Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “forms services forms”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 217 records · Page 12

Solar Terrestrial Observatory for future space station program

The Solar Terrestrial Observatory (STO) Science Study Group was established in 1979 to formulate a scientific strategy for the development of a Solar Terrestrial Observatory as an interdependent problem-oriented combination of solar, magnetospheric, and atmospheric instruments. In the scenario formed by the STO Science Study Group, the STO would be mounted on a long-lived Space Platform, carried into orbit, and serviced by the Space Shuttle. The proposed strategy focused on investigations of the physical processes that interlink the major regions of solar-terrestrial space. In reviewing that strategy, one quickly concludes that the STO objectives can be met, and in many ways enhanced, by using a Shuttle-serviced manned Space Station. This conclusion is reinforced by the results of earlier workshops devoted to manned Space Stations.

Roberts, W. T.↗

Tailorable Advanced Blanket Insulation (TABI)

Single layer and multilayer insulating blankets for high-temperature service fabricated without sewing. TABI woven fabric made of aluminoborosilicate. Triangular-cross-section flutes of core filled with silica batting. Flexible blanket formed into curved shapes, providing high-temperature and high-heat-flux insulation.

Sawko, Paul M.↗

New Screening Test Developed for the Blanching Resistance of Copper Alloys

NASA's extensive efforts towards more efficient, safer, and more affordable space transportation include the development of new thrust-cell liner materials with improved capabilities and longer lives. For rocket engines fueled with liquid hydrogen, an important metric of liner performance is resistance to blanching, a phenomenon of localized wastage by cycles of oxidation-reduction due to local imbalance in the oxygen-fuel ratio. The current liner of the Space Shuttle Main Engine combustion chamber, a Cu-3Ag-0.5Zr alloy (NARloy-Z) is degraded in service by blanching. Heretofore, evaluating a liner material for blanching resistance involved elaborate and expensive hot-fire tests performed on rocket test stands. To simplify that evaluation, researchers at the NASA Glenn Research Center developed a screening test that uses simple, in situ oxidation-reduction cycling in a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA). The principle behind this test is that resistance to oxidation or to the reduction of oxide, or both, implies resistance to blanching. Using this test as a preliminary tool to screen alloys for blanching resistance can improve reliability and save time and money. In this test a small polished coupon is hung in a TGA furnace at the desired (service) temperature. Oxidizing and reducing gases are introduced cyclically, in programmed amounts. Cycle durations are chosen by calibration, such that all copper oxides formed by oxidation are fully reduced in the next reduction interval. The sample weight is continuously acquired by the TGA as usual.

Thomas-Ogbuji, Linus U.↗

Digital Information Platform (DIP) Request for Information (RFI) Informational Session

DIP published an RFI on March 23, 2021. An information session is being hosted to go over the concept of DIP, review the content of the RFI and clarify what is being asked. Important information is emerging in digital form and additional effort is required to utilize the information. DIP will provide the capability to integrate key data sources to data processing services that are used to build aviation services for the traditional/commercial community and new emergents. DIP is currently planning and will take a community-involved, collaborative approach to define and develop the framework. DIP is seeking community and stakeholder input to operational needs, metrics of interest, and demonstration contribution. Participants will have an opportunity to ask questions at the end.

Mirna Johnson↗

Carrier Estimation Using Classic Spectral Estimation Techniques for the Proposed Demand Assignment Multiple Access Service

In any satellite communication, the Doppler shift associated with the satellite's position and velocity must be calculated in order to determine the carrier frequency. If the satellite state vector is unknown then some estimate must be formed of the Doppler-shifted carrier frequency. One elementary technique is to examine the signal spectrum and base the estimate on the dominant spectral component. If, however, the carrier is spread (as in most satellite communications) this technique may fail unless the chip rate-to-data rate ratio (processing gain) associated with the carrier is small. In this case, there may be enough spectral energy to allow peak detection against a noise background. In this thesis, we present a method to estimate the frequency (without knowledge of the Doppler shift) of a spread-spectrum carrier assuming a small processing gain and binary-phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation. Our method relies on an averaged discrete Fourier transform along with peak detection on spectral match filtered data. We provide theory and simulation results indicating the accuracy of this method. In addition, we will describe an all-digital hardware design based around a Motorola DSP56303 and high-speed A/D which implements this technique in real-time. The hardware design is to be used in NMSU's implementation of NASA's demand assignment, multiple access (DAMA) service.

