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NASA NTRS2008

NASA's Agency-wide Strategy for Environmental Regulatory Risk Analysis and Communication

NASA's mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. To help enable existing and future programs to pursue this mission, NASA has established the Principal Center for Regulatory Risk Analysis and Communication (RRAC PC) to proactively identify, analyze, and communicate environmental regulatory risks to the NASA community. The RRAC PC is chartered to evaluate the risks posed to NASA Programs and facilities by environmentally related drivers. The RRAC PC focuses on emerging environmental regulations, as well as risks related to operational changes that can trigger existing environmental requirements. Changing regulations have the potential to directly affect program activities. For example, regulatory changes can restrict certain activities or operations by mandating changes in how operations may be done or limiting where or how certain operations can take place. Regulatory changes also can directly affect the ability to use certain materials by mandating a production phase-out or restricting usage aPi'iications of certain materials. Such changes can result in NASA undertaking material replacement efforts. Even if a regulation does not directly affect NASA operations, U.S. and international regulations can pose program risks indirectly through requirements levied on manufacturers and vendors of components and materials. For example, manufacturers can change their formulations to comply with new regulatory requirements. Such changes can require time-consuming and costly requalification certification for use in human spaceflight programs. The RRAC PC has implemented several strategies for proactively managing regulatory change to minimize potential adverse impacts to NASA Programs and facilities. This presentation highlights the lessons learned through establishing the RRAC PC, the process by which the RRAC PC monitors and distributes information about emerging regulatory requirements, and the cross-Agency cooperation that is vital to supporting NASA's mission.

Duda, Kristen↗

NASA NTRS2022

Gateway Utilization Capabilities and Status

Gateway will be a space station orbiting the Moon that will enable long-term presence in deep space. As part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Artemis mission, Gateway will serve as a cornerstone of human deep space exploration and scientific discovery and a steppingstone to Mars. NASA leads the Gateway Program and serves as the integrator of spaceflight capabilities and contributions of U.S. commercial and international partners, European Space Agency (ESA), Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), to develop and utilize Gateway. This paper provides an overview of the following utilization capabilities of Gateway: spacecraft overview, internal and external accommodations, resources for utilization, and vantage point for Earth, Sun, and Moon observations. Three utilization payloads have already been selected to fly on Gateway as part of the initial modules, Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) and Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) modules: European Radiation Sensors Array (ERSA), Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite (HERMES), and Internal Dosimeter Array (IDA). This paper will provide a short summary of each payload, the value behind conducting each payload, and share an overview of future utilization goals of Gateway.

Gateway↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Linking Strategic Astrophysics Missions, Technology Gaps, and Technology Maturation Investments

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Astrophysics Division (APD) funds the development of cutting-edge technologies through multiple programs to enable its strategic missions to achieve ambitious and groundbreaking science goals. These technology development efforts are managed by the Cosmic Origins (COR), Exoplanet Exploration (ExE), and Physics of the Cosmos (PhysCOS) programs. The 2020 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, “Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s,” (Astro2020) recommended a pan-chromatic set of missions, including three Great Observatories (GO) and three Probe-class missions that could collect unprecedented data over the coming decades. We show the correlation between these strategic missions and the current Astrophysics technology gaps, as well as recent and current technology maturation projects funded to help close these technology gaps. We also cover how these investments advanced their Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) [1] and where they have been infused into missions and projects.

SAT↗

NASA NTRS2012

From EXOSAT to the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive (HEASARC): X-ray Astronomy Comes of Age

In May 1983 the European Space Agency launched EXOSAT, its first X-ray astronomy observatory. Even though it lasted only 3 short years, this mission brought not only new capabilities that resulted in unexpected discoveries, but also a pioneering approach to operations and archiving that changed X-ray astronomy from observations led by small instrument teams, to an observatory approach open to the entire community through a guest observer program. The community use of the observatory was supported by a small dedicated team of scientists, the precursor to the data center activities created to support e.g. Chandra and XMM-Newton. The new science capabilities of EX OS AT included a 90 hr highly eccentric high earth orbit that allow unprecedented continuous coverage of sources as well as direct communication with the satellite that allowed real time decisions to respond to unexpected events through targets of opportunity. The advantages of this orbit demonstrated by EXOSAT resulted in Chandra and XMM-Newton selecting similar orbits. The three instruments on board the EXOSAT observatory were complementary, designed to give complete coverage over a wide energy band pass of 0.05-50 keY. An onboard processor could be programmed to give multiple data modes that could be optimized in response to science discoveries: These new capabilities resulted in many new discoveries including the first comprehensive study of AGN variability, new orbital periods in X-ray binaries and cataclysmic variables, new black holes, quasi-periodic oscillations from neutron stars and black holes and broad band X-ray spectroscopy. The EXOSAT team generated a well-organized database accessible worldwide over the nascent internet, allowing remote selection of data products, making samples and undertaking surveys from the data. The HEASARC was established by NASA at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1990 as the repository of NASA X-ray and Gamma-ray data. The proven EXOSAT database system became the core of the HEASARC infrastructure. The HEASARC pioneered many concepts now taken for granted including standardized formats using FITS files, restoring data from earlier missions, multi-mission analysis tools and a searchable archive over the world wide web.

