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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 415 records · Page 23

Interim Measures Pilot Study Completion Report, South Repeater Building, Solid Waste Management Unit 121, Hydraulic Containment and Groundwater Treatment System for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances

This Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Interim Measures Pilot Study Completion Report was prepared for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration by AECOM Technical Services, Inc. under Contract 80KSC019D0010, Task Order 80KSC021F0096. The purpose of this report is to document the pilot study activities at the South Repeater Building, Solid Waste Management Unit (SWMU) 121. This report details the additional assessment activities completed from June 2023 through November 2023 and the subsequent pilot study completed at the South Repeater Building conducted in December 2023 through February 2024. Initial activities were conducted in accordance with the Pilot Study Work Plan (NASA 2023), submitted to the KSC Remediation Team and accepted by the team on October 26, 2023. The objectives of the pilot study were to: • Provide information on aquifer characteristics and to aid in future modeling and remedial design activities to mitigate off-KSC migration of PFAS compounds. • Develop information on characteristics of the surficial aquifer system, specifically transmissivity, storage coefficient, hydraulic conductivity, and vertical hydraulic conductivity. • Obtain data to support construction and calibration of a groundwater flow model. • Acquire design parameters necessary for future remedial design activities, specifically radius of influence, drawdown, flow rates, and pump settings. The following activities were completed to meet the pilot study objectives: • Groundwater and surface water sampling • Geophysical investigation via Hydraulic Profiling Tool (HPT) and soil sampling • Installation of observation and extraction wells via rotosonic techniques • Slug, step, and pump testing activities • Initial modeling efforts for a groundwater hydraulic containment system. Results of the pilot study and modeling activities are being used in the development of a groundwater containment and treatment system for the site.

PFAS↗

PTC MathCAD and Workgroup Manager: Implementation in a Multi-Org System

In this presentation, the presenter will review what was done at Kennedy Space Center to deploy and implement PTC MathCAD and PTC Workgroup Manager in a multi-org system. During the presentation the presenter will explain how they configured PTC Windchill to create custom soft-types and object initialization rules for their custom numbering scheme and why they choose these methods. This presentation will also include how to modify the EPM default soft-type file in the PTC Windchill server codebase folder. The presenter will also go over the code used in a start up script to initiate PTC MathCAD and PTC Workgroup Manager in the proper order, and also set up the environment variables when running both PTC Workgroup Manager and PTC Creo. The configuration.ini file the presenter used will also be reviewed to show you how to set up the PTC Workgroup Manager and customized it to their user community. This presentation will be of interest to administrators trying to create a similar set-up in either a single org or multiple org system deployment. The big take away will be ideas and best practices learned through implementing this system, and the lessons learned what to do and not to do when setting up this configuration. Attendees will be exposed to several different sets of code used and that worked well and will hear some limitations on what the software can accomplish when configured this way.

Multi-Org System↗

Pragmatic Leadership Advice from Donald Rumsfeld

When President Gerald Ford appointed Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense in 1975, Rumsfeld became the youngest defense secretary in US. history. Today, as defense secretary for President George W. Bush, Rumsfeld is the most senior appointee to hold that post. Between political assignments, he became an expert at turning around troubled corporations. His work at G.D. Searle-now a subsidiary of Pharmacia-earned him awards as an outstanding chief executive officer in the pharmaceutical industry. Rumsfeld's management philosophy is unique and direct, and the best part is he's written it down. While serving in the Ford administration, Rumsfeld wrote a white paper titled Rumsfeld's Rules. These rules were written as guiding principles for White House staff. First published in 1980, the rules were revised and expanded in 2001 to include broader insights on management, work and leadership. They reflect more than 40 years of Rumsfeld's wisdom and experience.

Teany, Douglas R.↗

Lessons Learned from the Node 1 Atmosphere Control and Storage and Water Recovery and Management Subsystem Design

Node 1 flew to the International Space Station (ISS) on Flight 2A during December 1998. To date the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has learned a lot of lessons from this module based on its history of approximately two years of acceptance testing on the ground and currently its twelve years on-orbit. This paper will provide an overview of the ISS Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) design of the Node 1 Atmosphere Control and Storage (ACS) and Water Recovery and Management (WRM) subsystems and it will document some of the lessons that have been learned to date for these subsystems based on problems prelaunch, problems encountered on-orbit, and operational problems/concerns. It is hoped that documenting these lessons learned from ISS will help in preventing them in future Programs.

