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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 469 records · Page 26
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NASA NTRS1995

H110 alpha observations of Sagittarius A West: Ionized gas at peculiar velocities at the galactic center

We present Very Large Array measurements of H110 alpha radio recombination line emission from Sgr A West with a resolution of 11 x 20 arcsec. These observations detected a number of new kinematic components showing a dramatically different velocity field than expected from circular motion of ionized gas in Sgr A West about the dynamical center of the Galaxy. Recent high-resolution molecular observations show a cloud of absorbing gas at -180 km/s within 30 arcsec of the Galactic center. We find evidence of an ionized counterpart to this highly blueshifted molecular gas. This result places this highly blueshifted neutral gas in a hot UV dominated environment of the Galactic center. We suggest that the blueshifted clouds are photoionized externally by the intense UV radiation field at the Galactic center. We also detect H110 alpha emission from large-scale linear features known as the 'streamers', which run primarily perpendicular to the Galactic plane and lie exterior to the 'three-arm' spiral structure of Sgr A West and the circumstellar disk. These observations support an earlier suggestion that the streamers are thermal features whose kniematics deviate from circular motion.

Yusef-Zadeh, Farhad↗
NASA NTRS2006

Eta Carinae: Orientation of The Orbital Plane

Evidence continues to build that Eta Carinae is a massive binary system with a hidden hot companion in a highly elliptical orbit. We present imaging and spectroscopic evidence that provide clues to the orientation of the orbital plane. The circumstellar ejecta, known as the Homunculus and Little Homunculus, are hourglass-shaped structures, one encapsulated within the other, tilted at about 45 degrees from the sky plane. A disk region lies between the bipolar lobes. Based upon their velocities and proper motions, Weigelt blobs B, C and D, very bright emission clumps 0.1 to 0.3" Northwest from Eta Carinae, lie in the disk. UV flux from the hot companion, Eta Car B, photoexcites the Weigelt blobs. Other clumps form a complete chain around the star, but are not significantly photoexcited. The strontium filament, a 'neutral' emission structure, lies in the same general direction as the Weigelt blobs and exhibits peculiar properties indicative that much mid-UV, but no hydrogen-ionizing radiation impinges on this structure. It is shielded by singly-ionized iron. P Cygni absorptions in Fe I I lines, seen directly in line of sight from Eta Carinae, are absent in the stellar light scattered by the Weigelt blobs. Rather than a strong absorption extending to -600 km/s, a low velocity absorption feature extends from -40 to -150 km/s. No absorbing Fe II exists between Eta Carinae and Weigelt D, but the outer reaches of the wind are intercepted in line of sight from Weigelt D to the observer. This indicates that the UV radiation is constrained by the dominating wind of Eta Car A to a small cavity carved out by the weaker wind of Eta Car B. Since the high excitation nebular lines are seen in the Weigelt blobs at most phases, the cavity, and hence the major axis of the highly elliptical orbit, must lie in the general direction of the Weigelt blobs. The evidence is compelling that the orbital major axis of Eta Carinae is projected at -45 degrees position angle on the sky. Moreover the milliarcsecond-scale extended structure of Eta Carinae, recently detected by VLTI, may be evidence of the binary companion in the disk plane, not necessarily of a single star as a prolate spheroid extending along the ejecta polar axis.

Gull, T. R.↗
NASA NTRS2005

A Testbed Demonstration of an Intelligent Archive in a Knowledge Building System

The last decade's influx of raw data and derived geophysical parameters from several Earth observing satellites to NASA data centers has created a data-rich environment for Earth science research and applications. While advances in hardware and information management have made it possible to archive petabytes of data and distribute terabytes of data daily to a broad community of users, further progress is necessary in the transformation of data into information, and information into knowledge that can be used in particular applications in order to realize the full potential of these valuable datasets. In examining what is needed to enable this progress in the data provider environment that exists today and is expected to evolve in the next several years, we arrived at the concept of an Intelligent Archive in context of a Knowledge Building System (IA/KBS). Our prior work and associated papers investigated usage scenarios, required capabilities, system architecture, data volume issues, and supporting technologies. We identified six key capabilities of an IA/KBS: Virtual Product Generation, Significant Event Detection, Automated Data Quality Assessment, Large-Scale Data Mining, Dynamic Feedback Loop, and Data Discovery and Efficient Requesting. Among these capabilities, large-scale data mining is perceived by many in the community to be an area of technical risk. One of the main reasons for this is that standard data mining research and algorithms operate on datasets that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the actual sizes of datasets maintained by realistic earth science data archives. Therefore, we defined a test-bed activity to implement a large-scale data mining algorithm in a pseudo-operational scale environment and to examine any issues involved. The application chosen for applying the data mining algorithm is wildfire prediction over the continental U.S. This paper reports a number of observations based on our experience with this test-bed. While proof-of-concept for data mining scalability and utility has been a major goal for the research reported here, it was not the only one. The other five capabilities of an WKBS named above have been considered as well, and an assessment of the implications of our experience for these other areas will also be presented. The lessons learned through the testbed effort and presented in this paper will benefit technologists, scientists, and system operators as they consider introducing IA/KBS capabilities into production systems.

