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This viewgraph presentation reviews the many parts of the JPL mission planning process that the project manager has to work with. Some of them are: NASA & JPL's institutional requirements, the mission systems design requirements, the science interactions, the technical interactions, financial requirements, verification and validation, safety and mission assurance, and independent assessment, review and reporting.
Within NASA’s highly competitive environment for funding, Human Centered Design (HCD) and cybernetics could provide advantages to proposers during the mission formulation phase. Opportunities are limited when it comes to funding new science missions. Proposers are challenged to make a compelling case about the scientific desirability, technical feasibility, and resource viability of their concepts. Organizations follow established processes for proposal development using teams that typically include scientists, engineers, and managers. These team members are highly experienced subject matter experts (SME) in their own disciplines, and can respond to requirements from the solicitation. However, they are typically not trained as designers and communicators. Their approach is rooted within NASA’s science and technology paradigm. How can we improve the proposal development process, refine workflow between team members, and deliver clear and appealing offerings to the stakeholders and evaluators? These questions have been addressed by today’s most innovative companies (e.g., Apple, Google, 3M, Dyson), where the design process is not limited simply to engineering and management, but involves an all-encompassing approach drawing from fields such as social sciences, design, and the arts. Like these commercial enterprises, NASA currently employs systems thinking and integrated design, but can benefit further by moving beyond its current practices, which are mostly driven by rigid engineering, technology, science, and project management considerations. At JPL’s Innovation Foundry and through the Solar System Mission Formulation Office, we broadened this paradigm by including HCD in the mission formulation workflow. Our goal was to create a proposal with improved clarity and appeal, thus helping our team to communicate its message and aid evaluators with their work. In this paper we provide examples and lessons learned from our recent proposal development effort using HCD. We discuss touch points where we infused non-linear designerly approaches and cybernetic circularity into the workflow. Implemented design topics include operational design for team building; process design throughout distinct phases of the proposal development and writing process; communication design for streamlined exchange of information within the team and to stakeholders; interaction design; graphic design; and creating boundary objects. While these approaches may feel new or foreign to SMEs and managers in the aerospace community, they produced significant benefits in this mission formulation effort. We will describe how such approaches can be used to broaden NASA’s technology-driven paradigm through design, thus creating an environment which fosters innovation, improved communication, and strategic advantage for proposers and their organizations.
The Mission And Computing Support (MACS) Contractor in accordance with contract number 958226 shall provide engineering, operations, and maintenance support to JPL core systems and Flight Projects.
The success of JPL's Next Generation Imaging Spectrometer (NGIS) in Earth remote sensing has inspired a follow-on instrument project, the MaRSPlus Sensor System (MSS). One of JPL's responsibilities in the MSS project involves updating the documentation from the previous JPL airborne imagers to provide all the information necessary for an outside customer to operate the instrument independently. As part of this documentation update, I created detailed electrical cabling diagrams to provide JPL technicians with clear and concise build instructions and a database to track the status of cables from order to build to delivery. Simultaneously, a distributed motor control system is being developed for potential use on the proposed 2018 Mars rover mission. This system would significantly reduce the mass necessary for rover motor control, making more mass space available to other important spacecraft systems. The current stage of the project consists of a desktop computer talking to a single "cold box" unit containing the electronics to drive a motor. In order to test the electronics, I developed a graphical user interface (GUI) using MATLAB to allow a user to send simple commands to the cold box and display the responses received in a user-friendly format.
The directions that will be followed for solar cell development, production and marketing are projected on the basis of experiences gained during the JPL's Flat-Plate Solar Array project. It is thought that a billion dollar market for Si ribbons can be established by 1990. Thin film technology will yield a product at $2 U.S./W at the end of the 1980s. R&D is growing more focused on central station photovoltaic generators, although the residential market may be the more suitable goal. The intermediate markets, e.g., schools, hospitals and shopping centers may be developed before the central stations.
This paper presents an overview of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) plan for developing a multi-mission facility called the Space Flight Operations Center (SFOC). The SFOC development is a five-year project with the objective of developing and adapting up-to-date computing, networking and data management technology to meet the future data processing and data management requirements for JPL's flight project mission operations. Presented are the project background, basic goals and objectives, design concept and project implementation approach.
The basic design criteria and operating characteristics of a Global Resources Information System GRIS are defined. Researchers are compiling background material and aiding JPL personnel in this project definition phase of GRIS. A bibliography of past studies and current work on large scale information systems is compiled. The material in this bibliography will be continuously updated throughout the lifetime of this grant. Project management, systems architecture, and user applications are also discussed.
