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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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49 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

The Simons Observatory: science goals and forecasts for the enhanced Large Aperture Telescope

We describe updated scientific goals for the wide-field, millimeter-wave survey that will be produced by the Simons Observatory (SO). Significant upgrades to the 6-meter SO Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) are expected to be complete by 2028, and will include a doubled mapping speed with 30,000 new detectors and an automated data reduction pipeline. In addition, a new photovoltaic array will supply most of the observatory's power. The LAT survey will cover about 60% of the sky at a regular observing cadence, with five times the angular resolution and ten times the map depth of the Planck satellite. The science goals are to: (1) determine the physical conditions in the early universe and constrain the existence of new light particles; (2) measure the integrated distribution of mass, electron pressure, and electron momentum in the late-time universe, and, in combination with optical surveys, determine the neutrino mass and the effects of dark energy via tomographic measurements of the growth of structure at redshifts z ≲ 3; (3) measure the distribution of electron density and pressure around galaxy groups and clusters, and calibrate the effects of energy input from galaxy formation on the surrounding environment; (4) produce a sample of more than 30,000 galaxy clusters, and more than 100,000 extragalactic millimeter sources, including regularly sampled AGN light-curves, to study these sources and their emission physics; (5) measure the polarized emission from magnetically aligned dust grains in our Galaxy, to study the properties of dust and the role of magnetic fields in star formation; (6) constrain asteroid regoliths, search for Trans-Neptunian Objects, and either detect or eliminate large portions of the phase space in the search for Planet 9; and (7) provide a powerful new window into the transient universe on time scales of minutes to years, concurrent with observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory of overlapping sky.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

OrganiCam: First Camera for Noncontact Biodetection in Space

Los Alamos National Laboratory designed a compact laser-induced fluorescence imaging camera with Raman spectrometer to identify organic molecules and biosignatures in environments such as Martian caves, icy-moons, and asteroid surfaces. OrganiCam is the primary instrument on the Laser-Induced Fluorescence Exploration of Caves for Organics and Volatiles using an Elevated Platform (LIFE COVE) NASA mission concept. OrganiCam could also determine if instruments being sent into space for NASA are sterile and analyze samples returned to Earth. OrganiCam’s robust design for extreme environments, portability, simple operation, and low power requirement build on LANL’s 50+ years designing robotic instruments for space applications.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2022

Nano-FTIR Investigation of the CM Chondrite Allan Hills 83100

Mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy has been used with great success to quantitatively determine the mineralogy of geologic samples. It has been employed in a variety of contexts from determining bulk composition of powdered samples to spectroscopic imaging of rock thin sections via micro-Fourier transform infrared (micro-FTIR) imaging spectroscopy. Recent advances allow for IR measurements at the nanoscale. Near field nanoscale infrared imaging and spectroscopy with a broadband source (nano-FTIR) enable understanding of the spatial relationships between compositionally distinct materials within a sample. This will be of particular use when analyzing returned samples from Bennu and Ryugu, which are thought to be compositionally like CI or CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrites. Returned samples will likely contain olivine/pyroxene chondrules that have been transformed into hydrous phyllosilicates, sulfides, carbonates, and other alteration phases. The use of near-field infrared techniques to probe the boundaries between once pristine chondrules and alteration phases at the nanoscale is a novel approach to furthering our understanding of the compositional evolution of carbonaceous asteroids and the processes that drive their evolution. Here we report the results of nano-FTIR spectroscopy and imaging measurements performed on the carbonaceous chondrite Allan Hills (ALH) 83100 (CM1/2). We show with nanoscale resolution that spatially resolved Fe-Mg variations exist within the phyllosilicates around a chondrule rim. We also present effects of crystal orientation on the nano-FTIR spectra to account for the spectral differences between the meteorite and mineral spectra.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

OrganiCam

Researchers at Los Alamos have developed OrganiCam, a compact, lightweight laser-induced fluorescence imaging camera and a Raman spectrometer for Mars caves, icy-moon and asteroid surface exploration, and terrestrial sterile laboratory use. It was designed to make remote observations in extreme environments to identify organic molecules and the biosignatures of life. OrganiCam is a bold step in a new direction—space missions need an imager that can “see” (observe and positively identify) organic molecules and potential biosignatures and direct the arm to sample the most promising locations. This ability to clearly see and characterize organic materials is exactly what OrganiCam does. We are seeking a commercialization partner to license the technology or participate in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to develop the technology into a commercial ready product for terrestrial applications.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Coordinated neutron and X-ray computed tomography of meteorites: Detection and distribution of hydrogen-bearing materials

