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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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NASA NTRS1988

Software engineering and Ada (Trademark) training: An implementation model for NASA

The choice of Ada for software engineering for projects such as the Space Station has resulted in government and industrial groups considering training programs that help workers become familiar with both a software culture and the intricacies of a new computer language. The questions of how much time it takes to learn software engineering with Ada, how much an organization should invest in such training, and how the training should be structured are considered. Software engineering is an emerging, dynamic discipline. It is defined by the author as the establishment and application of sound engineering environments, tools, methods, models, principles, and concepts combined with appropriate standards, guidelines, and practices to support computing which is correct, modifiable, reliable and safe, efficient, and understandable throughout the life cycle of the application. Neither the training programs needed, nor the content of such programs, have been well established. This study addresses the requirements for training for NASA personnel and recommends an implementation plan. A curriculum and a means of delivery are recommended. It is further suggested that a knowledgeable programmer may be able to learn Ada in 5 days, but that it takes 6 to 9 months to evolve into a software engineer who uses the language correctly and effectively. The curriculum and implementation plan can be adapted for each NASA Center according to the needs dictated by each project.

Legrand, Sue↗

NASA NTRS1986

Software engineering environment tool set integration

Space Transportation System Division (STSD) Engineering has a program to promote excellence within the engineering function. This program resulted in a capital funded facility based on a VAX cluster called the Rockwell Operational Engineering System (ROSES). The second phase of a three phase plan to establish an integrated software engineering environment for ROSES is examined. It discusses briefly phase one which establishes the basic capability for a modern software development environment to include a tool set, training and standards. Phase two is a tool set integration. The tool set is primarily off-the-shelf tools acquired through vendors or government agencies (public domain). These tools were placed into categories of software development. These categories are: requirements, design, and construction support; verification and validation support; and software management support. The integration of the tool set is being performed through concept prototyping and development of tools specifically designed to support the life cycle and provide transition from one phase to the next.

Selfridge, William P.↗

NASA NTRS2004

Using a Low Cost Flight Simulation Environment for Interdisciplinary Education

A multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary education is increasingly being emphasized for engineering undergraduates. However, often the focus is on interaction between engineering disciplines. This paper discusses the experience at Tuskegee University in providing interdisciplinary research experiences for undergraduate students in both Aerospace Engineering and Psychology through the utilization of a low cost flight simulation environment. The environment, which is pc-based, runs a low-cost of-the-shelf software and is configured for multiple out-of-the-window views and a synthetic heads down display with joystick, rudder and throttle controls. While the environment is being utilized to investigate and evaluate various strategies for training novice pilots, students were involved to provide them with experience in conducting such interdisciplinary research. On the global inter-disciplinary level these experiences included developing experimental designs and research protocols, consideration of human participant ethical issues, and planning and executing the research studies. During the planning phase students were apprised of the limitations of the software in its basic form and the enhancements desired to investigate human factors issues. A number of enhancements to the flight environment were then undertaken, from creating Excel macros for determining the performance of the 'pilots', to interacting with the software to provide various audio/video cues based on the experimental protocol. These enhancements involved understanding the flight model and performance, stability & control issues. Throughout this process, discussions of data analysis included a focus from a human factors perspective as well as an engineering point of view.

Khan, M. Javed↗

NASA NTRS1984

The role of simulation in the development and flight test of the HiMAT vehicle

Real time simulations have been essential in the flight test program of the highly maneuverable aircraft technology (HiMAT) remotely piloted research vehicle at NASA Ames Research Center's Dryden Flight Research Facility. The HiMAT project makes extensive use of simulations in design, development, and qualification for flight, pilot training, and flight planning. Four distinct simulations, each with varying amounts of hardware in the loop, were developed for the HiMAT project. The use of simulations in detecting anomalous behavior of the flight software and hardware at the various stages of development, verification, and validation has been the key to flight qualification of the HiMAT vehicle.

