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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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At least 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1996

Mars Exploration Program Strategy: 1995-2020

In the wake of the failure of the Mars Observer mission in 1993, a long-term program of robotic exploration of Mars was established. The themes of the Mars Exploration Program are to understand life, climate, and resources on Mars, with these themes tied together by the common thread of water. The Mars Exploration Program comprises at least one Discovery mission (Mars Pathfinder), the Mars Surveyor Program, plus sample return missions and other missions to prepare possible human expiditions to Mars.

Mars↗
NASA NTRS1997

Origin of the Galactic Disk 6.7 kev Line Emission

The goal of this program was to determine if the extended FeXXV 6.7 kev line emission might possibly be produced and confined by the hot wind-shocked bubbles to accompany UC HII regions. The main result of this study are: (1) FeXXV is detected in the W3 complex, but at a level that could only explain a small fraction of the galactic disk emission if all UC HII regions emit at about the same intensity as the W3 complex; (2) Two X-ray sources are detected in W3. W3-X 1 coincides with the radio image of this region, but W3-X2 has no radio, optical, or infrared counterpart; (3) There is no evidence for variability of W3-X1 during the period of observations (approx, 40,000 sec); (4) The X-ray spectrum of W3-X1 has no emission shortward of 1 kev, it peaks at approx. 2 kev and show significant emission out to approx. 6 kev. No individual lines are resolved. There is currently no generally accepted theory for extended hard X-ray emission in HII regions. Perhaps the most significant discovery of this program has been the detection of extended hard X-rays and the realization that some entirely new processes must be invoked to understand this; and (5)A minimum (chi)(sup 2) fit of the spectrum implies a H absorbing column of N(sub H) approx, equals to 2.1 x 10(exp 22)/ cm, a temperature of the emitting plasma of 7 x 10(exp 7) K, and a luminosity of approx. equal to 10(33)erg/s.

Churchwell, Ed↗
DOE OSTI2026

An interactive machine learning platform for analyzing multi-particle coincidence data from cold target recoil ion momentum spectroscopy

We present SCULPT (Supervised Clustering and Uncovering Latent Patterns with Training), a comprehensive software platform for analyzing tabulated high-dimensional multi-particle coincidence data from Cold Target Recoil Ion Momentum Spectroscopy (COLTRIMS) experiments. The software addresses critical challenges in modern momentum spectroscopy by integrating advanced machine learning techniques with physics-informed analysis in an interactive web-based environment. SCULPT implements uniform manifold approximation and projection for non-linear dimensionality reduction to reveal correlations in high-dimensional data. We also discuss potential extensions to deep autoencoders for feature learning and genetic programming for automated discovery of physically meaningful observables. A novel adaptive confidence scoring system provides quantitative reliability assessments by evaluating user-selected clustering quality metrics with predefined weights that reflect each metric’s robustness. The platform features configurable molecular profiles for different experimental systems, interactive visualization with selection tools, and comprehensive data filtering capabilities. Utilizing a subset of SCULPT’s capabilities, we analyze photo-double-ionization data measured using the COLTRIMS method for three-body dissociation of the D 2 O molecule, revealing distinct fragmentation channels and their correlations with physics parameters. The software’s modular architecture and web-based implementation make it accessible to the broader atomic and molecular physics community, significantly reducing the time required for complex multi-dimensional analyses. This opens the door to finding and isolating rare events exhibiting non-linear correlations on the fly during experimental measurements, which can help steer exploration and improve the efficiency of experiments.

Artificial neural networks↗
NASA NTRS1993

Small spacecraft for planetary exploration

There is need for lower cost, more frequent planetary science missions to compliment the 'once a decade' large multidisciplinary missions. The Solar System Exploration Division of NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications has initiated a program of planetary missions using small spacecraft. This program is called Discovery. Conceptual designs of small spacecraft (100 to 500 kg) for potential Discovery missions to near Earth asteroids are summarized. Another class of spacecraft that could be used for Discovery missions are called microspacecraft. Microspacecraft would be compatible with small launch vehicles such as Pegasus. The term 'microspacecraft' is used here for spacecraft concepts whose mass is about 10 kg. A study of a microspacecraft for a mission to near Earth asteroids is also summarized.