Ramapriyan, Hampapuram↗
NASA NTRS2006

Spherulitic (c-axis) Growth for Terrestrial (Mauna Kea, Hawaii) and Martian Hematite "blueberries"

Hematite concentrations observed by Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) onboard Mars Global Surveyor were considered a possible indicator for aqueous processes on Mars. Observations made by Opportunity show that the hematite at Meridiani Planum is present as spherules ( blueberries) and their fragments. The internal structure of the hematite spherules is not discernable at the resolution limit (approx.30 m/pixel) of Opportunity s Microscopic Imager (MI). A terrestrial analog for martian hematite spherules are spherules from hydrothermally altered and sulfate-rich tephra from the summit region of Mauna Kea volcano, Hawaii. The objective of this study is to determine the crystal growth fabric of the Mauna Kea hematite spherules using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques and to relate that crystalline fabric to the observed TES signature of Meridiani Planum "blueberries." TEM analysis of Mauna Kea spherules exhibited a radial growth pattern consisting of "fibrous" hematite with the c-axis of hematite particles aligned along the elongation direction of the hematite fibers. The individual fibers appear to be made of coalesced nano-particles of hematite arranged with their c-axis oriented radially to form a spherical structure. Lattice fringes suggest long-range order across particles and along fibers. According to interpretations of thermal emission spectra for Meridian Planum hematite, the absence of a band at approx. 390/cm implies a geometry where c-face emission dominates. Because the c-face is perpendicular to the c-axis, this is precisely the geometry for the Mauna Kea spherules because the c-axis is aligned parallel to their radial growth direction. Therefore, we conclude as a working hypothesis that the martian spherules also have radial, c-axis growth pattern on a scale that is too small to be detected by the MER MI. Furthermore, by analogy with the Mauna Kea spherules, the martian blueberries could have formed during hydrothermal alteration of basaltic precursors under acid-sulfate conditions.

Golden, D. C.↗
NASA NTRS2009

An Intelligent Archive Testbed Incorporating Data Mining

Many significant advances have occurred during the last two decades in remote sensing instrumentation, computation, storage, and communication technology. A series of Earth observing satellites have been launched by U.S. and international agencies and have been operating and collecting global data on a regular basis. These advances have created a data rich environment for scientific research and applications. NASA s Earth Observing System (EOS) Data and Information System (EOSDIS) has been operational since August 1994 with support for pre-EOS data. Currently, EOSDIS supports all the EOS missions including Terra (1999), Aqua (2002), ICESat (2002) and Aura (2004). EOSDIS has been effectively capturing, processing and archiving several terabytes of standard data products each day. It has also been distributing these data products at a rate of several terabytes per day to a diverse and globally distributed user community (Ramapriyan et al. 2009). There are other NASA-sponsored data system activities including measurement-based systems such as the Ocean Data Processing System and the Precipitation Processing system, and several projects under the Research, Education and Applications Solutions Network (REASoN), Making Earth Science Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs), and the Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth-Sun System Science (ACCESS) programs. Together, these activities provide a rich set of resources constituting a value chain for users to obtain data at various levels ranging from raw radiances to interdisciplinary model outputs. The result has been a significant leap in our understanding of the Earth systems that all humans depend on for their enjoyment, livelihood, and survival. The trend in the community today is towards many distributed sets of providers of data and services. Despite this, visions for the future include users being able to locate, fuse and utilize data with location transparency and high degree of interoperability, and being able to convert data to information and usable knowledge in an efficient, convenient manner, aided significantly by automation (Ramapriyan et al. 2004; NASA 2005). We can look upon the distributed provider environment with capabilities to convert data to information and to knowledge as an Intelligent Archive in the Context of a Knowledge Building system (IA-KBS). Some of the key capabilities of an IA-KBS are: Virtual Product Generation, Significant Event Detection, Automated Data Quality Assessment, Large-Scale Data Mining, Dynamic Feedback Loop, and Data Discovery and Efficient Requesting (Ramapriyan et al. 2004).