The presence and distribution of hydrogen-bearing materials in meteorites are important constraints on processes in the early solar system, and the delivery of volatile constituents to growing planets. Here, in this paper, we show that coordinated neutron and X-ray computed tomography, NXCT, can reveal the presence and distributions of hydrogen-bearing materials in meteorites, and thus help constrain the presence and actions of water in the early solar system. NXCT is nearly nondestructive of meteorite samples. Neutron fluence in NXCT is approximately seven orders of magnitude less than in typical instrumental neutron activation analysis, and so produces little residual radioactivity and currently undetectable changes in isotope ratios. Heating during NXCT is minimal, but NXCT will overprint the record of cosmic ray exposure held in natural thermoluminescence. Two meteorites were examined. EET 87503 is a howardite, a regolith breccia inferred to be from the asteroid 4 Vesta, and contains fragments of eucrite basalt, diogenite pyroxenite, and H-rich carbonaceous chondrites. With NXCT, the chondrite fragments within the meteorite piece can be clearly located and characterized, in preparation for possible extraction and detailed analyses. Graves Nunataks (GRA) 06100 is a CR2 chondrite meteorite that contains abundant iron metal and H-bearing silicates from aqueous alteration. In NXCT, H-bearing altered material is clearly distinguished from metal, and its distribution in three dimensions is revealed as a constraint on the processes of alteration.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

The Encounter of the Parker Solar Probe and a Comet-like Object Near the Sun: Model Predictions and Measurements

The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) aims to explore the nascent solar wind close to the Sun. Meanwhile, PSP is also expected to encounter small objects like comets and asteroids. Here, we survey the ephemerides to find the chance of a recent encounter and then model the interaction between released dusty plasmas and solar wind plasmas. On 2019 September 2, a comet-like object, the 322P/Solar and Heliosphere Observatory, just passed its perihelion flying to a heliocentric distance of 0.12 au and swept by PSP at a relative distance as close as 0.025 au. We present the dynamics of the dust particles released from 322P, forming a curved dust tail. Along the path of PSP in the simulated inner heliosphere, the states of plasma and magnetic field are sampled and illustrated, with the magnetic field sequences from simulation results being compared directly with the in situ measurements from PSP. Through the comparison, we suggest that 322P might be at a deficient activity level releasing limited dusty plasmas on its way to becoming a "rock comet." We also present images of solar wind streamers as recorded by the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe Plus, showing an indication of dust bombardment for the images superposed with messy trails. We observe from the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph that 322P was transiting from a dimming region to a relatively bright streamer during its perihelion passage, and perform a simulation to confirm that 322P was flying from relatively faster to slower solar wind streams, modifying the local plasma states of the streams.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Perspectives and Challenges in Bolide Infrasound Processing and Interpretation: A Focused Review with Case Studies

Infrasound sensing plays a critical role in the detection and analysis of bolides, offering passive, cost-effective global monitoring capabilities. Key objectives include determining the timing, location, and yield of these events. Achieving these goals requires a robust approach to detect, analyze, and interpret rapidly moving elevated sources such as bolides (also re-entry). In light of advancements in infrasonic methodologies, there is a need for a comprehensive overview of the characteristics that distinguish bolides from other infrasound sources and methodologies for bolide infrasound analysis. This paper provides a focused review of key considerations and presents a unified framework to enhance infrasound processing approaches specifically tailored for bolides. Three representative case studies are presented to demonstrate the practical application of infrasound processing methodologies and deriving source parameters while exploring challenges associated with bolide-generated infrasound. These case studies underscore the effectiveness of infrasound in determining source parameters and highlight interpretative challenges, such as variations in signal period measurements across different studies. Future research should place emphasis on improving geolocation and yield accuracy. This can be achieved through rigorous and systematic analyses of large, statistically significant samples of such events, aiming to resolve interpretative inconsistencies and explore the causes for variability in signal periods and back azimuths. The topic described here is also relevant to space exploration involving planetary bodies with atmospheres, such as Venus, Mars, and Titan.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Monitoring of asteroids in cometary orbits and activated asteroids through archival images and new observations

