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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 235 records · Page 13
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2007

Locomotor Dysfunction after Spaceflight: Characterization and Countermeasure Development

Astronauts returning from space flight show disturbances in locomotor control manifested by changes in various sub-systems including head-trunk coordination, dynamic visual acuity, lower limb muscle activation patterning and kinematics (Glasauer, et al., 1995; Bloomberg, et al., 1997; McDonald, et al., 1996; 1997; Layne, et al., 1997; 1998, 2001, 2004; Newman, et al., 1997; Bloomberg and Mulavara, 2003). These post flight changes in locomotor performance, due to neural adaptation to the microgravity conditions of space flight, affect the ability of crewmembers especially after a long duration mission to egress their vehicle and perform extravehicular activities soon after landing on Earth or following a landing on the surface of the Moon or Mars. At present, no operational training intervention is available pre- or in- flight to mitigate post flight locomotor disturbances. Our laboratory is currently developing a gait adaptability training program that is designed to facilitate recovery of locomotor function following a return to a gravitational environment. The training program exploits the ability of the sensorimotor system to generalize from exposure to multiple adaptive challenges during training so that the gait control system essentially "learns to learn" and therefore can reorganize more rapidly when faced with a novel adaptive challenge. Ultimately, the functional goal of an adaptive generalization countermeasure is not necessarily to immediately return movement patterns back to "normal". Rather the training regimen should facilitate the reorganization of available sensorimotor sub-systems to achieve safe and effective locomotion as soon as possible after space flight. We have previously confirmed that subjects participating in adaptive generalization training programs, using a variety of visuomotor distortions and different motor tasks from throwing to negotiating an obstacle course as the dependent measure, can learn to enhance their ability to adapt to a novel sensorimotor environment (Roller et al., 2001; Cohen et al. 2005). Importantly, this increased adaptability is retained even one month after completion of the training period. Our laboratory is currently developing adaptive generalization training procedures and the associated flight hardware to implement such a training program, using variations of visual flow, subject loading, and treadmill speed; during regular in-flight treadmill operations.

Mulavara, A. P.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Tracking The Double Eagle

Last summer a trio of aeronauts made aviation history. Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, all of Albuquerque, New Mexico, piloted their balloon Double Eagle I1 from Presque Isle, Maine to Miserey, France, some 50 miles from Paris. They were the first to negotiate a successful Atlantic crossing in a freeflying balloon after a score of attempts over a span of more than a century. A year earlier, Abruzzo and Anderson had made an unsuccessful try in their predecessor balloon Double Eagle. On that occasion, a NASA-developed satellite beacon helped save their lives. Carried aboard the balloon, the simple, seven-pound beacon continuously transmitted signals to NASA's Nimbus-6 satellite. Nimbus relayed the signals to monitors at Goddard Space Flight Center, enabling Goddard to compute the balloon's position. Position reports were then telephoned regularly to Double Eagle's control center at Bedford, Massachusetts. This monitoring system proved invaluable when the balloon encountered trouble several days after liftoff.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2006

Zero to Integration in Eight Months, the Dawn Ground Data System Engineering Challange

The Dawn Project has presented the Ground Data System (GDS) with technical challenges driven by cost and schedule constraints commonly associated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Discovery Projects. The Dawn mission consists of a new and exciting Deep Space partnership among: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), responsible for project management and flight operations; Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC), spacecraft builder and responsible for flight system test and integration; and the University of California, at Los Angeles (UCLA), responsible for science planning and operations. As a cost-capped mission, one of Dawn s implementation strategies is to leverage from both flight and ground heritage. OSC's ground data system is used for flight system test and integration as part of the flight heritage strategy. Mission operations, however, are to be conducted with JPL s ground system. The system engineering challenge of dealing with two heterogeneous ground systems emerged immediately. During the first technical interchange meeting between the JPL s GDS Team and OSC's Flight Software Team, August 2003, the need to integrate the ground system with the flight software was brought to the table. This need was driven by the project s commitment to enable instrument engineering model integration in a spacecraft simulator environment, for both demonstration and risk mitigation purposes, by April 2004. This paper will describe the system engineering approach that was undertaken by JPL's GDS Team in order to meet the technical challenge within a non-negotiable eight-month schedule. Key to the success was adherence to an overall systems engineering process and fundamental systems engineering practices: decomposition of the project request into manageable requirements; definition of a structured yet flexible development process; integration of multiple ground disciplines and experts into a focused team effort; in-process risk management; and aggregation of the intermediate products to an integrated final product. In addition, this paper will highlight the role of lessons learned from the integration experience. The lessons learned from an early GDS deployment have served as the foundation for the design and implementation of the Dawn Ground Data System.