Scaife, Bradley James↗

HST Multi Layer Insulation Failure Review Board Findings

The mechanical and optical properties of the thermal control materials on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have degraded over the nearly seven years the telescope has been in orbit. Astronaut observations and photographs from the Second Servicing Mission (SM2) revealed large cracks in the metallized Teflon fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP), the outer layer of the multi-layer insulation (MLI), in many locations around the telescope. Also, the absorptance of the bonded metallized Teflon FEP radiator surfaces of the telescope has increased over time. A Failure Review Board was established to determine the damage mechanism and to identify a replacement material. Samples of the top layer of the MLI and radiator material were retrieved during SM2, and a thorough investigation into the degradation followed in order to determine the primary cause of the damage. Mapping of the cracks on HST and the ground testing showed that thermal cycling with deep-layer damage from electron and proton radiation are necessary to cause the observed embrittlement. Further, strong evidence was found indicating that chain scission (reduced molecular weight) is the dominant form of damage to the metallized Teflon FEP. Given the damage to the outer layer of the multi-layer insulation (MLI) that was apparent during the second servicing mission (SM2), the decision was made to replace the outer layer during subsequent servicing missions. The replacement material had to meet the stringent thermal requirements of the spacecraft and maintain structural integrity for at least ten years. Ten candidate materials were exposed to simulated orbital environments and a replacement material was selected. This presentation will summarize the FRB results, in particular, the analysis of the retrieved specimens, the results of the simulated environmental exposures, and the selection of the replacement material. The NASA Space Environments and Effects community needs to hear these results because they reveal that Teflon (FEP) films should not be used in LEO as routinely as they are today.

Townsend, Jacqueline↗

Improved piston ring materials for 650 deg C service

A program to develop piston ring material systems which will operate at 650C was performed. In this program, two candidate high temperature piston ring substrate materials, Carpenter 709-2 and 440B, were hot formed into the piston ring shape and subsequently evaluated. In a parallel development effort ceramic and metallic piston ring coating materials were applied to cast iron rings by various processing techniques and then subjected to thermal shock and wear evaluation. Finally, promising candidate coatings were applied to the most thermally stable hot formed substrate. The results of evaluation tests of the hot formed substrate show that Carpenter 709-2 has greater thermal stability than 440B. Of the candidate coatings, plasma transferred arc (PTA) applied tungsten carbide and molybdenum based systems exhibit the greatest resistance to thermal shock. For the ceramic based systems, thermal shock resistance was improved by bond coat grading. Wear testing was conducted to 650C (1202F). For ceramic systems, the alumina/titania/zirconia/yttria composition showed highest wear resistance. For the PTA applied systems, the tungsten carbide based system showed highest wear resistance.

Bjorndahl, W. D.↗

Value-added Data Services at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center

The NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), in addition to serving the Earth Science community as one of the major Distributed Active Archives Centers (DAACs), provides much more than just data. Among the value-added services available to general users are subsetting data spatially and/or by parameter, online analysis (to avoid downloading unnecessarily all the data), and assistance in obtaining data from other centers. Services available to data producers and high-volume users include consulting on building new products with standard formats and metadata and construction of data management systems. A particularly useful service is data processing at the DISC (i.e., close to the input data) with the users algorithm. This can take a number of different forms: as a configuration-managed algorithm within the main processing stream; as a stand-alone program next to the on-line data storage; as build-it-yourself code within the Near-Archive Data Mining (NADM) system; or as an on-the-fly analysis with simple algorithms embedded into the web-based tools. Partnerships between the GES DISC and scientists, both producers and users, allow the scientists to concentrate on science, while the GES DISC handles the data management, e.g., formats, integration, and data processing. The existing data management infrastructure at the GES DISC supports a wide spectrum of options: from simple data support to sophisticated on-line analysis tools, producing economies of scale and rapid time-to-deploy. At the same time, such partnerships allow the GES DISC to serve the user community more efficiently and to better prioritize on-line holdings. Several examples of successful partnerships are described in the presentation.