Transitional objects are minor bodies that share some characteristics with asteroids and others with comets. These objects include asteroids in cometary orbits (ACOs), which behave dynamically like comets, but lack observed activity, while activated asteroids (AAs) follow typical asteroidal orbits, but have shown dust ejections. The monitoring of a set of these objects carried out in 2015 and 2016 is continued using archival images from various observatories and new data from the IMPACTON telescope in Brazil. Two techniques were applied to detect activity: (i) surface brightness profiles were compared with those of field stars to identify widening, and (ii) the magnitudes reported in the Minor Planet Center, combined with our observations, were reduced and analyzed to identify abrupt brightness increases as a function of heliocentric distance. We analyzed the surface brightness profiles of 133 ACOs and 7 AAs. To study the reduced magnitude, we obtained data from the 705 ACOs that were known at the time of the analysis. Together with the data from our previous work, our analysis covered 23% of the total known ACOs; 8 deviated slightly in the surface brightness profile, 6 brightened in the reduced magnitude, and one object is in common in both samples. A very low percentage of objects might show activity (4% of the sample with brightness profiles and <1% in the reduced magnitudes). These results would rule out a slow transition from active to inert. Regarding AAs, 4 showed activity, and 3 of them matched previously reported periods, while the data we analyzed for P/2015 X 6 were obtained 19 days before the first existing activity report. The activity episodes of these objects are very restricted in time and do not always occur in the same region of the orbit.

asteroids: general↗
DOE OSTI2022

Contribution of Ryugu-like material to Earth’s volatile inventory by Cu and Zn isotopic analysis

We report initial analyses showed that asteroid Ryugu’s composition is close to CI (Ivuna-like) carbonaceous chondrites (CCs) – the chemically most primitive meteorites, characterized by near-solar abundances for most elements. However, some isotopic signatures (for example, Ti, Cr) overlap with other CC groups, so the details of the link between Ryugu and the CI chondrites are not yet fully clear. Here we show that Ryugu and CI chondrites have the same zinc and copper isotopic composition. As the various chondrite groups have very distinct Zn and Cu isotopic signatures, our results point at a common genetic heritage between Ryugu and CI chondrites, ruling out any affinity with other CC groups. Since Ryugu’s pristine samples match the solar elemental composition for many elements, their Zn and Cu isotopic compositions likely represent the best estimates of the solar composition. Earth’s mass-independent Zn isotopic composition is intermediate between Ryugu/CC and non-carbonaceous chondrites (NCs), suggesting a contribution of Ryugu-like material to Earth’s budgets of Zn and other moderately volatile elements.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Physical properties, internal structure, and the three‐dimensional petrography of CI chondrites

physical properties and the nature of their breccation, we investigated nine samples of the Ivuna and Orgueil CI chondrites ranging in size from 1 mm to 4 cm in approximate diameter. The combined mass of unique material investigated in this work is 113 g. For our investigations, we use ideal gas pycnometry, 3-D laser scanning, x-ray computed microtomography (μCT), and accompanying digital data extraction techniques. We found that the bulk density of the samples ranged from 1.61 to 2.10 g cm −3 . Larger samples tend to have a lower bulk density. Grain density (ranging from 2.44 to 2.55 g cm −3 ) is significantly less variable than the bulk density in our samples and the quantity of porosity (ranging from 14.6% to 33.8%) is the dominant factor in determining the bulk density of CI chondrite material. Our μCT results show that the visible porosity across all sizes of our CI chondrite samples is in the form of cracks, but these cracks can account for less than two-thirds of the porosity in the CI chondrites. Other porosity is not visible, even at μCT resolutions of 2.7 μm voxel edge −1 and we conclude that it is sub-micron in nature. It is not clear if the cracks seen in our samples are indigenous to the chondrites or are a result of terrestrial processes. We also find that the CI chondrites are excellent examples of the fractal-like nature of brecciation, where clasts can be observed at all scales we imaged. The breccias are composed of sub-equant-shaped and sub-rounded-textured clasts like melt-free impact breccias on other solar system bodies. From our μCT volume and digital data extraction, we determine that the Ivuna CI chondrite breccia is organized: the mostly sub-equant clasts within our ~2 cm chunk of Ivuna have a mean diameter of 1.33 mm and their aligned longest axes define a lineation structure. We speculate that the lineation was imparted after fragmentation of the clasts by slight shear on the parent asteroid which could be the result of seismic-related granular flow or mild non-axial impact-related compaction. These data will help to place returned asteroidal material from asteroids 162173 Ryugu and 101955 Bennu and the CI chondrites into a mutual geological context.

