date.

Jessica Jean Wood↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Going beyond reliability to robustness and resilience in space systems

The words reliability, robustness, and resilience, are often used interchangeably to describe tough and dependable systems but the distinctions between them suggest how to design more serviceable space systems. Reliability is simply the quality of consistently performing well. A system that dependably meets its design requirements in the specified environments is reliable. The designers may not consider themselves responsible for failures under unanticipated conditions. Robustness is the capability of performing without failure under a wide range of conditions, which can go beyond the expected range to include possible off-nominal conditions. Resilience is the ability to recover from or adapt to damaging events, such as failures, accidents, external disruptions, and repurposing. Such changes are usually unanticipated. They often invalidate the usual operating assumptions and cause system failure. Reliability, robustness, and resilience describe dependable performance under increasingly difficult conditions, first the specified environment, then a wider possible environment, and finally unanticipated damaging events. These three are increasingly desirable and increasingly difficult to achieve. Engineering for resilience would design systems that can ignore or repair failures, survive accidents, and recover from disruptions. Increasing the resilience of space systems, the ability to perform after unanticipated events, would greatly increase space crew safety. Improving reliability and robustness can be done by dealing with known sources of problems, but improving resilience requires implementing a general approach to reducing the impact of unknown future events. Two contrasting approaches are reducing system complexity and adding supervisory control. The need for resilience has been claimed for decades but little has been accomplished. Systems designers assume that they understand requirements, technologies, designs, architectures, integration, testing, operations, and environments. The potential problems of changes, failures, accidents, unknown environments, and unknown unknowns are ignored. Systems designers are typically overconfident and ignore the need for robustness and resilience.

Harry W Jones↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Going Beyond Reliability to Robustness and Resilience in Space Life Support Systems

The words reliability, robustness, and resilience are often used interchangeably to describe tough and dependable systems but the distinctions between them suggest how to design more serviceable space systems. Reliability is simply the quality of consistently performing well. A system that dependably meets its design requirements in the specified environment is reliable. The designers may not consider themselves responsible for failures under unanticipated conditions. Robustness is the capability of performing without failure under a wide range of conditions, which can go beyond the expected range to include possible off-nominal conditions. Resilience is the ability to recover from or adapt to unanticipated damaging events, such as failures, accidents, external disruptions, and repurposing. Such changes can invalidate the usual operating assumptions and cause system failure. Reliability, robustness, and resilience describe dependable performance under increasingly difficult conditions, first the specified environment, then a wider possible environment, and finally unanticipated damaging conditions. These three qualities are increasingly desirable and increasingly difficult to achieve. Engineering for resilience would design systems that can ignore or repair failures, survive accidents, and recover from unanticipated disruptions. Increasing the resilience of space systems would greatly increase space crew safety. Improving reliability and robustness requires dealing with known problems, but improving resilience requires implementing a general approach to reducing the impact of unknown future events. The need for robustness and resilience has been stated for decades but little has been done. Systems designers often assume that they understand everything they need to know. The potential failures caused by changes, failures, accidents, unknown environments, and unknown unknowns can be ignored. Such overconfidence can lead to neglect of reliability, robustness, and resilience.

Harry W. Jones↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Analysis of Alternative Architectures for Cargo Lunar Landers

NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program has been working with commercial partners to develop human-class lunar landers to return the first American woman and next American man to the lunar surface in the mid 2020’s. In an effort to expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit, NASA’s Artemis program aims to facilitate a sustainable, long-term human presence in cis-lunar space. A component of this will require significant infrastructure to be delivered to the lunar surface. Delivering this infrastructure will require a significant lander capability that has yet to be developed. A thorough understanding of cargo lunar lander architectures is required such that select alternatives can be identified that best support the Artemis program’s objective of sustainability. The goal of this study is to aid NASA and its partners in the understanding of the cargo lunar lander trades space, as well as identify potential robust alternatives. The results will support NASA as it moves forward with key activities such as requirements formulation, agency strategic planning, and potential cargo lunar lander procurements. The study builds off of recent work performed by the Human Landing System program’s Architecture and Systems Analysis group to encompass a broad trade space of cargo lunar lander architecture alternatives. The current trade space as depicted by the morphological matrix and mission graph in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, respectively, includes key alternative options that have become highly relevant due to current HLS activities and include on-orbit refueling, active cryogenic fluid management, Earth orbit aggregation, and global lunar access. The authors believe that there is also a statistically relevant impact of lander-payload configuration on the primary structure of the vehicle that could greatly impact alternative selection. Because of this, several conceptual lander-payload configurations will be evaluated to determine the level of impact. The current set of conceptual configurations are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. To aid the conceptual evaluation of these configurations, a catalogue of notional payloads has been developed that represent a wide range of masses and volumes that are expected to be delivered in support of a sustained human lunar presence, including pressurized and unpressurized rovers, surface habitats, power systems, and other support infrastructure. In order to execute this study in a timely fashion, a similar approach to that utilized in a similar 2019 study focused on 2024 human lunar sorties will be employed [1]. The team utilized a novel architecture synthesis framework currently being developed by NASA/MSFC to evaluate over 600,000 lunar lander architectures over a two month time frame [2]. From this large data set, varying ground rules and assumptions were applied as filters to explore the trade space to identify alternatives which exhibited robustness, as measured by launch vehicle payload margin, to absorb the natural growth that occurs during design maturation. The set of Earth-Moon system Delta-Vs assumed from the 2019 study, shown in Fig. 5, will be repurposed to accelerate model formulation for this effort. Additionally, current efforts in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Aerospace System Design Lab will be integrated to provide probabilistic modeling of the cargo lunar lander architectures to aid in identifying robust design alternatives [3]. The approach will help minimize potential impacts due to large levels of uncertainty inherent to pre phase-A conceptual design. By leveraging these past and present studies and partnerships, a highly detailed set of data can be generated in a short time period to aid NASA in the coming years to support the goal of a sustained human lunar presence.