Ramapriyan, H.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) for the International Space Station (ISS): Mission Description and Science Goals

In recent years, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and their partners have developed and demonstrated space-based lightning observations as an effective remote sensing tool for Earth science research and applications. The Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) continues to provide global observations of total lightning after 17 years on-orbit. In April 2013, a space-qualified LIS built as the flight spare for TRMM, was selected for flight as a science mission on the International Space Station. The ISS LIS (or I-LIS as Hugh Christian prefers) will be flown as a hosted payload on the Department of Defense Space Test Program (STP) H5 mission, which has a January 2016 baseline launch date aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle for a 2-4 year or longer mission. The LIS measures the amount, rate, and radiant energy of global lightning. More specifically, it measures lightning during both day and night, with storm scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform detection efficiency, without any land-ocean bias. Lightning is a direct and most impressive response to intense atmospheric convection. It has been found that the characteristics of lightning that LIS measures can be quantitatively coupled to both thunderstorm and other geophysical processes. Therefore, the ISS LIS lightning observations will provide important gap-filling inputs to pressing Earth system science issues across a broad range of disciplines, including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and lightning physics. A unique contribution from the ISS platform will be the availability of real-time lightning, especially valuable for operational applications over data sparse regions such as the oceans. The ISS platform will also uniquely enable LIS to provide simultaneous and complementary observations with other payloads such as the European Space Agency's Atmosphere-Space Interaction Monitor (ASIM) that will be exploring the connection between thunderstorms and lightning with terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). Another important function of the ISS LIS will be to provide cross-sensor calibration/validation with a number of other payloads, including the TRMM LIS and the next generation geostationary lightning mappers (e.g., GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper and Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager). This inter-calibration will improve the long term climate monitoring provided by all these systems. Finally, the ISS LIS will extend the time-series climate record of LIS lightning observations and expand the latitudinal coverage of LIS lightning to the climate significant upper middle-latitudes.

Blakeslee, R. J.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) for the International Space Station (ISS): Mission Description and Science Goals

In recent years, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and their partners have developed and demonstrated space-based lightning observations as an effective remote sensing tool for Earth science research and applications. The Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) continues to provide global observations of total lightning after 17 years on-orbit. In April 2013, a space-qualified LIS built as the flight spare for TRMM, was selected for flight as a science mission on the International Space Station. The ISS LIS (or I-LIS as Hugh Christian prefers) will be flown as a hosted payload on the Department of Defense Space Test Program (STP) H5 mission, which has a January 2016 baseline launch date aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle for a 2-4 year or longer mission. The LIS measures the amount, rate, and radiant energy of global lightning. More specifically, it measures lightning during both day and night, with storm scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform detection efficiency, without any land-ocean bias. Lightning is a direct and most impressive response to intense atmospheric convection. It has been found that the characteristics of lightning that LIS measures can be quantitatively coupled to both thunderstorm and other geophysical processes. Therefore, the ISS LIS lightning observations will provide important gap-filling inputs to pressing Earth system science issues across a broad range of disciplines, including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and lightning physics. A unique contribution from the ISS platform will be the availability of real-time lightning, especially valuable for operational applications over data sparse regions such as the oceans. The ISS platform will also uniquely enable LIS to provide simultaneous and complementary observations with other payloads such as the European Space Agency's Atmosphere-Space Interaction Monitor (ASIM) that will be exploring the connection between thunderstorms and lightning with terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). Another important function of the ISS LIS will be to provide cross-sensor calibration/validation with a number of other payloads, including the TRMM LIS and the next generation geostationary lightning mappers (e.g., GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper and Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager). This inter-calibration will improve the long term climate monitoring provided by all these systems. Finally, the ISS LIS will extend the time-series climate record of LIS lightning observations and expand the latitudinal coverage of LIS lightning to the climate significant upper middle-latitudes.