White, Nicholas E.↗

DOE OSTI2021

Physics Goals of DWA Experiments at FACET-II

The dielectric wakefield acceleration (DWA) program at FACET produced a multitude of new physics results that range from GeV/m acceleration to the discovery of high field-induced conductivity in THz waves, and beyond, to a demonstration of positron-driven wakes. Here we review the rich program now developing in the DWA experiments at FACET-II. With increases in beam quality, a key feature of this program is extended interaction lengths, near 0.5 m, permitting GeV-class acceleration. Detailed physics studies in this context include beam breakup and its control through the exploitation of DWA structure symmetry. The next step in understanding DWA limits requires the exploration of new materials with low loss tangent, large bandgap, and improved thermal characteristics. Advanced structures with photonic features for mode confinement and exclusion of the field from the dielectric, as well as quasi-optical handling of coherent Cerenkov signals is discussed. Use of DWA for laser-based injection and advanced temporal diagnostics is examined.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

DOE OSTI2019

PDB Structure Data Impacted Discovery and Development of Recently FDA‐Approved Drugs

Protein Data Bank (PDB) was established in 1971 as the 1 st open access digital data resource in biology and medicine. Today, the PDB currently houses >145,000 atomic level biomolecular structures determined by crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and 3D electron microscopy. Managed by the Worldwide Protein Data Bank partnership (wwPDB; wwpdb.org ), PDB data are used by researchers and educators to understand the role molecules play in health and disease of humans, animals, and plants, food and energy production, and other topics of concern to global prosperity and sustainability. RCSB PDB operates the US data center for the global PDB archive, and makes PDB data available at no charge to all data consumers without limitations on usage. During calendar 2017, >679 million structure data files were downloaded from the PDB by Data Consumers working worldwide. RCSB PDB served >1 million RCSB.org users worldwide with PDB data integrated with ~40 external data resources providing rich structural views of fundamental biology, biomedicine, and energy sciences, and supported >600,000 PDB101.rcsb.org educational website users around the globe. RCSB PDB examined the impact of PDB archiving and open access availability on the discovery of 210 new molecular entities (NMEs or drugs) approved by the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2010 and 2016. Biological targets for 90% of NMEs are known. Approximately 6,000 PDB structures containing one of these drug targets and/or one approved NME were identified, providing 85% coverage of known targets and 88% coverage of 2010–2016 approved NMEs. Coverage was comparable across all therapeutic areas. Most structures were both published and freely accessible from the PDB long before the NMEs were approved. Additional analyses revealed these PDB structures were cited by more than 200,000 PubMed‐indexed publications reporting pre‐competitive research on the would‐be drug targets. PDB structures and citing publications contributed substantially to understanding of the target biology, and led to biopharmaceutical company investment in successful drug discovery/development programs. Overall, access to PDB data contribute to patent applications, drug discovery and development, publication of scientific studies, innovations that can lead to new product development and company formation, and STEM education. Support or Funding Information RCSB PDB is funded by a grant (DBI‐1338415) from the National Science Foundation , the National Institutes of Health , and the US Department of Energy . This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .

Zardecki, Christine↗

NASA NTRS1999

K-12 Aerospace Education Programs

NASA, the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force Space Command, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS), and the United States Space Foundation teamed to produce a dynamic and successful graduate course and in-service program for K-12 educators that has a positive impact on education trends across the nation. Since 1986, more than 10,000 educators from across the United States have participated in Space Discovery and Teaching with Space affecting nearly a million students in grades K-12. The programs are designed to prepare educators to use the excitement of space to motivate students in all curriculum subjects.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2020

Accelerating Space Life Sciences: Successes and Challenges of Biospecimen and Data Sharing