systems engineering↗
NASA NTRS2007

Access to Space for Technology Validation Missions: A Practical Guide

Space technology experiments and validation missions share a common dilemma with the aerospace industry in general: the high cost of access to space. Whether the experiment is a so-called university cubesat, a university measurement experiment, or a NASA New Millennium Program (NMP) technology validation mission, the access to space option can be scaled appropriately for the particular constraints. A cubesat might fly as one of a number of cubesats that negotiate a flight on an experimental vehicle. A university experiment might do the same. A NASA flight validation might partner with an Air Force experimental mission.

access to space↗
NASA NTRS2008

Environmental Public Health Survelliance for Exposure to Respiratory Health Hazards: A Joint NASA/CDC Project to Use Remote Sensing Data for Estimating Airborne Particulate Matter Over the Atlanta, Georgia Metropolitan Area

Describes the public health surveillance efforts of NASA, in a joint effort with the Center for Disease Control (CDC). NASA/MSFC and the CDC are partners in linking nvironmental and health data to enhance public health surveillance. The use of NASA technology creates value - added geospatial products from existing environmental data sources to facilitate public health linkages. The venture sought to provide remote sensing data for the 5-country Metro-Atlanta area and to integrate this environmental data with public health data into a local network, in an effort to prevent and control environmentally related health effects. Remote sensing data used environmental data (Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] Air Quality System [AQS] ground measurements and MODIS Aerosol Optical Depth [AOD]) to estimate airborne particulate matter over Atlanta, and linked this data with health data related to asthma. The study proved the feasibility of linking environmental data (MODIS particular matter estimates and AQS) with health data (asthma). Algorithms were developed for QC, bias removal, merging MODIS and AQS particulate matter data, as well as for other applications. Additionally, a Business Associate Agreement was negotiated for a health care provider to enable sharing of Protected Health Information.

Quattrochi, Dale A.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Play and Learn: Potentials of Game-Based Learning

Learners are encouraged to combine knowledge from different areas to choose a solution or to make a decision at acertain point. Learners can test how the outcome of the game changes based on their decisions and actions. Learners are encouraged to contact other team members and discuss and negotiate subsequent steps, thus improving their social skills.

Pivec, Maja↗
NASA NTRS2008

Performance Basis for Airborne Separation

Emerging applications of Airborne Separation Assistance System (ASAS) technologies make possible new and powerful methods in Air Traffic Management (ATM) that may significantly improve the system-level performance of operations in the future ATM system. These applications typically involve the aircraft managing certain components of its Four Dimensional (4D) trajectory within the degrees of freedom defined by a set of operational constraints negotiated with the Air Navigation Service Provider. It is hypothesized that reliable individual performance by many aircraft will translate into higher total system-level performance. To actually realize this improvement, the new capabilities must be attracted to high demand and complexity regions where high ATM performance is critical. Operational approval for use in such environments will require participating aircraft to be certified to rigorous and appropriate performance standards. Currently, no formal basis exists for defining these standards. This paper provides a context for defining the performance basis for 4D-ASAS operations. The trajectory constraints to be met by the aircraft are defined, categorized, and assessed for performance requirements. A proposed extension of the existing Required Navigation Performance (RNP) construct into a dynamic standard (Dynamic RNP) is outlined. Sample data is presented from an ongoing high-fidelity batch simulation series that is characterizing the performance of an advanced 4D-ASAS application. Data of this type will contribute to the evaluation and validation of the proposed performance basis.

