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At least 325 records · Page 18

Component design, construction and evaluation for satellites

Components for a high-reliability system such as the Telstar project are obtained by: (a) design of the component for the required environment, (b) careful control of manufacturing processes, (c) elimination of potential early failures by screening tests, and (d) selection of the most stable components. For passive components, these methods could be applied by using design parameters, suppliers and screening techniques established in the earlier submarine cable program, with consideration being given to the additional effects of the satellite launch and orbit environments. Semiconductor component designs were selected by qualification tests using accelerated electrical and environmental stress conditions. Screening tests were applied to eliminate early failures, and resulting components were aged from two to six months before selection for the satellite. The recognition of the effect of ionizing radiation on transistors caused the addition of a radiation qualification test, or a screening to assure selection of the least sensitive devices. Tests have shown this screening to be effective for the radiation intensity expected. Experience with the passive components, and evaluation of the accelerated test results and aging data of the semiconductor devices, indicate that the reliability objective was obtained.

TELSTAR SATELLITE↗

Land image data processing requirements for the EOS era

Requirements are proposed for a hybrid approach to image analysis that combines the functionality of a general-purpose image processing system with the knowledge representation and manipulation capabilities associated with expert systems to improve the productivity of scientists in extracting information from remotely sensed image data. The overall functional objectives of the proposed system are to: (1) reduce the level of human interaction required on a scene-by-scene basis to perform repetitive image processing tasks; (2) allow the user to experiment with ad hoc rules and procedures for the extraction, description, and identification of the features of interest; and (3) facilitate the derivation, application, and dissemination of expert knowledge for target recognition whose scope of application is not necessarily limited to the image(s) from which it was derived.

Wharton, Stephen W.↗

JPL initiative on historically black colleges and universities

Executive order number 12320 of September 15, 1981, established a program designed to significantly increase the participation of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU's) in Federal programs. Because of its geographical remoteness and position as a contractor operated center, JPL had not participated in grant and training programs with the HBCU's. In recognition of JPL's responsibility to the national commitment on behalf of the historically black colleges and universities, an initiative with effective, achievable guidelines and early progress for a better and more productive interaction between JPL and the HBCU's is described. Numerous areas of interaction with the historically black colleges and universities have been identified and are being inplemented. They have two broad objectives: research interactions and faculty/student interactions. Plans and progress to date for each specific area are summarized.

Allen, Lew↗

An Intelligent Computer-aided Training System (CAT) for Diagnosing Adult Illiterates: Integrating NASA Technology into Workplace Literacy

An important part of NASA's mission involves the secondary application of its technologies in the public and private sectors. One current application being developed is The Adult Literacy Evaluator, a simulation-based diagnostic tool designed to assess the operant literacy abilities of adults having difficulties in learning to read and write. Using Intelligent Computer-Aided Training (ICAT) system technology in addition to speech recognition, closed-captioned television (CCTV), live video and other state-of-the-art graphics and storage capabilities, this project attempts to overcome the negative effects of adult literacy assessment by allowing the client to interact with an intelligent computer system which simulates real-life literacy activities and materials and which measures literacy performance in the actual context of its use. The specific objectives of the project are as follows: (1) to develop a simulation-based diagnostic tool to assess adults' prior knowledge about reading and writing processes in actual contexts of application; (2) to provide a profile of readers' strengths and weaknesses; and (3) to suggest instructional strategies and materials which can be used as a beginning point for remediation. In the first and development phase of the project, descriptions of literacy events and environments are being written and functional literacy documents analyzed for their components. From these descriptions, scripts are being generated which define the interaction between the student, an on-screen guide and the simulated literacy environment.

Yaden, David B., Jr.↗

Sensor fusion techniques for predicting thunderstorm evolution using lightning and radar networks

A pattern recognition scheme that is used to generate initial seeds or 'first guess' fields for clustering the discrete lightning discharges into storm cells is presented. The clustering process is critically dependent on the prior accuracy of the lightning location estimates. The generation of subsequent storm life-cycle time series (for extrapolation forecasting) also relies on the cluster analysis procedure assigning the correct number of lightning discharges (objects) to the proper storms (groups). The advantages and limitations of different clustering strategies for storm identification and tracking are examined. Storm identification with lightning data alone is compared to storm identification with radar alone, and some synergies for sensor fusion are explored.