Jones, Ross M.↗
NASA NTRS2019

K2-288Bb: A Small Temperate Planet in a Low-Mass Binary System Discovered by Citizen Scientists

Observations from the Kepler and K2 missions have provided the astronomical community with unprecedented amounts of data to search for transiting exoplanets and other astrophysical phenomena. Here, we present K2-288, a low-mass binary system (M2.0 ± 1.0; M3.0 ± 1.0) hosting a small (Rp=1.9 R), temperate (Teq=226K) planet observed in K2 Campaign 4. The candidate was first identified by citizen scientists using Exoplanet Explorers hosted on the Zooniverse platform. Follow-up observations and detailed analysesvalidate the planet and indicate that it likely orbits the secondary star on a 31.39-day period. This orbit places K2-288Bb in or near the habitable zone of its low-mass host star. K2-288Bb resides in a system with a uniquearchitecture, as it orbits at >0.1 au from one component in a moderate separation binary (a(proj)~55 au), andfurther follow-up may provide insight into its formation and evolution. Additionally, its estimated size straddlesthe observed gap in the planet radius distribution. Planets of this size occur less frequently and may be in atransient phase of radius evolution. K2-288 is the third transiting planet system identified by the ExoplanetExplorers program and its discovery exemplifies the value of citizen science in the era of Kepler, K2, and theTransiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

Kepler and K2 missions↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Road to Endurance: Outcomes From the Endurance Science Workshop

Endurance is a mission concept for a long-range, highly autonomous lunar rover (Fig. 1) designed to explore the farside of the Moon and the largest and oldest (undisputed) impact crater in the Solar System: South Pole–Aitken basin (SPA) (Fig. 2). Endurance would traverse nearly 2,000 kilometers, acquiring a large volume of in situ data, and a large mass of samples (up to 100 kg of material from 12 sites), before rendezvousing with Artemis astronauts at the south pole of the Moon. The Endurance concept was developed during the recent Origins, Worlds, and Life Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey [1–2], which recommended Endurance as the highest priority new strategic mission for NASA’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program. Since the release of the Decadal Survey in 2022, NASA has been further studying this concept, and investigating the range of implementation options [3–5].

J. T. Keane↗
NASA NTRS1994

Exobiology opportunities from Discovery-class missions

Discovery-class missions that are now planned, and those in the concept stage, have the potential to expand our knowledge of the origins and evolution of biogenic compounds, and ultimately, of the origins of life in the solar system. This class of missions, recently developed within NASA's Solar System Exploration Program, is designed to meet important scientific objectives within stringent guidelines--$150 million cap on development cost and a 3-year cap on the development schedule. The Discovery Program will effectively enable "faster, cheaper" missions to explore the inner solar system. The first two missions are Mars Environmental Survey (MESUR) Pathfinder and Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR). MESUR Pathfinder will be the first Discovery mission, with launch planned for November/December 1996. It will be primarily a technical demonstration and validation of the MESUR Program--a network of automated landers to study the internal structure, meteorology, and surface properties of Mars. Besides providing engineering data, Pathfinder will carry atmospheric instrumentation and imaging capabilities, and may deploy a microrover equipped with an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer to determine elemental composition, particularly the lighter elements of exobiological interest. NEAR is expected to be launched in 1998 and to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid for up to 1 year. During this time, the spacecraft will assess the asteroid's mass, size, density, map its surface topography and composition, determine its internal properties, and study its interaction with the interplanetary environment. A gamma ray or X-ray spectrometer will be used to determine elemental composition. An imaging spectrograph, with 0.35 to 2.5 micron spectral range, will be used to determine the asteroid's compositional disbribution. Of the 11 Discovery mission concepts that have been designated as warranting further study, several are promising in terms of determining the composition and chemical evolution of organic matter on small planetary bodies. The following mission concepts are of particular interest to the Exobiology Program: Cometary coma chemical composition, comet nucleus tour, near earth asteroid returned sample, small missions to asteroids and comets, and solar wind sample return. The following three Discovery mission concepts that have been targeted for further consideration are relevant to the study of the evolution of biogenic compounds: Comet nucleus penetrator, mainbelt asteroid rendezvous explorer, and the Mars polar Pathfinder.

Meyer, Michael A.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lunar Mining and Processing: Considerations for Responsible Space Mining & Connections to Terrestrial Mining