Wing, David J.↗
NASA NTRS2008

Advanced Control System Increases Helicopter Safety

With support and funding from a Phase II NASA SBIR project from Ames Research Center, Hoh Aeronautics Inc. (HAI), of Lomita, California, produced HeliSAS, a low-cost, lightweight, attitude-command-attitude-hold stability augmentation system (SAS) for civil helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles. HeliSAS proved itself in over 160 hours of flight testing and demonstrations in a Robinson R44 Raven helicopter, a commercial helicopter popular with news broadcasting and police operations. Chelton Flight Systems, of Boise, Idaho, negotiated with HAI to develop, market, and manufacture HeliSAS, now available as the Chelton HeliSAS Digital Helicopter Autopilot.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2010

Sensory Bias Predicts Postural Stability, Anxiety, and Cognitive Performance in Healthy Adults Walking in Novel Discordant Conditions

We designed a gait training study that presented combinations of visual flow and support surface manipulations to investigate the response of healthy adults to novel discordant sensorimotor conditions. We aimed to determine whether a relationship existed between subjects visual dependence and their scores on a collective measure of anxiety, cognition, and postural stability in a new discordant environment presented at the conclusion of training (Transfer Test). A treadmill was mounted to a motion base platform positioned 2 m behind a large visual screen. Training consisted of three walking sessions, each within a week of the previous visit, that presented four 5-minute exposures to various combinations of support surface and visual scene manipulations, all lateral sinusoids. The conditions were scene translation only, support surface translation only, simultaneous scene and support surface translations in-phase, and simultaneous scene and support surface translations 180 out-of-phase. During the Transfer Test, the trained participants received a 2-minute novel exposure. A visual sinusoidal roll perturbation, with twice the original flow rate, was superimposed on a sinusoidal support surface roll perturbation that was 90 out of phase with the scene. A high correlation existed between normalized torso translation, measured in the scene-only condition at the first visit, and a combined measure of normalized heart rate, stride frequency, and reaction time at the transfer test. Results suggest that visually dependent participants experience decreased postural stability, increased anxiety, and increased reaction times compared to their less visually dependent counterparts when negotiating novel discordant conditions.

Brady, Rachel A.↗
NASA NTRS2009

An Effective Health and Medical Technical Authority

The NASA Governance model directed the formation of three Technical Authorities, Engineering; Safety and Mission Assurance; and Health and Medical, to ensure that risks are identified and adjudicated efficiently and transparently in concert with the spaceflight programs and projects. The Health and Medical Technical Authority (HMTA) has been implemented at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) and consists of the Chief Medical Office (CMO), the Deputy CMO, and HMTA Delegates. The JSC HMTA achieves the goals of risk identification and adjudication through the discharge of the appropriate technical expertise to human space flight programs and projects and the escalation of issues within program and technical authority boards. The JSC HMTA relies on subject matter experts (SMEs) in the Space Life Sciences Directorate at JSC as well as experts from other Centers to work crew health and performance issues at the technical level, develop requirements, oversee implementation and validation of requirements, and identify risks and non-compliances. Once a risk or potential noncompliance has been identified and reported to the programs or projects, the JSC HMTA begins to track it and closely monitor the program's or project's response. As a risk is developed or a non-compliance negotiated, positions from various levels of decision makers are sought at the program and project control boards. The HMTA may support a program or project position if it is satisfied with the decision making and vetting processes (ex. the subject matter expert voiced his/her concerns and all dissenting opinions were documented) and finds that the position both acknowledges the risk and cost of the mitigation and resolves the issue without changing NASA risk posture. The HMTA may disagree with a program or project position if the NASA risk posture has been elevated or obfuscated. If the HMTA does disagree with the program or project position, it will appeal to successively higher levels of authority so that risk acceptance and risk trades will be acknowledged and sanctioned at the highest appropriate level; this includes Program Managers, Mission Directorate Associate Administrators and the Agency Administrator.