Williams, David E.↗

Lessons Learned from the Node 1 Atmosphere Control and Storage and Water Recovery and Management Subsystem Design

Node 1 flew to the International Space Station (ISS) on Flight 2A during December 1998. To date the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has learned a lot of lessons from this module based on its history of approximately two years of acceptance testing on the ground and currently its twelve years on-orbit. This paper will provide an overview of the ISS Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) design of the Node 1 Atmosphere Control and Storage (ACS) and Water Recovery and Management (WRM) subsystems and it will document some of the lessons that have been learned to date for these subsystems based on problems prelaunch, problems encountered on-orbit, and operational problems/concerns. It is hoped that documenting these lessons learned from ISS will help in preventing them in future Programs.

Williams, David E.↗

Future Aeronautical Communication Infrastructure Technology Investigation

This National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Contractor Report summarizes and documents the work performed to investigate technologies that could support long-term aeronautical mobile communications operating concepts for air traffic management (ATM) in the timeframe of 2020 and beyond, and includes the associated findings and recommendations made by ITT Corporation and NASA Glenn Research Center to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The work was completed as the final phase of a multiyear NASA contract in support of the Future Communication Study (FCS), a cooperative research and development program of the United States FAA, NASA, and EUROCONTROL. This final report focuses on an assessment of final five candidate technologies, and also provides an overview of the entire technology assessment process, including final recommendations.

Gilbert, Tricia↗

Standards guide for space and earth sciences computer software

Guidelines for the preparation of systems analysis and programming work statements are presented. The data is geared toward the efficient administration of available monetary and equipment resources. Language standards and the application of good management techniques to software development are emphasized.

Mason, G.↗

Report to the administrator by the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel on the Skylab program. Volume 1: Summary report

Contractor and NASA technical management for the development and manufacture of the Skylab modules is reviewed with emphasis on the following management controls: configuration and interface management; vendor control; and quality control of workmanship. A review of the modified two-stage Saturn V launch vehicle which focused on modifications to accommodate the Skylab payload; resolution of prior flight anomalies; and changes in personnel and management systems is presented along with an evaluation of the possible age-life and storage problems for the Saturn 1-B launch vehicle. The NASA program management's visibility and control of contractor operations, systems engineering and integration, the review process for the evaluation of design and flight hardware, and the planning process for mission operations are investigated. It is concluded that the technical management system for development and fabrication of the modules, spacecraft, and launch vehicles, the process of design and hardware acceptance reviews, and the risk assessment activities are satisfactory. It is indicated that checkout activity, integrated testing, and preparations for and execution of mission operation require management attention.

Source record↗

The pilot climate data system

The Pilot Climate Data System (PCDS) is an interactive scientific information management system for locating, obtaining, manipulating, and displaying climate-research data. The PCDS was developed to manage a large collection of data of interest to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) research community and currently provides such support for approximately twenty data sets. In order to provide the PCDS capabilities, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA/GSFC) has integrated the capabilities of several general-purpose software packages with specialized software for reading and reformatting the supported data sets. These capabilities were integrated in a manner which allows the PCDS to be easily expanded, either to provide support for additional data sets or to provide additional functional capabilities. This also allows the PCDS to take advantage of new technology as it becomes available, since parts of the system can be replaced with more powerful components without significantly affecting the user interface.

Reph, M. G.↗

NASA's Advanced Life Support Systems Human-Rated Test Facility

Future NASA missions to explore the solar system will be long-duration missions, requiring human life support systems which must operate with very high reliability over long periods of time. Such systems must be highly regenerative, requiring minimum resupply, to enable the crews to be largely self-sufficient. These regenerative life support systems will use a combination of higher plants, microorganisms, and physicochemical processes to recycle air and water, produce food, and process wastes. A key step in the development of these systems is establishment of a human-rated test facility specifically tailored to evaluation of closed, regenerative life supports systems--one in which long-duration, large-scale testing involving human test crews can be performed. Construction of such a facility, the Advanced Life Support Program's (ALS) Human-Rated Test Facility (HRTF), has begun at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and definition of systems and development of initial outfitting concepts for the facility are underway. This paper will provide an overview of the HRTF project plan, an explanation of baseline configurations, and descriptive illustrations of facility outfitting concepts.