NASA's current human space flight research is directed towards enabling human space exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). To that end, NASA Space Flight Payload Projects; Rodent Research, Cell Science, and Microbial Labs, flown on the International Space Station (ISS), benefit the global life sciences and commercial space communities. Verified data sets, science results, peer-reviewed publications, and returned biospecimens, collected and analyzed for flight and ground investigations, are all part of the knowledge base collected by NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate's Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications (SLPSRA) Division, specifically the Human Research and Space Biology Programs. These data and biospecimens are made available through the public Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA) website to promote basic discovery, pre-clinical and clinical science.The NASA Institutional Scientific Collection (ISC), stores flight and ground biospecimens from Space Shuttle and ISS programs. These specimens are curated and managed by the Ames Life Sciences Data Archive (ALSDA), an internal node of NASA's LSDA. The ISC stores over 30,000 specimens from experiments dating from 1984 to present. Currently available specimens include tissues from the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, excretory, integumentary, muscular, neurosensory, reproductive, respiratory and skeletal systems.NASA's biospecimen collection represents a unique and limited resource of unique spaceflight payload and ground control research subjects. These specimens are harvested according to well established SOPs that maintain their quality and integrity. Once the primary scientific objectives have been met, the remaining specimens are made available to provide secondary opportunities for complementary studies or new investigations to broaden research without large expenditures of time or resources. Website: https://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/

Scott, Ryan T.↗

NASA NTRS2022

The Visual Survey Group: A Decade of Hunting Exoplanets and Unusual Stellar Events with Space-based Telescopes

This article presents the history of the Visual Survey Group (VSG)—a Professional-Amateur (Pro-Am) collaboration within the field of astronomy working on data from several space missions (Kepler, K2 and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). This paper covers the formation of the VSG, its survey-methods including the most common tools used and its discoveries made over the past decade. So far, the group has visually surveyed nearly 10 million light curves and authored 69 peer-reviewed papers which mainly focus on exoplanets and discoveries involving multistellar systems. The preferred manual search-method carried out by the VSG has revealed its strength by detecting numerous objects which were overlooked or discarded by automated search programs, uncovering some of the most rare stars in our galaxy, and leading to several serendipitous discoveries of unprecedented astrophysical phenomena. The main purpose of the VSG is to assist in the exploration of our local universe, and we therefore advocate continued crowd-sourced examination of time-domain data sets, and invite other research teams to reach out in order to establish collaborating projects.

Martti H Kristiansen↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Wire-break Ignition Testing of Materials for Spacesuit Fire Hazard Control

The input design constraints applied to the extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuit pose a significant challenge for mitigation of fire hazards. To minimize fatigue and increase comfort of the crewmember operating the suit, the suit pressure is lowered below sea level conditions with typical EVA suit designs operating with 4.3 psia (29.7 kPa). With the lowered operating pressures and the use of closed-loop life support, the suit requires elevated concentrations of oxygen, typically >95%. At these oxygen concentrations, nearly the entirety of the suit internal materials are flammable. This leaves one remaining possible control leg of the fire triangle: ignition sources. Since the Gemini and Apollo programs, this has been a risk that has undergone constant reassessment, with a focus on improved mitigation. After the Apollo I fire, an arc ignition method was developed and used to quantify ignition thresholds for in-suit materials resulting in a current limit for powered in-suit devices applied to all subsequent suit designs. After the discovery of a frayed spacesuit biomed cable on STS-113 during the Shuttle Program, the previous arcing method was repeated with additional methods developed to extend the testing further. One of those methods was wire-break ignition testing, in which the current in a single strand of wire was progressively increased, preheating the material in proximity with a resultant break and the application of a reasonably repeatable arc to ignite the material, all while exposed in the selected environment. This method was used to test a suite of spacesuit materials providing relative performance with respect to ignition with this configuration for application of energy. This paper discusses extension of the current data set to address recent material additions, lowering of energy test levels for quantification of materials too low to measure in previous testing, as well as future plans to improve this method.

Colin Campbell↗

DOE OSTI2021

Enabling discovery data science through cross-facility workflows

Experimental and observational instruments for scientific research (such as light sources, genome sequencers, accelerators, telescopes and electron microscopes) increasingly require High Performance Computing (HPC) scale capabilities for data analysis and workflow processing. Next-generation instruments are being deployed with higher resolutions and faster data capture rates, creating a big data crunch that cannot be handled by modest institutional computing resources. Often these big data analysis pipelines also require near real-time computing and have higher resilience requirements than the simulation and modeling workloads more traditionally seen at HPC centers. While some facilities have enabled workflows to run at a single HPC facility, there is a growing need to integrate capabilities across HPC facilities to enable cross-facility workflows, either to provide resilience to an experiment, increase analysis throughput capabilities, or to better match a workflow to a particular architecture. In this paper we describe the barriers to executing complex data analysis workflows across HPC facilities and propose an architectural design pattern for enabling scientific discovery using cross-facility workflows that includes orchestration services, application programming interfaces (APIs), data access and co-scheduling.