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States of America (US) has initiated the Artemis Moon to Mars program to send astronauts (the first woman and person of color) back to the lunar surface, create a sustainable human lunar exploration program, and lead the first human exploration mission to the Mars surface in the late 2030’s [1]. Besides reinvigorating human exploration beyond low Earth orbit not seen since the Apollo program and enabling new scientific activities and discoveries, a major objective of this program is to characterize the resources that exist on the Moon and Mars, and learn how to utilize them for human exploration and the commercialization of cis-lunar space. Commonly known as In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), the search for, acquisition, and processing of resources in space has the potential to greatly reduce the dependency on transporting mission consumables and infrastructure from Earth, thereby reducing mission costs, risks, and dependency on Earth. With the launch of Artemis I in November 2022 and the anticipation of several robotic missions to the Moon under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, greater recognition and excitement about NASA’s Artemis program and lunar exploration activities is growing in the public. With the recognition that past statements and concept videos of human exploration of the Moon are actually becoming real, there is also a growing awareness of the possible positive and negative consequences and impacts these exploration activities may have on the Moon and Mars. On the positive side, the development of ISRU and lunar mining and processing can enable and grow lunar surface exploration and cis-lunar commercial activities, as well as provide benefits to terrestrial industries through spin-in and spin-back of advanced technologies and autonomous operations. On the negative side, there is a perception that space mining will impact the lunar surface and environment negatively for science, and that cultural beliefs about the Moon need to be addressed and considered before these operations occur. This paper will begin to explore the potential driving attributes and guidelines that will address how best to maximize the lessons and connections to terrestrial mining to reduce the risk and cost of lunar ISRU and space commercial activities, enhance efforts to achieve the terrestrial ‘mine of the future’, and provide viable markets for space-derived technologies until commercial space mining is established. This paper will also begin to explore the potential driving attributes and guidelines that could address how to minimize the environmental and surface impacts of lunar ISRU and foster ‘responsible’ space mining that can be implemented until more official agreements and treaties are signed. The existing robust mining regulations adopted globally will be used as a basis for this examination and suggestions will be presented to adopt these agreements for use in space mining.

ISRU↗
DOE OSTI2023

Advanced Research Directions on AI for Science, Energy, and Security: Report on Summer 2022 Workshops

Over the past decade, fundamental changes in artificial intelligence (AI)—from foundational to applied—have delivered dramatic insights across a wide breadth of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) mission space. AI is helping to augment and improve scientific and engineering workflows (e.g., for control, design, and dramatic performance gains through surrogate models) in national security, the Office of Science, and DOE’s applied energy programs. The progress and potential for AI in DOE science was captured in the 2020 “AI for Science” report from the DOE laboratory community in collaboration with academia and industry. Specific scientific areas ready to further leverage the power of AI ranged from the scale and performance of computational models to data analysis to creating new classes of observations using computer vision. Since that report, the scale and scope of scientific AI have accelerated, revealing new, emergent properties that yield insights that go beyond enabling opportunities to being potentially transformative in the way that scientific problems are posed and solved. Thus, under the guidance of both the Office of Science (SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the DOE national laboratories organized a series of workshops in 2022 to gather input on new and rapidly emerging opportunities and challenges of scientific AI. This 2023 report is a synthesis of those workshops. The scientific community believes AI can have a foundational impact on a broad range of DOE missions, including science, energy, and national security. Further, DOE has unique capabilities that enable the community to drive progress in scientific use of AI, building on long-standing DOE strengths and investments in computation, data, and communications infrastructure, spanning the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), and integrative programs such as the NNSA Office of Defense Programs Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) and the SC Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) programs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1970

Selected Technical Spin Offs from the Space Program

The report describes some of the problems which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has encountered in getting people to understand how the general public has profited from the technical discoveries of the space program. Next, it describes NASA's Technology Utilization Program and comments on it. It then describes some of the many spin-offs from the space program. These include examples from management technology, communications, aeronautics, medicine, fabrics highway safety, and weather forecasting.

Gilmore, H. L.↗
DOE OSTI2025

High Energy Physics Network Requirements Review: Final Report, July 2024–December 2024

The world-class research infrastructure at the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC) provides the research community with premier observational, experimental, computational, and network capabilities. Each user facility is designed to provide unique capabilities to advance the core DOE mission in science and technology for its SC program to stimulate rich scientific discoveries and enhance its innovation ecosystem. Research communities gather and flourish around each user facility, bringing together new and enhanced perspectives. The continual reinvention of the practice of science — as users and staff forge novel approaches expressed in research workflows — unlocks new discoveries and propels scientific progress. Within this research ecosystem, the high-performance computing (HPC) and networking user facilities stewarded by the SC’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program play a dynamic cross-cutting role, enabling complex workflows demanding high-performance data, networking, and computing solutions. The ASCR facilities enterprise seeks to understand and meet the needs and requirements across SC and DOE domain science programs and priority efforts, highlighted by the formal requirements review methodology. Between July and December 2024, the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the Office of High Energy Physics (HEP) of the DOE-SC organized an ESnet requirements review of HEP-supported program activities. Preparation for these events included identification of key stakeholders: program and facility management, research groups, and technology providers. Each stakeholder group was asked to prepare formal case study documents about its relationship to the HEP program to build a complete understanding of the current, near-term, and long-term status, expectations, and processes that will support the science going forward.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Improving the Discovery Power of the Dark Energy Survey Gravitational Wave Program in Its Fourth Observing Campaign