NASA Discipline Number 61-10↗

Time Relevance of Convective Weather Forecast for Air Traffic Automation

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is handling nearly 120,000 flights a day through its Air Traffic Management (ATM) system and air traffic congestion is expected to increse substantially over the next 20 years. Weather-induced impacts to throughput and efficiency are the leading cause of flight delays accounting for 70% of all delays with convective weather accounting for 60% of all weather related delays. To support the Next Generation Air Traffic System goal of operating at 3X current capacity in the NAS, ATC decision support tools are being developed to create advisories to assist controllers in all weather constraints. Initial development of these decision support tools did not integrate information regarding weather constraints such as thunderstorms and relied on an additional system to provide that information. Future Decision Support Tools should move towards an integrated system where weather constraints are factored into the advisory of a Decision Support Tool (DST). Several groups such at NASA-Ames, Lincoln Laboratories, and MITRE are integrating convective weather data with DSTs. A survey of current convective weather forecast and observation data show they span a wide range of temporal and spatial resolutions. Short range convective observations can be obtained every 5 mins with longer range forecasts out to several days updated every 6 hrs. Today, the short range forecasts of less than 2 hours have a temporal resolution of 5 mins. Beyond 2 hours, forecasts have much lower temporal. resolution of typically 1 hour. Spatial resolutions vary from 1km for short range to 40km for longer range forecasts. Improving the accuracy of long range convective forecasts is a major challenge. A report published by the National Research Council states improvements for convective forecasts for the 2 to 6 hour time frame will only be achieved for a limited set of convective phenomena in the next 5 to 10 years. Improved longer range forecasts will be probabilistic as opposed to the deterministic shorter range forecasts. Despite the known low level of confidence with respect to long range convective forecasts, these data are still useful to a DST routing algorithm. It is better to develop an aircraft route using the best information available than no information. The temporally coarse long range forecast data needs to be interpolated to be useful to a DST. A DST uses aircraft trajectory predictions that need to be evaluated for impacts by convective storms. Each time-step of a trajectory prediction n&s to be checked against weather data. For the case of coarse temporal data, there needs to be a method fill in weather data where there is none. Simply using the coarse weather data without any interpolation can result in DST routes that are impacted by regions of strong convection. Increasing the temporal resolution of these data can be achieved but result in a large dataset that may prove to be an operational challenge in transmission and loading by a DST. Currently, it takes about 7mins retrieve a 7mb RUC2 forecast file from NOAA at NASA-Ames Research Center. A prototype NCWF6 1 hour forecast is about 3mb in size. A Six hour NCWFG forecast with a 1hr forecast time-step will be about l8mb (6 x 3mb). A 6 hour NCWF6 forecast with a l5min forecast time-step will be about 7mb (24 x 3mb). Based on the time it takes to retrieve a 7mb RUC2 forecast, it will take approximately 70mins to retrieve a 6 hour NCWF forecast with 15min time steps. Until those issues are addressed, there is a need to develop an algorithm that interpolates between these temporally coarse long range forecasts. This paper describes a method of how to use low temporal resolution probabilistic weather forecasts in a DST. The beginning of this paper is a description of some convective weather forecast and observation products followed by an example of how weather data are used by a DST. The subsequent sections will describe probabilistic forecasts followed by a descrtion of a method to use low temporal resolution probabilistic weather forecasts by providing a relevance value to these data outside of their valid times.

Chan, William N.↗

UAS Related Activities at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center is completing its refurbishment and initial flights of one the pre-production Global Hawk aircraft it received from the U.S. Air Force. NASA Dryden has an agreement with the Global Hawk s manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, to partner in the refurbishment and flight operations of the vehicles. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also partnered on the project and is assisting NASA with project management and pilot responsibilities for the aircraft. NASA and NOAA will be using the Global Hawks to conduct earth science research. The earth science community is increasing utilizing UAS of all sizes and capabilities to collect important data on a variety of issues including important global climate change issues. To pursue the data collection needs of the science community there is a growing demand for international collaboration with respect to operating UAS in global airspace. Operations of NASA s Ikhana aircraft continued this past year. The Ikhana is a modified Predator B UAS. A UAS dedicated to research at NASA Dryden is the X-48B blended wing body research aircraft. Flight tests with the 500- pound, remotely piloted test vehicle are now in a block 4 phase involving parameter identification and maneuvers to research the limits of the engine in stall situations. NASA s participation in the blended wing body research effort is focused on fundamental, advanced flight dynamics and structural design concepts within the Subsonic Fixed Wing project, part of the Fundamental Aeronautics program managed through NASA s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. Potential benefits of the aircraft include increased volume for carrying capacity, efficient aerodynamics for reduced fuel burn and possibly significant reductions in noise due to propulsion integration options. NASA Dryden continues to support the UAS industry by facilitating access to three specially designated test areas on Edwards Air Force Base for the development of small UAS.