Goodman, Steven J.↗

Receptivity in parallel flows: An adjoint approach

Linear receptivity studies in parallel flows are aimed at understanding how external forcing couples to the natural unstable motions which a flow can support. The vibrating ribbon problem models the original Schubauer and Skramstad boundary layer experiment and represents the classic boundary layer receptivity problem. The process by which disturbances are initiated in convectively-unstable jets and shear layers has also received attention. Gaster was the first to handle the boundary layer analysis with the recognition that spatial modes, rather than temporal modes, were relevant when studying convectively-unstable flows that are driven by a time-harmonic source. The amplitude of the least stable spatial mode, far downstream of the source, is related to the source strength by a coupling coefficient. The determination of this coefficient is at the heart of this type of linear receptivity study. The first objective of the present study was to determine whether the various wave number derivative factors, appearing in the coupling coefficients for linear receptivity problems, could be reexpressed in a simpler form involving adjoint eigensolutions. Secondly, it was hoped that the general nature of this simplification could be shown; indeed, a rather elegant characterization of the receptivity properties of spatial instabilities does emerge. The analysis is quite distinct from the usual Fourier-inversion procedures, although a detailed knowledge of the spectrum of the Orr-Sommerfeld equation is still required. Since the cylinder wake analysis proved very useful in addressing control considerations, the final objective was to provide a foundation upon which boundary layer control theory may be developed.

Hill, D. Christopher↗

Controversies in cardiovascular care: silent myocardial ischemia

The objective evidence of silent myocardial ischemia--ischemia in the absence of classical chest pain--includes ST-segment shifts (usually depression), momentary left ventricular failure, and perfusion defects on scintigraphic studies. Assessment of angina patients with 24-hour ambulatory monitoring may uncover episodes of silent ischemia, the existence of which may give important information regarding prognosis and may help structure a more effective therapeutic regimen. The emerging recognition of silent ischemia as a significant clinical entity may eventually result in an expansion of current therapy--not only to ameliorate chest pain, but to minimize or eliminate ischemia in the absence of chest pain.

NASA Program Space Medicine↗

2022 Spring Internship Exit Presentation

As efforts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) continue to digitize the air traffic management (ATM) domain, there is countless times of need for downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as named entity recognition, text summarization, classification, and more. Although there are a plethora of open-sourced pre-trained transformer models in the NLP field such as BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-3, these models are trained on general corpora and perform poorly on domain-specific terminology and phraseology seen in ATM documents such as Notice to Airmen (NOTAMs) and Letters of Agreement (LoA). Our proposed research objective will be to first gather a large corpus of air traffic management related documents, orders, notices, books, technical papers, conference papers, articles, and other miscellaneous sources of text data from the FAA, NASA, and accredited conference and publication societies. After gathering this data, many steps will have to be taken to collate and preprocess the data into a format understandable by our test transformer models. Thirdly, we will set up training pipelines to train the RoBERTa model on its unsupervised training task masked language modelling (MLM) using resources provided by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facilities. Finally, these fine-tuned transformer models will be evaluated on their performance on down-stream NLP tasks as mentioned above, to show whether they will be effective when working with ATM related data or not. Once complete, this model could be made open-sourced on the HuggingFace website, where the rest of the ATM community can access and utilize this tool.

NLP↗

Crop species recognition and mensuration in the Sacramento Valley

The goal of the second recognition map was to delineate various crop species in a portion of the Sacramento Valley, and at the same time to determine how accurately each could be classified and measured from ERTS-1 data. The new recognition map, a new and concise display of the old map, and classification and mensuration accuracy data are presented and discussed. The mensuration accuracy, in particular, is affected by the presence of an edge effect one resolution wide surrounding nearly all fields. Points on the edge are misclassified because they contain a mixture of, crop and bare soil. Using a processing technique to estimate the proportions of unresolved objects in this edge region, a much improved mensuration capability will be demonstrated.

Thomson, F. J.↗

Manipulation and identification of objects by magnetic forces

An overview is presented of the results of research and engineering design activities over the past 20 years in the area of identification and manipulation of objects by magnetic forces. The relationship is discussed between the properties of objects and the parameters of magnetic fields, with the view toward being able to create forces for efficient manipulation and identification of different kinds of parts. Some of this information, particularly regarding nonferromagnetic materials, is relatively new and can be used to solve a variety of engineering problems by creating new types of automation systems. Topics covered include identification and orientation of bodies by magnetostatic and electrodynamic forces, electromagnetic recognition and orientation of nonsymmetric parts, and assembly and position control of parts by electromagnetic forces.