Architectures↗

NASA NTRS2019

Sun search desgin for the Psyche spacecraft

Psyche is a scientific mission to explore the large asteroid (16) Psyche that orbits the Sun at ~3 AU. Managed by JPL, it is the first instance of Maxar’s product line of geosynchronous communication satellites being repurposed for deep space. This paper presents the design of a unique sun sensor configuration for Safe Mode of the spacecraft. It enables quick, robust, and propellant-efficient safing while leveraging sensors, avionics, and algorithms that have extensive, flight-proven heritages

Turner, Eric↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Going beyond reliability to achieve robustness

Reliability is the ability to perform well and consistently. More formally, reliability is defined as the mathematical probability that a system does not fail during a specified time period under its specified operating conditions. The specified operating conditions often go beyond the nominal environment to include variations and challenges encountered in operational use. The difficulty is that systems are often operated outside of their specified operating conditions and, if they fail, the designers are in theory blameless. Unanticipated damaging events include internal failures, external disruptions in supporting systems, accidents, and repurposing. The most common explanation of a system failure is human error, which is usually the first assumption of the system designers. Robustness is the capability to perform without failure under a wide range of conditions that go beyond the specified operating conditions. The first step towards improving robustness would be to expand the system’s specified operating conditions to include a wider range of anticipated challenges, especially human error. Beyond this, there is a need for general approach to reduce the impact of unanticipated future events, the unknown unknowns, by improving the system’s general ability to cope. Robustness can be improved by providing additional processing capacity, larger flow control buffers, increased backup storage, more online redundancy, and more capable supervisory monitoring and control.

Harry W Jones↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Observatory Implementation and Challenges

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), previously referred to as Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), was named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, an astronomer and NASA pioneer of modern space-based astronomy who is known as the “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope”. Roman is a deep space infrared observatory with a Hubble-sized telescope and wide field of view instrument (greater than 100 times that of Hubble’s) that will conduct a high latitude time-domain survey, a high latitude imaging and spectroscopic survey, and a galactic bulge time-domain survey to characterize dark energy and expand the census of exoplanets in our galaxy while allowing a broad range of astrophysics research. Roman will also demonstrate exoplanet coronagraphy with active wave front control technology and provide general investigator programs for the science community. Roman is finishing the critical design phase and is planning for launch in 2026. It will operate in a quasi-halo orbit about Sun-Earth L2, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, for a five-year primary mission life. The Observatory features an Optical Telescope Assembly with an existing, repurposed 2.4m primary mirror, a Wide Field Instrument with a focal plane array comprised of 18 HgCdTe near-infrared detectors and a grism, prism and filter elements for imaging and spectroscopy in support of the primary surveys, as well as a Coronagraph instrument technology demonstration with starlight suppression technology for direct imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets. The telescope is mounted to the Instrument Carrier composite truss structure which also optically meters each instrument, includes a Launch Load and Vibration Isolation System to provide passive isolation of spacecraft jitter sources while also supporting the payload during launch and is attached to the Spacecraft Bus. The Spacecraft also includes a Solar Array Sunshield ,Deployable Aperture Cover, Lower Instrument Sunshade, High Gain Antenna System, and Outer Barrel Assembly. Figure 1 shows an overview of the Roman Observatory. When fully integrated, Roman will be the largest Observatory assembled and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Figure 1. Roman Observatory Overview Development of scientific satellites is challenging by nature, as the pursuit to broaden scientific knowledge always pushes the boundary of what has come before. The implementation of the Roman mission is a prime example and expected challenges have been augmented by the foundational decision to use the existing telescope components, developed in the early 2000s by another Government agency for a different application. Other unique aspects of the Roman mission, such as its survey nature, the vast amount of data required to meet science objectives, and packaging of the Observatory elements around the existing telescope components, create constrained design spaces that drive competing requirements across Observatory subsystems. Given these challenges, systems engineering has been a critical discipline in balancing implementation decisions for the Roman mission and will continue to play a key role going forward. This paper will discuss details of the Roman Observatory configuration, as well as some of the systems engineering challenges and the decision-making process used to mature the Roman Space Telescope preliminary design to implementation.

Lisa Ml Bartusek↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Going Beyond Reliability to Robustness and Resilience in Space Life Support Systems

Harry W. Jones↗

NASA NTRS2021

Retired Satellites: A chance to shed light

Satellite data are vital to decisions about both environmental and human health. As satellites are replaced and decommissioned, they could be repurposed to spark new scientific insights.

Eleanor C Stokes↗