Antypas, Katerina B.↗

DOE OSTI2024

The U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, 1991-2021: Follow-Up Study Shows Major Impact on Recipients and the Scientific Workforce

Since 1991, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) has addressed DOE National Laboratory needs as well as demands in the national workforce for trained professionals in computational science and engineering. Sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, the DOE CSGF supports doctoral students in the pursuit of novel scientific or engineering discoveries using high-performance computing (HPC) resources. To meet the program’s core requirements, recipients participate in multidisciplinary studies, carry out at least one 12-week DOE laboratory research practicum, and contribute to an annual program review where the fellows present their research for sponsor review. The Krell Institute, which as managed the fellowship on behalf of the DOE since 1997, has commissioned several follow-up studies to examine the DOE CSGF recipients’ characteristics, fellows’ outcomes and professional accomplishments, alumni’s career paths and achievements, and recipients’ impact on national priorities through research and education.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2024

The U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, 1991-2021: Follow-Up Study Shows Major Impact on Recipients and the Scientific Workforce

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

NASA NTRS1988

Observations of supernova SN1987a

Supernova SN1987a was discovered on February 23, 1987, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy that is visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. The NASA program for observations of SN1987a, which was developed rapidly after the discovery of the explosion, was designed to be implemented through a series of coordinated campaigns of gamma-ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared observations from spacecraft, rockets, balloons, aircraft and the ground. The author summarizes models for supernovae, recent results for SN1987a, and the NASA plans for further observations.

Riegler, Guenter R.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Killer rocks and the celestial police - The search for near-earth asteroids

The discovery of asteroids near the earth as the result of search programs is detailed with attention given to methods for locating, tracking, and identifying asteroids. The concept of 'prediscovery' is discussed in which new asteroids are tracked backward in time through previous celestial observational data. The need for more comprehensive programs is identified in order to locate objects that present a clear danger of colliding with the earth.

Yeomans, Donald K.↗

NASA NTRS2023

Radiation Shielding Plasma Sprayed Coatings Heads to International Space Station for MISSE-17 Experiments

NASA's Artemis program aims to return to the moon in search of scientific discoveries and establish a habitat using in-situ resource utilization. However, the past lunar explorations presented challenges, such as thermal cycles, solar and intergalactic cosmic radiation, and severe abrasive interaction of sharp lunar regolith particles[1]–[4].Dust mitigation and radiation shielding have become the most important concerns for lunar structural components and rovers which can fail abruptly without a protective solution. To counter these threats, Plasma Forming Laboratory(PFL) at Florida International University (FIU), in collaboration with NASA, has developed a novel multi-functional coating to protect the components synergistically against abrasion, erosion ,and radiation. The titanium-boron nitride composite coatings were prepared using the atmospheric plasma spray technique from engineered composite powders [5], [6].The coatings were subjected to extensive characterization and tribological study with lunar mare simulant JSC-1A, which shows tremendous improvement in the wear performance. The coatings subjected to neutron radiation shielding experiments at NASA Langley Research Center exhibited significantly improved neutron attenuation capacity compared to the substrate. The coating is selected to undergo radiation exposure on the International Space Station as a part of MISSE-17 (Materials International Space Station Experiment).

Thermal Spray↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Application of Regolith Polymer Composite Fused Granular Fabrication Construction in Simulated Lunar Conditions

NASA’s Artemis program has the goal of creating a sustained lunar presence to provide unprecedented opportunities for scientific discovery and to ensure industry’s access to the unlimited resources and commercial potential in space. To achieve this goal, NASA must incrementally develop and expand its capabilities beyond the short lunar stays of the Apollo program to a robust continued presence with infrastructure and equipment to reduce mission risk. Kennedy Space Center’s Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations laboratory (a.k.a. Swamp Works) has partnered with SpaceFactory and LERA Consulting Structural Engineers to develop the architectural and structural design of a robotically constructable unpressurized shelter. The shelter, called Lunar Infrastructure Asset (LINA), is designed to protect astronauts and surface assets from radiation, meteoroid impact, thermal gradients, and to withstand moonquakes. A Fused Granular Fabrication (FGF) construction process using regolith polymer composites was developed. The construction system and associated print parameters are discussed along with the environmental simulation equipment and a summary of test conditions. Test samples were printed in dirty thermal vacuum conditions (~10-3 torr, ~-200 °C,) and subscale versions of LINA were printed on a regolith simulant substrate in vacuum (~10-4 torr). Full scale LINA design optimization, simulation, and construction concept of operations are discussed.

lunar infrastructure↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Selection, Production and Properties of Regolith Polymer Composite for Lunar Construction

lunar infrastructure↗