Joffe, Benjamin↗

A long-term space astrophysics research program: The evolution of the quasar continuum

The research program supported by this grant now has great momentum. Numerous papers are in progress, and a strong multi-wavelength observing program is rapidly accumulating data on samples of high redshift quasars across the spectrum. ROSAT spectra of quasars continue to yield surprises. Of four z = 3 quasars with X-ray spectra, three show strong absorption. This contrasts strongly with the situation for luminous AGN at low redshifts where fewer than 1 in 20 show X-ray absorption. A new site for this absorption is probably needed, either around the quasar (e.g. in a cluster cooling flow) or along the line of sight (e.g. in a Damped Lyman-alpha system). The unabsorbed quasar allows limits on the physical conditions in a damped Lyman-alpha cloud to be calculated, and will allow a X-ray Gunn-Peterson test to be applied that will limit the fraction of the closure mass in an intergalactic medium. The X-ray spectral indices of these z = 3 quasars show no change from those of similar objects at low z, suggesting that 'short-lifetime' models apply. Eight other z = 3-4 quasars have been detected and their energy distributions from X-rays to Infrared (using new infrared spectrographs) have been compiled. These are now being compared with the low z continua from the 'Atlas of Quasar Energy Distributions' to search for evolutionary changes. The discovery of a likely warm absorber in 3C351 made recognition of another example simple. Also, modeling of the conditions in the absorber in 3C351 using the OVI absorption line from HST and the high ionization emission lines, suggests that the broad line region is indeed the origin of the warm absorber in this quasar, and by extension, others. Warm absorbers can now be used as a new diagnostic of this region. The X-ray spectrum of a 'Red Quasar', 3C212, has a cut-off spectrum, which could be fitted by an absorbed power-law, or more remarkably, by an unabsorbed black body. Using our quasi-simultaneous optical data and photoionization modeling we are able to rule out this latter possibility. The long-sought key to understanding red quasars has now been found. (Reddening was earlier ruled out because no 2175A absorption feature was seen. This is now seen to have been misleading.)

Elvis, M.↗

Digital-Electronic/Optical Apparatus Would Recognize Targets

Proposed automatic target-recognition apparatus consists mostly of digital-electronic/optical cross-correlator that processes infrared images of targets. Infrared images of unknown targets correlated quickly with images of known targets. Apparatus incorporates some features of correlator described in "Prototype Optical Correlator for Robotic Vision System" (NPO-18451), and some of correlator described in "Compact Optical Correlator" (NPO-18473). Useful in robotic system; to recognize and track infrared-emitting, moving objects as variously shaped hot workpieces on conveyor belt.

Scholl, Marija S.↗

Using the IRAS data to search in the asteroid belt for any potential evidence of galactic colonization

The end product of the biological evolution seems to be the appearance of technological civilizations, which are characterized by superior technology that supercedes biological capabilities. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has gained scientific recognition in recent years. The concept of galactic colonization is debated extensively, with opinions ranging from the impossible to the inevitable, but without a clear resolution. Answers can be obtained only with experimental tests and not with endless debates. A search for large space colonies in the asteroid belt, an ideal source of raw materials for a spaceborne civilization, is a test of the galactic colonization theory. The catalogue of solar system objects obtained form the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) observations at 12, 25, 60, and 100 microns, is an ideal source for such a search. The catalog is expected to be ready at the end of 1985 and will contain more than 10,000 objects.

Papagiannis, M. D.↗

Fusing Image Data for Calculating Position of an Object

A computer program has been written for use in maintaining the calibration, with respect to the positions of imaged objects, of a stereoscopic pair of cameras on each of the Mars Explorer Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The program identifies and locates a known object in the images. The object in question is part of a Moessbauer spectrometer located at the tip of a robot arm, the kinematics of which are known. In the program, the images are processed through a module that extracts edges, combines the edges into line segments, and then derives ellipse centroids from the line segments. The images are also processed by a feature-extraction algorithm that performs a wavelet analysis, then performs a pattern-recognition operation in the wavelet-coefficient space to determine matches to a texture feature measure derived from the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal coefficients. The centroids from the ellipse finder and the wavelet feature matcher are then fused to determine co-location. In the event that a match is found, the centroid (or centroids if multiple matches are present) is reported. If no match is found, the process reports the results of the analyses for further examination by human experts.