Fogarty, Jennifer A.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Streamlining Payload Integration

Payload integration onto space transport vehicles and the International Space Station (ISS) is a complex process. Yet, cargo transport is the sole reason for any space mission, be it for ferrying humans, science, or hardware. As the largest such effort in history, the ISS offers a wide variety of payload experience. However, for any payload to reach the Space Station under the current process, Payload Developers face a list of daunting tasks that go well beyond just designing the payload to the constraints of the transport vehicle and its stowage topology. Payload customers are required to prove their payload s functionality, structural integrity, and safe integration - including under less than nominal situations. They must also plan for or provide training, procedures, hardware labeling, ground support, and communications. In addition, they must deal with negotiating shared consumables, integrating software, obtaining video, and coordinating the return of data and hardware. All the while, they must meet export laws, launch schedules, budget limits, and the consensus of more than 12 panel and board reviews. Despite the cost and infrastructure overhead, payload proposals have increased. Just in the span from FY08 to FY09, the NASA Payload Space Station Support Office budget rose from $78M to $96M in attempt to manage the growing manifest, but the potential number of payloads still exceeds available Payload Integration Management manpower. The growth has also increased management difficulties due to the fact that payloads are more frequently added to a flight schedule late in the flow. The current standard ISS template for payload integration from concept to payload turn-over is 36 months, or 18 months if the payload already has a preliminary design. Customers are increasingly requiring a turn-around of 3 to 6-months to meet market needs. The following paper suggests options for streamlining the current payload integration process in order to meet customer schedule needs and reduce costs for both the integration support teams and the developers, without reducing quality or compromising safety. Issues for the key integration areas of planning, training, verification, and safety are presented in a Root-Cause Analysis study, with plausible solutions provided that involve technology and tools already available to the ISS community. Although based upon the ISS process, the payload integration techniques outlined herein also offer an integration template for any space transport endeavor.

Lufkin, Susan N.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Ares I-X Roll Control System Development

Project Managers often face challenging technical, schedule and budget issues. This presentation will explore how the Ares I-X Roll Control System Integrated Product Team (IPT) mitigated challenges such as concurrent engineering requirements and environments and evolving program processes, while successfully managing an aggressive project schedule and tight budget. IPT challenges also included communications and negotiations among inter- and intra-government agencies, including the US Air Force, NASA/MSFC Propulsion Engineering, LaRC, GRC, KSC, WSTF, and the Constellation Program. In order to successfully meet these challenges it was essential that the IPT define those items that most affected the schedule critical path, define early mitigation strategies to reduce technical, schedule, and budget risks, and maintain the end-product focus of an "unmanned test flight" context for the flight hardware. The makeup of the IPT and how it would function were also important considerations. The IPT consisted of NASA/MSFC (project management, engineering, and safety/quality) and contractors (Teledyne Brown Engineering and Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, who supplied heritage hardware experience). The early decision to have a small focused IPT working "badgelessly" across functional lines to eliminate functional stove-piping allowed for many more tasks to be done by fewer people. It also enhanced a sense of ownership of the products, while still being able to revert back to traditional roles in order to provide the required technical independence in design reviews and verification closures. This presentation will highlight several prominent issues and discuss how they were mitigated and the resulting Lessons Learned that might benefit other projects.