Leptoukh, Gregory G.↗

Multicomponent, Rare-Earth-Doped Thermal-Barrier Coatings

Multicomponent, rare-earth-doped, perovskite-type thermal-barrier coating materials have been developed in an effort to obtain lower thermal conductivity, greater phase stability, and greater high-temperature capability, relative to those of the prior thermal-barrier coating material of choice, which is yttria-partially stabilized zirconia. As used here, "thermal-barrier coatings" (TBCs) denotes thin ceramic layers used to insulate air-cooled metallic components of heat engines (e.g., gas turbines) from hot gases. These layers are generally fabricated by plasma spraying or physical vapor deposition of the TBC materials onto the metal components. A TBC as deposited has some porosity, which is desirable in that it reduces the thermal conductivity below the intrinsic thermal conductivity of the fully dense form of the material. Undesirably, the thermal conductivity gradually increases because the porosity gradually decreases as a consequence of sintering during high-temperature service. Because of these and other considerations such as phase transformations, the maximum allowable service temperature for yttria-partially stabilized zirconia TBCs lies in the range of about 1,200 to 1,300 C. In contrast, the present multicomponent, rare-earth-doped, perovskite-type TBCs can withstand higher temperatures.

Miller, Robert A.↗

Spacecraft Passive Safety Assessment Using Ellipse Constraints and Relative Orbital Elements

This paper presents necessary and sufficient conditions for validating spacecraft passive safety using relative orbital elements (ROE) centered around the far-field to near-field trajectory design of a hypothetical autonomous rendezvous and docking (AR&D) mission. The specific formulation of the ROEs used in this study are of quasi-nonsingular form based on elative eccentricity/inclination vectors. Current methodologies for ensuring passive safety apply keep-out volumes (KOV) to maintain appropriate separation between the Servicer and Client. Widely used techniques to assess the integrity of the KOV involve forward propagation of the relative Cartesian state to check for a potential KOV breach. In this study, an alternative approach to the propagation-based method is proposed using ROEs due to their valuable geometric insights of spacecraft relative motion. Modeling the relative trajectory and KOV ellipsoids as ellipses into the 2-D ROE sub-space simplifies the passive safety validation to a root-finding problem within the unit disk with high computational efficiency. Other approaches to intersection detection of the KOV are also evaluated in accuracy and run-time. Furthermore, a Monte Carlo simulation was employed to compare the ROE-based and relative Cartesian approaches in terms of maneuver error.

Bruce Barbour↗

Forming Aggregations using Virtual Sharding: Lessons Learned from Simple Scalable Storage (S3)

Data aggregation is the ability to combine separate datasets to form a single new logical dataset provides users with a powerful abstraction. The advantage of an aggregate dataset is that the users are freed from having to understand, and incorporate into their workflow, knowledge about the (ad hoc) organization of the constituent datasets. However, aggregating large numbers of files can be computationally complex with data server systems performing many repetitive operations. As part of the authors work on subsetting data stored on Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3), we developed technology to read portions of otherwise monolithic data files. This enables the formation of virtual shards for user in subsetting data stored in HDF5 (hierarchical data format, version 5) files. This same tool can be used to form aggregations that combine data stored in many HDF5 files when those files are stored on S3. The nature of the virtual sharding and the algorithm that exploits it for subsetting is such that it can also be used for aggregation with the need for many of the repetitive operations required by the per file aggregation techniques. We will present timing information that demonstrates the flexibility of this approach. However, the lessons learned is that while this is a useful result in and of itself, these very same techniques can be applied in other contexts where data are stored in services and on media other than S3. For example, this same technique can be applied to data stored on spinning disk. Pushing the envelope for S3 forced a reexamination of our data access techniques which lead to unexpected positive benefits.

Gallagher, James↗

Summary report of the Turbulence Committee

The effects of atmospheric turbulence are discussed. Aircraft design and aircraft operations are reviewed. Turbulence in terms of intensity and scale in design considerations was examined. Turbulence models were used in the form of discrete gusts, spectral distributions, and probability distributions. Various aspects of the design and operations problems, simulation and training factors of pilots, and weather services and forecasts are reported.