Evans, M. B.↗

NASA NTRS2011

Integrated Modeling, Mapping, and Simulation (IMMS) Framework for Exercise and Response Planning

EmergenCy management personnel at federal, stale, and local levels can benefit from the increased situational awareness and operational efficiency afforded by simulation and modeling for emergency preparedness, including planning, training and exercises. To support this goal, the Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate is funding the Integrated Modeling, Mapping, and Simulation (IMMS) program to create an integrating framework that brings together diverse models for use by the emergency response community. SUMMIT, one piece of the IMMS program, is the initial software framework that connects users such as emergency planners and exercise developers with modeling resources, bridging the gap in expertise and technical skills between these two communities. SUMMIT was recently deployed to support exercise planning for National Level Exercise 2010. Threat, casualty. infrastructure, and medical surge models were combined within SUMMIT to estimate health care resource requirements for the exercise ground truth.

Mapar, Jalal↗

DOE OSTI2025

Robust Dark Energy Constraints with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey (Final Technical Report)

This project developed and applied advanced theoretical, computational, and data-analysis methodologies to extract robust and precise cosmological constraints from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The work focused on maximizing the scientific return of DESI through optimized survey strategy, novel higher-order clustering statistics, improved modeling of small-scale structure, and rigorous mitigation of observational systematics. Over the award period, the project made substantial contributions to DESI science planning, produced new methods for bispectrum and three-point correlation function analyses, advanced constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity, and delivered widely used software tools. The project also played a major role in training graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher who contributed directly to DESI key projects. The results have significantly enhanced the cosmological reach of DESI and provide a strong foundation for future surveys such as DESI-II and Stage-V experiments.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

NASA NTRS1974

STARPAHC. Part 1: Final summary report

A ground-based demonstration of IMBLMS Space Technology was conducted in a remote geographical area of the U.S. The STARPAHC program, designed to improve the capability for delivering health care to the Papago Indians, is divided into three areas: (1) design and definition; (2) system assembly, test, installation, checkout, and training; and (3) operations and evaluation. The accomplishments achieved in the program are summarized emphasizing system requirements in the areas of communication, specialized medical equipment, display, and computer software. Budgetary history and future cost plans are presented and planned activities are summarized.

Riley, F. E.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Automating simulator operations

A set of requirements are defined for an operations support system for automating operations in the Space Station Training Facility (SSTF). An operations concept is described based on utilization studies and facility-operations plans with specific attention given to the SSTF components. The Operations Support System (OSS) is designed to have an integrated set of tools for system configuration and realtime data monitoring, analysis, and control. The concept relies on a system configuration tool for connecting and verifying hardware and software components, and a status-and-control monitor is envisaged to collect data. The SSTF OSS is expected to enhance the effectiveness of simulator training by configuring the components for training, monitoring and controlling components, and conducting all operations in real time.

Jacobs, Rebecca J.↗

NASA NTRS2011

Full-Scaled Advanced Systems Testbed: Ensuring Success of Adaptive Control Research Through Project Lifecycle Risk Mitigation

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Dryden Flight Research Center completed flight testing of adaptive controls research on the Full-Scale Advance Systems Testbed (FAST) in January of 2011. The research addressed technical challenges involved with reducing risk in an increasingly complex and dynamic national airspace. Specific challenges lie with the development of validated, multidisciplinary, integrated aircraft control design tools and techniques to enable safe flight in the presence of adverse conditions such as structural damage, control surface failures, or aerodynamic upsets. The testbed is an F-18 aircraft serving as a full-scale vehicle to test and validate adaptive flight control research and lends a significant confidence to the development, maturation, and acceptance process of incorporating adaptive control laws into follow-on research and the operational environment. The experimental systems integrated into FAST were designed to allow for flexible yet safe flight test evaluation and validation of modern adaptive control technologies and revolve around two major hardware upgrades: the modification of Production Support Flight Control Computers (PSFCC) and integration of two, fourth-generation Airborne Research Test Systems (ARTS). Post-hardware integration verification and validation provided the foundation for safe flight test of Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion and Model Reference Aircraft Control adaptive control law experiments. To ensure success of flight in terms of cost, schedule, and test results, emphasis on risk management was incorporated into early stages of design and flight test planning and continued through the execution of each flight test mission. Specific consideration was made to incorporate safety features within the hardware and software to alleviate user demands as well as into test processes and training to reduce human factor impacts to safe and successful flight test. This paper describes the research configuration, experiment functionality, overall risk mitigation, flight test approach and results, and lessons learned of adaptive controls research of the Full-Scale Advanced Systems Testbed.