Unger, Ronald J.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Developing Collective Training for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Employment

The projected use of small unmanned aerial systems (SUAS) in military operations will produce training requirements which go beyond current capabilities. The paper describes the development of prototype training procedures and accompanying research simulations to address this need. We initially constructed a testbed to develop simulation-based training for an SUAS operator equipped with a simulated vertical-lift and land SUAS. However, the required training will go beyond merely training an operator how to pilot an SUAS. In addition to tactics, techniques, and procedures for employment of SUASs, collective training methods must be trained. Moreover, the leader of a unit equipped with SUAS will need to learn how to plan missions which incorporate the SUAS, and take into account air space and frequency management considerations. The demands of the task require the leader to allocate personnel to the SUAS mission, communicate and coordinate with those personnel during the mission, and make use of the information provided. To help address these training issues, we expanded our research testbed to include a command and control node (C2 node), to enable communications between a leader and the SUAS operator. In addition, we added a virtual environment in which dismounted infantry missions can be conducted. This virtual environment provides the opportunity for interactions among human-controlled avatars and non-player characters (NPCs), plus authoring tools to construct scenarios. Using these NPCs, a collective exercise involving friendly, enemy, and civilian personnel can be conducted without the need for a human role-player for every entity. We will describe the results of our first experiment, which examined the ability of players to negotiate use of the C2 node and the virtual environment at the same time, in order to see if this is a feasible combination of tools for training development.

Durlach, Paula J.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Project Interface Requirements Process Including Shuttle Lessons Learned

Most failures occur at interfaces between organizations and hardware. Processing interface requirements at the start of a project life cycle will reduce the likelihood of costly interface changes/failures later. This can be done by adding Interface Control Documents (ICDs) to the Project top level drawing tree, providing technical direction to the Projects for interface requirements, and by funding the interface requirements function directly from the Project Manager's office. The interface requirements function within the Project Systems Engineering and Integration (SE&I) Office would work in-line with the project element design engineers early in the life cycle to enhance communications and negotiate technical issues between the elements. This function would work as the technical arm of the Project Manager to help ensure that the Project cost, schedule, and risk objectives can be met during the Life Cycle. Some ICD Lessons Learned during the Space Shuttle Program (SSP) Life Cycle will include the use of hardware interface photos in the ICD, progressive life cycle design certification by analysis, test, & operations experience, assigning interface design engineers to Element Interface (EI) and Project technical panels, and linking interface design drawings with project build drawings

Bauch, Garland T.↗
NASA NTRS2006

Zero to Integration in Eight Months, the Dawn Ground Data System Engineering Challenge

The Dawn Project has presented the Ground Data System (GDS) with technical challenges driven by cost and schedule constraints commonly associated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Discovery Projects. The Dawn mission consists of a new and exciting Deep Space partnership among: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), manages the project and is responsible for flight operation; Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC), is the spacecraft builder and is responsible for flight system test and integration; and the University of California, at Los Angeles (UCLA), is responsible for science planning and operations. As a cost-capped mission, one of Dawn's implementation strategies is to leverage from both flight and ground heritage. OSC's ground data system is used for flight system test and integration as part of the flight heritage strategy. Mission operations, however, are to be conducted with JPL's ground system. The system engineering challenge of dealing with two heterogeneous ground systems emerged immediately. During the first technical interchange meeting between the JPL's GDS Team and OSC's Flight Software Team, August 2003, the need to integrate the ground system with the flight software was brought to the table. This need was driven by the project's commitment to enable instrument engineering model integration in a spacecraft simulator environment, for both demonstration and risk mitigation purposes, by April 2004. This paper will describe the system engineering approach that was undertaken by JPL's GDS Team in order to meet the technical challenge within a non-negotiable eight-month schedule. Key to the success was adherence to fundamental systems engineering practices: decomposition of the project request into manageable requirements; integration of multiple ground disciplines and experts into a focused team effort; definition of a structured yet flexible development process; definition of an in-process risk reduction plan; and aggregation of the intermediate products to an integrated final product. In addition, this paper will highlight the role of lessons learned from the integration experience. The lessons learned from an early GDS deployment have served as the foundation for the design and implementation of the Dawn Ground Data System.