Elderkin, C. E.↗

An evaluation of the total quality management implementation strategy for the advanced solid rocket motor project at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

An evaluation of the NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) strategy to implement Total Quality Management (TQM) in the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) Project is presented. The evaluation of the implementation strategy reflected the Civil Service personnel perspective at the project level. The external and internal environments at MSFC were analyzed for their effects on the ASRM TQM strategy. Organizational forms, cultures, management systems, problem solving techniques, and training were assessed for their influence on the implementation strategy. The influence of ASRM's effort was assessed relative to its impact on mature projects as well as future projects at MSFC.

Schramm, Harry F.↗

NCC Simulation Model: Simulating the operations of the network control center, phase 2

The simulation of the network control center (NCC) is in the second phase of development. This phase seeks to further develop the work performed in phase one. Phase one concentrated on the computer systems and interconnecting network. The focus of phase two will be the implementation of the network message dialogues and the resources controlled by the NCC. These resources are requested, initiated, monitored and analyzed via network messages. In the NCC network messages are presented in the form of packets that are routed across the network. These packets are generated, encoded, decoded and processed by the network host processors that generate and service the message traffic on the network that connects these hosts. As a result, the message traffic is used to characterize the work done by the NCC and the connected network. Phase one of the model development represented the NCC as a network of bi-directional single server queues and message generating sources. The generators represented the external segment processors. The served based queues represented the host processors. The NCC model consists of the internal and external processors which generate message traffic on the network that links these hosts. To fully realize the objective of phase two it is necessary to identify and model the processes in each internal processor. These processes live in the operating system of the internal host computers and handle tasks such as high speed message exchanging, ISN and NFE interface, event monitoring, network monitoring, and message logging. Inter process communication is achieved through the operating system facilities. The overall performance of the host is determined by its ability to service messages generated by both internal and external processors.

Benjamin, Norman M.↗

NASA Remote Sensing Data in Earth Sciences: Processing, Archiving, Distribution, Applications at the GES DISC

The NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) is one of the major Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) archiving and distributing remote sensing data from the NASA's Earth Observing System. In addition to providing just data, the GES DISC/DAAC has developed various value-adding processing services. A particularly useful service is data processing a t the DISC (i.e., close to the input data) with the users' algorithms. This can take a number of different forms: as a configuration-managed algorithm within the main processing stream; as a stand-alone program next to the on-line data storage; as build-it-yourself code within the Near-Archive Data Mining (NADM) system; or as an on-the-fly analysis with simple algorithms embedded into the web-based tools (to avoid downloading unnecessary all the data). The existing data management infrastructure at the GES DISC supports a wide spectrum of options: from data subsetting data spatially and/or by parameter to sophisticated on-line analysis tools, producing economies of scale and rapid time-to-deploy. Shifting processing and data management burden from users to the GES DISC, allows scientists to concentrate on science, while the GES DISC handles the data management and data processing at a lower cost. Several examples of successful partnerships with scientists in the area of data processing and mining are presented.

Leptoukh, Gregory G.↗

Fabricating Grating Couplers on Optical Fibers

Microscopic corrugations form on fiber surfaces. Grating couplers couple signals into and out of single-mode optical waveguides without requiring precise alignment of components, although in-service efficiency has yet to be verified.

Chubb, C. R.↗

Current state of the mass storage system reference model

IEEE SSSWG was chartered in May 1990 to abstract the hardware and software components of existing and emerging storage systems and to define the software interfaces between these components. The immediate goal is the decomposition of a storage system into interoperable functional modules which vendors can offer as separate commercial products. The ultimate goal is to develop interoperable standards which define the software interfaces, and in the distributed case, the associated protocols to each of the architectural modules in the model. The topics are presented in viewgraph form and include the following: IEEE SSSWG organization; IEEE SSSWG subcommittees & chairs; IEEE standards activity board; layered view of the reference model; layered access to storage services; IEEE SSSWG emphasis; and features for MSSRM version 5.

Coyne, Robert↗

Opportunity-adaptive QoS enhancement in satellite constellations: a case study

Systems that are formed by massively distributed mobile resources, such as satellite constellations, often provide mission-critical functions. However, many existing fault tolerance schemes and quality-of-service (QoS) management concepts cannot be applied to those systems in a traditional way, due to the dynamically and continuously changing readiness-to-serve of their mobile resources. In this paper, we describe a case study that investigates a method called opportunity-adaptive QoS enhancement (QAQ).

QAQ algorithm↗