Blakeslee, R. J.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Observational Consequences of Coronal Heating Mechanisms

The coronal heating problem remains unsolved today, 80 years after its discovery, despite 50 years of suborbital and orbital coronal observatories. Tens of theoretical coronal heating mechanisms have been suggested, but only a few have been able to be ruled out. In this talk, we will explore the reasons for the slow progress and discuss the measurements that will be needed for potential breakthrough, including imaging the solar corona at small spatial scales, measuring the chromospheric magnetic fields, and detecting the presence of high temperature, low emission measure plasma. We will discuss three sounding rocket instruments developed to make these measurements: the High resolution Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C), the Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectropolarimeter (CLASP), and the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS).

Winebarger, Amy R.↗
NASA NTRS2014

New Instruments to Isolate the Coronal Heating Mechanism

The coronal heating problem remains unsolved today, 80 years after its discovery, despite 50 years of suborbital and orbital coronal observatories. Tens of theoretical coronal heating mechanisms have been suggested, but only a few have been able to be ruled out. In this talk, we will explore the reasons for the slow progress and discuss the measurements that will be needed for potential breakthrough, including imaging the solar corona at small spatial scales, measuring the chromospheric magnetic fields, and detecting the presence of high temperature, low‐emission measure plasma. We will discuss three sounding rocket instruments developed to make these measurements: the High‐resolution Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi‐C), the Chromospheric Lyman‐Alpha Spectropolarimeter (CLASP), and the Marshall Grazing Incidence X‐ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS).

Winebarger, Amy↗
NASA NTRS2015

Pioneering a Biobased UAS

With the exponential growth of interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their vast array of applications in both space exploration and terrestrial uses such as the delivery of medicine and monitoring the environment, the 2014 Stanford-Brown-Spelman iGEM team is pioneering the development of a fully biological UAV for scientific and humanitarian missions. The prospect of a biologically-produced UAV presents numerous advantages over the current manufacturing paradigm. First, a foundational architecture built by cells allows for construction or repair in locations where it would be difficult to bring traditional tools of production. Second, a major limitation of current research with UAVs is the size and high power consumption of analytical instruments, which require bulky electrical components and large fuselages to support their weight. By moving these functions into cells with biosensing capabilities - for example, a series of cells engineered to report GFP, green fluorescent protein, when conditions exceed a certain threshold concentration of a compound of interest, enabling their detection post-flight - these problems of scale can be avoided. To this end, we are working to engineer cells to synthesize cellulose acetate as a novel bioplastic, characterize biological methods of waterproofing the material, and program this material's systemic biodegradation. In addition, we aim to use an "amberless" system to prevent horizontal gene transfer from live cells on the material to microorganisms in the flight environment. So far, we have: successfully transformed Gluconacetobacter hansenii, a cellulose-producing bacterium, with a series of promoters to test transformation efficiency before adding the acetylation genes; isolated protein bands present in the wasp nest material; transformed the cellulose-degrading genes into Escherichia coli; and we have confirmed that the amberless construct prevents protein expression in wild-type cells. In addition, as part of our human outreach project, we have been in touch with leaders in the fields of UAVs, synthetic biology, and earth sciences, and it is clear that biodegradable UAVs could have a significant impact on the industry.

Escherichia↗
NASA NTRS2014

Towards a Biosynthetic UAV

We are currently working on a series of projects towards the construction of a fully biological unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for use in scientific and humanitarian missions. The prospect of a biologically-produced UAV presents numerous advantages over the current manufacturing paradigm. First, a foundational architecture built by cells allows for construction or repair in locations where it would be difficult to bring traditional tools of production. Second, a major limitation of current research with UAVs is the size and high power consumption of analytical instruments, which require bulky electrical components and large fuselages to support their weight. By moving these functions into cells with biosensing capabilities - for example, a series of cells engineered to report GFP, green fluorescent protein, when conditions exceed a certain threshold concentration of a compound of interest, enabling their detection post-flight - these problems of scale can be avoided. To this end, we are working to engineer cells to synthesize cellulose acetate as a novel bioplastic, characterize biological methods of waterproofing the material, and program this material's systemic biodegradation. In addition, we aim to use an "amberless" system to prevent horizontal gene transfer from live cells on the material to microorganisms in the flight environment.