Ground Data System (GDS)↗
NASA NTRS2009

A Module Language for Typing by Contracts

Assume-guarantee reasoning is a popular and expressive paradigm for modular and compositional specification of programs. It is becoming a fundamental concept in some computer-aided design tools for embedded system design. In this paper, we elaborate foundations for contract-based embedded system design by proposing a general-purpose module language based on a Boolean algebra allowing to define contracts. In this framework, contracts are used to negotiate the correctness of assumptions made on the definition of a component at the point where it is used and provides guarantees to its environment. We illustrate this presentation with the specification of a simplified 4-stroke engine model.

Glouche, Yann↗
NASA NTRS2010

Embracing Safe Ground Test Facility Operations and Maintenance

Conducting integrated operations and maintenance in wind tunnel ground test facilities requires a balance of meeting due dates, efficient operation, responsiveness to the test customer, data quality, effective maintenance (relating to readiness and reliability), and personnel and facility safety. Safety is non-negotiable, so the balance must be an "and" with other requirements and needs. Pressure to deliver services faster at increasing levels of quality in under-maintained facilities is typical. A challenge for management is to balance the "need for speed" with safety and quality. It s especially important to communicate this balance across the organization - workers, with a desire to perform, can be tempted to cut corners on defined processes to increase speed. Having a lean staff can extend the time required for pre-test preparations, so providing a safe work environment for facility personnel and providing good stewardship for expensive National capabilities can be put at risk by one well-intending person using at-risk behavior. This paper documents a specific, though typical, operational environment and cites management and worker safety initiatives and tools used to provide a safe work environment. Results are presented and clearly show that the work environment is a relatively safe one, though still not good enough to keep from preventing injury. So, the journey to a zero injury work environment - both in measured reality and in the minds of each employee - continues. The intent of this paper is to provide a benchmark for others with operational environments and stimulate additional sharing and discussion on having and keeping a safe work environment.

Dunn, Steven C.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Efficient Web Services Policy Combination

Large-scale Web security systems usually involve cooperation between domains with non-identical policies. The network management and Web communication software used by the different organizations presents a stumbling block. Many of the tools used by the various divisions do not have the ability to communicate network management data with each other. At best, this means that manual human intervention into the communication protocols used at various network routers and endpoints is required. Developing practical, sound, and automated ways to compose policies to bridge these differences is a long-standing problem. One of the key subtleties is the need to deal with inconsistencies and defaults where one organization proposes a rule on a particular feature, and another has a different rule or expresses no rule. A general approach is to assign priorities to rules and observe the rules with the highest priorities when there are conflicts. The present methods have inherent inefficiency, which heavily restrict their practical applications. A new, efficient algorithm combines policies utilized for Web services. The method is based on an algorithm that allows an automatic and scalable composition of security policies between multiple organizations. It is based on defeasible policy composition, a promising approach for finding conflicts and resolving priorities between rules. In the general case, policy negotiation is an intractable problem. A promising method, suggested in the literature, is when policies are represented in defeasible logic, and composition is based on rules for non-monotonic inference. In this system, policy writers construct metapolicies describing both the policy that they wish to enforce and annotations describing their composition preferences. These annotations can indicate whether certain policy assertions are required by the policy writer or, if not, under what circumstances the policy writer is willing to compromise and allow other assertions to take precedence. Meta-policies are specified in defeasible logic, a computationally efficient non-monotonic logic developed to model human reasoning. One drawback of this method is that at one point the algorithm starts an exhaustive search of all subsets of the set of conclusions of a defeasible theory. Although the propositional defeasible logic has linear complexity, the set of conclusions here may be large, especially in real-life practical cases. This phenomenon leads to an inefficient exponential explosion of complexity. The current process of getting a Web security policy from combination of two meta-policies consists of two steps. The first is generating a new meta-policy that is a composition of the input meta-policies, and the second is mapping the meta-policy onto a security policy. The new algorithm avoids the exhaustive search in the current algorithm, and provides a security policy that matches all requirements of the involved metapolicies.

Vatan, Farrokh↗