The universe is growing at an accelerated rate, yet the several experiments and science cases used to measure this property yield conflicting results for the rate. Known colloquially as the Hubble tension problem, this discrepancy calls for a novel measurement of the Hubble Constant, H0, in order to be resolved. The Dark Energy Survey Gravitational Wave group (DESGW) aims to relieve this tension by performing a standard sirens measurement of H0 independent of traditional methods. To do so in the current era of data abundance and limited telescope time demands a robust, optimized, and complete science software pipeline to carefully balance the transition from gravitational wave data to state-of-the-art images, images to photometric data, and photometric data to identification and analysis of electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave signals. This thesis details the contributions of the author to the DESGW Search & Discovery Pipeline for the fourth observing run of the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA gravitational wave detector network, as well as the science applications that have been pursued.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
NASA NTRS2005

STS-114: Discovery Post MMT Briefing

Wayne Hale, Space Shuttle Deputy Program Manager, is presented in this STS-114 Discovery Post Mission Management Team (MMT) briefing. He begins by talking about obtaining clearance from the Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) material. He then describes the supplies such as eleven water containers and the transfer of 50 additional pounds of Oxygen to the International Space Station. Hale presents a video of a billowed thermal blanket next to the commander's window on the port side of the Space Shuttle Discovery that seems to be of some concern. He answers questions from the news media about the dimensions of this blanket, and the dangers of getting close to this blanket during the Extravehicular Activity (EVA) to repair the gap fillers.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2004

Constructing an Educational Mars Simulation

January 14th 2004, President George Bush announces his plans to catalyst the space program into a new era of space exploration and discovery. His vision encompasses a robotics program to explore our solar system, a return to the moon, the human exploration of Mars, and to promote international prosperity towards our endeavors. We at NASA now have the task of constructing this vision in a very real timeframe. I have been chosen to begin phase 1 of making this vision a reality. I will be working on creating an Educational Mars Simulation of human exploration of Mars to stimulate interest and involvement with the project from investors and the community. GRC s Computer Services Division (CSD) in collaboration with the Office of Education Programs will be designing models, constructing terrain, and programming this simulation to create a realistic portrayal of human exploration on mars. With recent and past technological breakthroughs in computing, my primary goal can be accomplished with only the aid of 3-4 software packages. Lightwave 3D is the modeling package we have selected to use for the creation of our digital objects. This includes a Mars pressurized rover, rover cockpit, landscape/terrain, and habitat. Once we have the models completed they need textured so Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks are handy for bringing these objects to life. Before directly importing all of this data into a simulation environment, it is necessary to first render a stunning animation of the desired final product. This animation with represent what we hope to capture out of the simulation and it will include all of the accessories like ray-tracing, fog effects, shadows, anti-aliasing, particle effects, volumetric lighting, and lens flares. Adobe Premier will more than likely be used for video editing and adding ambient noises and music. Lastly, V-Tree is the real-time 3D graphics engine which will facilitate our realistic simulation. Additional information is included in the original extended abstract.

Henke, Stephen A.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Spacelab program's scientific benefits to mankind

The paper describes the important scientific discoveries and accomplishments achieved by the Spacelab program during the ten years of its operation starting with the first flight in 1983, with emphasis on the discoveries and accomplishments in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, atmospheric science, life sciences, microgravity science, plasma physics, and earth observations. The Spacelab systems performance and operations are discussed with particular attention given to the operations applicable to the Space Station era.

Graft, Harry G., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS2007

Space Science Research and Technology at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

This presentation will summarize the various projects and programs managed in the Space Science Programs and Projects Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Projects in the portfolio include NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope, Hinode solar physics satellite, various advanced space propulsion technologies, including solar sails and tethers, as well as NASA's Discovery and New Frontiers Programs.

Johnson, Charles L.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Search for Near-Earth Object with Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) Assets

This is a brief review of recent plans and current status of the adaptation of an Air Force wide field GEODSS telescope for the discovery and follow-up of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). The proposed search program will focus on the discovery of natural objects and will proceed on a non-interference basis, i.e. avoiding any impact on GEODSS' dedicated purpose of tracking and monitoring Earth orbiting spacecraft. In September, 1992, JPL representatives had an initial meeting with GEODSS personnel and saw their facilities in Maui where use of GEODSS' telescopes were discussed in terms of using these existing sensors for the detection of NEOs. A result of these meetings was a test run at the GEODSS, Socorro, N. Mexico location to evaluate the tracking and astrometric accuracy of an upcoming close approach of NEA, (4179) Toutatis...

Helin, Eleanor F.↗