Bauer, Jeffrey E.↗

Commercial Crew Development Environmental Control and Life Support System Status

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) Project was a short term Project that was managed within the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO) to help develop and demonstrate a small number of key human spaceflight capabilities in support of moving towards a possible commercial crew transportation system to low earth orbit (LEO). It was intended to foster entrepreneurial activities with a few selected companies. The other purpose of the Project was to try to reduce some of the possible risk with a commercial crew transportation system to LEO. The entrepreneurial activities were encouraged with these few selected companies by NASA providing only part of the total funding to complete specific tasks that were jointly agreed to by NASA and the company. These joint agreements were documented in a Space Act Agreement (SAA) that was signed by NASA and the company. This paper will provide an overview of the CCDev Project and it will also discuss in detail the Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) tasks that were performed under CCDev.

Williams, David E.↗

Trajectory Assessment and Modification Tools for Next Generation Air Traffic Management Operations

This paper reviews three Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) based high fidelity air traffic control human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations, with a focus on the expected requirement of enhanced automated trajectory assessment and modification tools to support future air traffic flow management (ATFM) planning positions. The simulations were conducted at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Centers Airspace Operations Laboratory (AOL) in 2009 and 2010. The test airspace for all three simulations assumed the mid-term NextGenEn-Route high altitude environment utilizing high altitude sectors from the Kansas City and Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Centers. Trajectory assessment, modification and coordination decision support tools were developed at the AOL in order to perform future ATFM tasks. Overall tool usage results and user acceptability ratings were collected across three areas of NextGen operatoins to evaluate the tools. In addition to the usefulness and usability feedback, feasibility issues, benefits, and future requirements were also addressed. Overall, the tool sets were rated very useful and usable, and many elements of the tools received high scores and were used frequently and successfully. Tool utilization results in all three HITLs showed both user and system benefits including better airspace throughput, reduced controller workload, and highly effective communication protocols in both full Data Comm and mixed-equipage environments.

Brasil, Connie↗

Optical Communications from Planetary Distances

Future planetary campaigns, including human missions, will require data rates difficult to realize by microwave links. Optical channels not only provide an abundance of bandwidth, they also allow for significant size, weight, and power reduction. Moreover, optical-based tracking may enhance spacecraft navigation with respect to microwave-based tracking. With all its advantages, optical communications from deep space is not without its challenges. Due to the extreme distance between the two ends of the link, specialized technologies are needed to enable communications in the deep space environment. Although some of the relevant technologies have been developed in the last decade, they remain to be validated in an appropriate domain. The required assets include efficient pulsed laser sources, modulators, transmitters, receivers, detectors, channel encoders, precise beam pointing technologies for the flight transceiver and large apertures for the ground receiver. Clearly, space qualification is required for the systems that are installed on a deep space probe. Another challenge is atmospheric effects on the optical beam. Typical candidate locations on the ground have a cloud-free line of sight only on the order of 60-70% of the time. Furthermore, atmospheric losses and background light can be problematic even during cloud-free periods. Lastly, operational methodologies are needed for efficient and cost effective management of optical links. For more than a decade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has invested in relevant technologies and procedures to enable deep space optical communications capable of providing robust links with rates in the order of 1 Gb/s from Mars distance. A recent publication indicates that potential exists for 30-dB improvement in performance through technology development with respect to the state-of-the-art in the early years of this decade. The goal is to fulfill the deep space community needs from about 2020 to the foreseeable future. It is envisioned that, at least initially, optical links will be complemented by microwave assets for added robustness, especially for human missions. However, it is expected that as optical techniques mature, laser communications may be operated without conventional radio frequency links. The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the state-of-the-art in deep space laser communications and its challenges and discuss NASA-supported technology development efforts and plans for deep space optical communications at JPL.

Laser Communications↗

SMAP RFI Change Detection

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, launched on January 31, 2015, has completed its primary 3-year mission and is currently in its extended mission. Although operation occurs within the protected frequency allocation of 1400-1427 MHz, the SMAP radiometer is impacted by radio frequency interference (RFI). The radiometer was designed to provide detection and filtering of RFI in order to meet error budget requirements. A time series algorithm was developed to monitor, detect and report the changing environment with the objective of detecting new RFI sources as well as existing persistent sources. The detection of sources are used in RFI reporting to NASA spectrum management with the hope that interfering sources will be turned off by the necessary administrations.

Priscilla N Mohammed↗