Biological↗
NASA NTRS2015

Pioneering a Biobased UAS

With the exponential growth of interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their vast array of applications in both space exploration and terrestrial uses such as the delivery of medicine and monitoring the environment, the 2014 Stanford-Brown-Spelman iGEM team is pioneering the development of a fully biological UAV for scientific and humanitarian missions. The prospect of a biologically-produced UAV presents numerous advantages over the current manufacturing paradigm. First, a foundational architecture built by cells allows for construction or repair in locations where it would be difficult to bring traditional tools of production. Second, a major limitation of current research with UAVs is the size and high power consumption of analytical instruments, which require bulky electrical components and large fuselages to support their weight. By moving these functions into cells with biosensing capabilities – for example, a series of cells engineered to report GFP, green fluorescent protein, when conditions exceed a certain threshold concentration of a compound of interest, enabling their detection post-flight – these problems of scale can be avoided. To this end, we are working to engineer cells to synthesize cellulose acetate as a novel bioplastic, characterize biological methods of waterproofing the material, and program this material’s systemic biodegradation. In addition, we aim to use an “amberless” system to prevent horizontal gene transfer from live cells on the material to microorganisms in the flight environment. So far, we have: successfully transformed Gluconacetobacter hansenii, a cellulose-producing bacterium, with a series of promoters to test transformation efficiency before adding the acetylation genes; isolated protein bands present in the wasp nest material; transformed the cellulose-degrading genes into Escherichia coli; and we have confirmed that the amberless construct prevents protein expression in wild-type cells. In addition, as part of our human outreach project, we have been in touch with leaders in the fields of UAVs, synthetic biology, and earth sciences, and it is clear that biodegradable UAVs could have a significant impact on the industry.

Escherichia↗
NASA NTRS2019

NASA Disasters Program: A Partner for Coastal Disaster Response, Resiliency, and Risk Reduction

Summary: The NASA Applied Sciences: Disasters Program has kicked off a pilot project as “Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Demonstration Study, Communities at Intensive Risk” in FY17 and FY18; Efforts focus on a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to integrate a full suite of capabilities from numerical weather prediction, tide and surge modeling at high spatial resolution and urban/neighborhood scales, and remote sensing capabilities for water detection and depth estimation; Future efforts - Partner with Federal Agencies, academia professional societies to complement and augment ongoing work using Earth observations unique to NASA - Translate hazards to risk in order to understand local and regional impacts and minimize vulnerability.

Bell, Jordan↗
NASA NTRS2018

GEONEX: Progressive Conditional Generative Adversarial Training Using Transfer learning

Obtaining accurate segmentation on large scale images is an open problem in deep learning. The main problem is the amount of labeled data that exists for large scale images. Traditionally, the common solution to this problem is to crop the large images into smaller images to increase the amount of available data and train a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN). CGANs are currently the state of the art in image to image translation and provide better accuracy than the traditional method of training a encoder based conv-net architecture to minimize the loss at each pixel. This method can produce noisy and discontinuous images with inaccurate results. We seek to solve this problem by utilizing the concepts of transfer learning and progressive training to create a CGAN that can segment large scale images with a limited amount of labeled data. In transfer learning we recognize that many learned features are applicable to many classes from multiple domains. This introduces the concept of feature reusability, which is the basis for finetuning. Progressive training got its start in training models on the same images at different resolutions. In this work we instead train a GAN on increasing image scales by transferring the weights from the smaller scales to the larger scales. The learned features at the smaller scales are continually reused and applied to larger scales to create a CGAN that can perform accurate segmentation on large scale images. We apply this method to detect building footprints on very high-resolution overhead imagery (e.g Digital Globe and high resolution airborne platforms).

GEONEX↗
NASA NTRS2019

Real Time Photon-Counting Receiver for High Photon Efficiency Optical Communications

We present a scalable design for a photon-counting ground receiver based on superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) real-time processing for applications to space-to-ground photon starved links, such as the Orion EM-2 Optical Communication Demonstration (O2O), and future deep space or low transmitter power missions. The receiver is designed to receive a serially concatenated pulse position modulation (SCPPM) waveform, which follows the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) Optical Communications Coding and Synchronization Red Book standard. The receiver design uses multiple individually fiber coupled, 80% detection efficiency commercial SNSPDs in parallel to scale to a required data rate, and is capable of achieving data rates up to 528 Mbps. For efficient fiber coupling from the telescope to the array of parallel detectors that can be scaled both to telescope aperture size and the number of detectors, we use either a single mode fiber (SMF) photonic lantern or a few-mode fiber (FMF) photonic lantern. In this paper we give an overview of the receiver system design, the characteristics of the photonic lanterns, the performance of the SNSPDs, and system level tests. We show that 40 Mbps can be received using a single SNSPD, and discuss aspects for scaling to higher data rates.

Vyhnalek, Brian E.↗