Huntsberger, Terrance↗

Oxygen, Magnesium, and Aluminum Isotopes in the Ivuna CAI: Re-Examining High-Temperature Fractionations in CI Chondrites

CI chondrites are thought to approximate the bulk solar system composition since they closely match the composition of the solar photosphere. Thus, chemical differences between a planetary object and the CI composition are interpreted to result from fractionations of a CI starting composition. This interpretation is often made despite the secondary mineralogy of CI chondrites, which resulted from low-T aqueous alteration on the parent asteroid(s). Prevalent alteration and the relatively large uncertainties in the photospheric abundances (approx. +/-5-10%) permit chemical fractionation of CI chondrites from the bulk solar system, if primary chondrules and/or CAIs have been altered beyond recognition. Isolated olivine and pyroxene grains that range from approx. 5 microns to several hundred microns have been reported in CI chondrites, and acid residues of Orgueil were found to contain refractory oxides with oxygen isotopic compositions matching CAIs. However, the only CAI found to be unambiguously preserved in a CI chondrite was identified in Ivuna. The Ivuna CAI's primary mineralogy, small size (approx.170 microns), and fine-grained igneous texture classify it as a compact type A. Aqueous alteration infiltrated large portions of the CAI, but other regions remain pristine. The major primary phases are melilite (Ak 14-36 ), grossmanite (up to 20.8 wt.% TiO 2 ), and spinel. Both melilite and grossmanite have igneous textures and zoning patterns. An accretionary rim consists primarily of olivine (Fa 2-17 ) and low-Ca pyroxene (Fs 2-10 ), which could be either surviving CI2 material or a third lithology.

Frank, D. R.↗

Optical pattern recognition; Proceedings of the Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, Jan. 17, 18, 1989

Papers on optical pattern recognition are presented, covering topics such as the estimation of satellite pose and motion parameters using a neural net tracker, associative memory, optical implmentation of programmable neural networks, optoelectronic neural networks, dynamic autoassociative neural memory, heteroassociative memory, bilinear pattern recognition processors, optical processing of optical correlation plane data, and a synthetic discriminant function-based nonlinear optical correlator. Other topics include an interactive optical-digital image processor, geometric transformations for video compression and human teleoperator display, quasiconformal remapping for compensation of human visual field defects, hybrid vision for automated spacecraft landing, advanced symbolic and inference optical correlation filters, and a rotationally invariant holographic tracking system. Additional topics include the detection of rotational and scale-varying objects with a programmable joint transform correlator, a single spatial light modulator binary nonlinear optical correlator, optical joint transform correlation, linear phase coefficient composite filters, and binary phase-only filters.

Liu, Hua-Kuang↗

From following edges to pursuing objects

Primates can generate accurate, smooth eye-movement responses to moving target objects of arbitrary shape and size, even in the presence of complex backgrounds and/or the extraneous motion of non-target objects. Most previous studies of pursuit have simply used a spot moving over a featureless background as the target and have thus neglected critical issues associated with the general problem of recovering object motion. Visual psychophysicists and theoreticians have shown that, for arbitrary objects with multiple features at multiple orientations, object-motion estimation for perception is a complex, multi-staged, time-consuming process. To examine the temporal evolution of the motion signal driving pursuit, we recorded the tracking eye movements of human observers to moving line-figure diamonds. We found that pursuit is initially biased in the direction of the vector average of the motions of the diamond's line segments and gradually converges to the true object-motion direction with a time constant of approximately 90 ms. Furthermore, transient blanking of the target during steady-state pursuit induces a decrease in tracking speed, which, unlike pursuit initiation, is subsequently corrected without an initial direction bias. These results are inconsistent with current models in which pursuit is driven by retinal-slip error correction. They demonstrate that pursuit models must be revised to include a more complete visual afferent pathway, which computes, and to some extent latches on to, an accurate estimate of object direction over the first hundred milliseconds or so of motion.

NASA Discipline Neuroscience↗

Neural networks application to divergence-based passive ranging

The purpose of this report is to summarize the state of knowledge and outline the planned work in divergence-based/neural networks approach to the problem of passive ranging derived from optical flow. Work in this and closely related areas is reviewed in order to provide the necessary background for further developments. New ideas about devising a monocular passive-ranging system are then introduced. It is shown that image-plan divergence is independent of image-plan location with respect to the focus of expansion and of camera maneuvers because it directly measures the object's expansion which, in turn, is related to the time-to-collision. Thus, a divergence-based method has the potential of providing a reliable range complementing other monocular passive-ranging methods which encounter difficulties in image areas close to the focus of expansion. Image-plan divergence can be thought of as some spatial/temporal pattern. A neural network realization was chosen for this task because neural networks have generally performed well in various other pattern recognition applications. The main goal of this work is to teach a neural network to derive the divergence from the imagery.

Barniv, Yair↗