Current research projects conducted at the JPL Center for Space Microelectronics Technology are briefly reviewed. These include the development of a new miniature tunneling Goday cell that can be made into arrays. This tunneling IR detector is sensitive to radiation through the infrared and is particularly suited to room temperature measurements of the mid to far infrared. Other developments include ballistic-electron-emission microscopy, a next-generation spacecraft on-board computer using the Direct Memory Access Co-Processor, a 1-sq cm custom chip with 40,000 transistors, new neural network chips, the third-generation hypercube, and a new Hyperswitch Adaptive Message routing VLSI chip.
This paper discusss the systems approach taken by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the commercialization of land-mobile satellite services (LMSS) in the United States. As the lead center for NASA's Mobile Satellite Program, JPL was involved in identifying and addressing many of the key barriers to commercialization of mobile satellite communications, including technical, economic, regulatory and institutional risks, or uncertainties. The systems engineering approach described here was used to mitigate these risks. The result was the development and implementation of the JPL Mobile Satellite Experiment Project. This Project included not only technology development, but also studies to support NASA in the definition of the regulatory, market, and investment environments within which LMSS would evolve and eventually operate, as well as initiatives to mitigate their associated commercialization risks. The end result of these government-led endeavors was the acceleration of the introduction of commercial mobile satellite services, both nationally and internationally.
This paper describes the effort to provide a preliminary capability analysis and a neural network based adaptive flight control system for the JPL-led BEES aircraft project. The BEES flyer was envisioned to be a small, autonomous platform with sensing and control systems mimicking those of biological systems for the purpose of scientific exploration on the surface of Mars. The platform is physically tightly constrained by the necessity of efficient packing within rockets for the trip to Mars. Given the physical constraints, the system is not an ideal configuration for aerodynamics or stability and control. The objectives of this effort are to evaluate the aerodynamics characteristics of the existing design, to make recommendaaons as to potential improvements and to provide a control system that stabilizes the existing aircraft for nominal flight and damaged conditions. Towards this several questions are raised and analyses are presented to arrive at answers to some of the questions raised. CART3D, a high-fidelity inviscid analysis package for conceptual and preliminary aerodynamic design, was used to compute a parametric set of solutions over the expected flight domain. Stability and control derivatives were extracted from the database and integrated with the neural flight control system. The Integrated Vehicle Modeling Environment (IVME) was also used for estimating aircraft geometric, inertial, and aerodynamic characteristics. A generic neural flight control system is used to provide adaptive control without the requirement for extensive gain scheduling or explicit system identification. The neural flight control system uses reference models to specify desired handling qualities in the roll, pitch, and yaw axes, and incorporates both pre-trained and on-line learning neural networks in the inverse model portion of the controller. Results are presented for the BEES aircraft in the subsonic regime for terrestrial and Martian environments.
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The goal of the Formal Inspection Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is to support projects wishing to use Formal Inspections to improve the quality of software and system level engineering products.
NESC saw the need to study the persistent failure of DC/DC Converters during ground testing and in flight, motivated investigation of causes and mitigation options. Research indicated misapplication and device quality to be root causes. The study took 20 months. Team included multiple NASA Centers : JPL, JSC, MSFC, GSFC Project Background
This paper captures the systematic approach taken by JPL's Acquisition Reengineering Project team, the methodology used, challenges faced, and lessons learned. It provides pragmatic "how-to" techniques and tools for collecting requirements and for identifying areas of improvement in an acquisition/procurement process or other core process of interest.
RICST, the Realtime Interferometer Control System Testbed, is a testbed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where teams are developing a common electronics and software foundation that will form the core of the control system for JPL's various interferometer projects.
Flight mission operations systems place human operators in demanding, high risk environments. The objective of Mission Operations and Command Assurance (MO&CA) is to help improve the operational reliability of flight projects by reducing error -- Pareto Analysis shows that the human is the largest error category. MO&CA is a system level task reporting to project flight management and JPL Systems Assurance Division. MO&CA provides direct transfer of knowledge, continuous process improvement, and communication facilitation.
In response to two NASA Office of Space Science initiatives, the NASA Glenn Research Center is now developing a 7-kW-class xenon ion thruster system for near-term solar-powered spacecraft and a 25-kW ion engine for nuclear-electric spacecraft. The 7-kW ion thruster and power processor can be throttled down to 1 kW and are applicable to 25-kW flagship missions to the outer planets, asteroids, and comets. This propulsion system was scaled up from the 2.5-kW ion thruster and power processor that was developed successfully by Glenn, Boeing, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Spectrum Astro for the Deep Space 1 spacecraft. The 7-kW ion thruster system is being developed under NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) project, which includes partners from JPL, Aerojet, Boeing, the University of Michigan, and Colorado State University.
Current status, projected goals, and results of 49 research and advanced development programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are reported in abstract form. Areas of investigation include: aerodynamics and fluid mechanics, applied mathematics and computer sciences, environment protection, materials science, propulsion, electric and solar power, guidance and navigation, communication and information sciences, general physics, and chemistry.