CI chondrite↗
DOE OSTI2022

Correction and calibration of atmospheric impact observations in GOES GLM data

The Earth's atmosphere is impacted daily by both meteoroids and artificial objects. Calibrated observations of the emitted light at sufficiently high sampling rates can enable or improve the estimation of impactor attributes such as size, cohesion, trajectory, and composition, but are difficult to obtain owing to the unpredictability, brevity, and high dynamic (brightness) range of impacts. Ground-based camera systems have successfully monitored small regions of the atmosphere at video frame rates and with limited radiometric capabilities, but most impacts occur over the 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water and are therefore missed by these networks. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instruments aboard Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites 16 and 17 provide near-hemispherical coverage at 500 frames per second. These data have been shown to contain the signatures of many independently confirmed impacts, often from both viewing angles simultaneously, and constitute an observational resource that is currently unparalleled in the public domain. NASA's Asteroid Threat Assessment Project has implemented an automated impact detection pipeline that processes data from GLM daily. Given a detected impact, the GLM data contain a wealth of information for use in quantitative follow-up analyses. However, impact events differ from lightning in ways that violate key assumptions built into GLM's design. The result is that GLM's onboard processing introduces errors into pixel observations of impact events and the calibrated energies near the periphery of the detector may be substantially overestimated. We present methods for mitigating these and other issues to produce a data product more suitable for impact analyses than the existing GLM lightning product.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Systematics and Consequences of Comet Nucleus Outgassing Torques

Anisotropic outgassing from comets exerts a torque sufficient to rapidly change the angular momentum of the nucleus, potentially leading to rotational instability. Here, we use empirical measures of spin changes in a sample of comets to characterize the torques, and to compare them with expectations from a simple model. Both the data and the model show that the characteristic spin-up timescale, τ {sub s}, is a strong function of nucleus radius, r {sub n}. Empirically, we find that the timescale for comets (most with perihelion 1–2 au and eccentricity ∼0.5) varies as τ{sub s}∼100r{sub n}{sup 2}, where r {sub n} is expressed in kilometers, and τ {sub s} is in years. The fraction of the nucleus surface that is active varies as f{sub A}∼0.1r{sub n}{sup −2}. We find that the median value of the dimensionless moment arm of the torque is k {sub T} = 0.007 (i.e., ∼0.7% of the escaping momentum torques the nucleus), with weak (<3σ) evidence for a size dependence k{sub T}∼10{sup −3}r{sub n}{sup 2}. Sub-kilometer nuclei have spin-up timescales comparable to their orbital periods, confirming that outgassing torques are quickly capable of driving small nuclei toward rotational disruption. Torque-induced rotational instability likely accounts for the paucity of sub-kilometer short-period cometary nuclei, and for the pre-perihelion destruction of sungrazing comets. Torques from sustained outgassing on small active asteroids can rival YORP torques, even for very small (≲1 g s{sup −1}) mass-loss rates. Finally, we highlight the important role played by observational biases in the measured distributions of τ {sub s}, f {sub A}, and k {sub T}.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

Photometry of Outer Solar System Objects from the Dark Energy Survey. I. Photometric Methods, Light-curve Distributions, and Trans-Neptunian Binaries

We report the methods of and initial scientific inferences from the extraction of precision photometric information for the >800 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) discovered in the images of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Scene-modeling photometry is used to obtain shot-noise-limited flux measures for each exposure of each TNO, with background sources subtracted. Comparison of double-source fits to the pixel data with single-source fits are used to identify and characterize two binary TNO systems. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo method samples the joint likelihood of the intrinsic colors of each source as well as the amplitude of its flux variation, given the time series of multiband flux measurements and their uncertainties. A catalog of these colors and light-curve amplitudes A is included with this publication. We show how to assign a likelihood to the distribution q(A) of light-curve amplitudes in any subpopulation. Using this method, we find decisive evidence (i.e., evidence ratio <0.01) that cold classical (CC) TNOs with absolute magnitude 6 < H$_{r}$ < 8.2 are more variable than the hot classical (HC) population of the same H$_{r}$, reinforcing theories that the former form in situ and the latter arise from a different physical population. Resonant and scattering TNOs in this H$_{r}$ range have variability consistent with either the HCs or CCs. DES TNOs with H$_{r}$ < 6 are seen to be decisively less variable than higher-H$_{r}$ members of any dynamical group, as expected. More surprising is that detached TNOs are decisively less variable than scattering TNOs, which requires them to have distinct source regions or some subsequent differential processing.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