Pavlock, Kate M.↗

DOE OSTI2024

Battery State of Health Estimator: Cooperative Research and Development Final Report

NREL has developed a software tool to enable Renewance to estimate the degradation of batteries from basic information such as the type of battery and the application of that battery during its first life, so that used batteries may be evaluated for potential repurposing at low cost. This software tool utilizes NREL's BLAST-Lite battery degradation modeling code, which was updated with additional models for commercially produced lithium-ion batteries as a part of this CRADA. The software tool enables users to input details such as battery type and application so that lifetime estimates can be made without any programming or expert battery knowledge. The application input loads in saved values for parameters such as cycles per year, depth-of-discharge, and other battery operating parameters from a file defined by Renewance. These parameters may be modified to refine simulations for specific batteries. The software tool also incorporates a degradation model optimization tool, whereby existing battery degradation models may be tuned according to measured battery health. This ensures that new models still predict degradation behaviors expected from a certain battery chemistry, but with the overall degradation rate tuned to a specific battery make and model. The new model can then be saved for estimating the degradation of other similar batteries. An additional task was planned to utilize machine-learning to enable battery health diagnosis from rapid EIS measurements to accelerate the screening of used batteries. This task was not completed due to lack of available data for training a machine-learning model. CRADA benefit to DOE, Participant, and US Taxpayer: Further development of open-source software tool BLAST-Lite for predicting the lifetime of commercially produced Lithium-ion batteries (NREL SWR-22-69).

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

NASA NTRS1989

Ada and software management in NASA: Symposium/forum

The promises of Ada to improve software productivity and quality, and the claims that a transition to Ada would require significant changes in NASA's training programs and ways of doing business were investigated. The study assesses the agency's ongoing and planned Ada activities. A series of industry representatives (Computer Sciences Corporation, General Electric Aerospace, McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Company, TRW, Lockheed, and Boeing) reviewed the recommendations and assessed their impact from the Company's perspective. The potential effects on NASA programs were then discussed.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2020

Blackbird: Object-Oriented Planning, Simulation, and Sequencing Framework Used by Multiple Missions

Every JPL flight mission relies on activity planningand sequence generation software to perform operations. Mostsuch tools in use at JPL and elsewhere use attribute-basedschemas or domain-specific languages (DSLs) to defineactivities. This reliance poses user training, softwaremaintenance, performance, and other challenges. To solve thisproblem for future missions, a new software called Blackbirdwas developed which allows engineers to specify behavior instandard Java. The new code base has over an order ofmagnitude fewer lines of code than other JPL planningsoftware, since no DSL or schema interpreter is needed. Theuse of Java for defining activities also allows mission adaptersto debug their code in an integrated development environment,seamlessly call external libraries, and set up truly multimissionmodels. These efficiency gains have significantlyreduced the amount of development effort required to supportthe software. This paper discusses Blackbird’s design,principles, and use cases.

Rothstein-Dowden, Ansel↗

NASA NTRS2014

Preparing GMAT for Operational Maneuver Planning of the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE)

The General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) is an open-source space mission design, analysis and trajectory optimization tool. GMAT is developed by a team of NASA, private industry, public and private contributors. GMAT is designed to model, optimize and estimate spacecraft trajectories in flight regimes ranging from low Earth orbit to lunar applications, interplanetary trajectories and other deep space missions. GMAT has also been flight qualified to support operational maneuver planning for the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) mission. ACE was launched in August, 1997 and is orbiting the Sun-Earth L1 libration point. The primary science objective of ACE is to study the composition of both the solar wind and the galactic cosmic rays. Operational orbit determination, maneuver operations and product generation for ACE are conducted by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Flight Dynamics Facility (FDF). This paper discusses the entire engineering lifecycle and major operational certification milestones that GMAT successfully completed to obtain operational certification for the ACE mission. Operational certification milestones such as gathering of the requirements for ACE operational maneuver planning, gap analysis, test plans and procedures development, system design, pre-shadow operations, training to FDF ACE maneuver planners, shadow operations, Test Readiness Review (TRR) and finally Operational Readiness Review (ORR) are discussed. These efforts have demonstrated that GMAT is flight quality software ready to support ACE mission operations in the FDF.

Trajectory analysis↗

NASA NTRS2019

Preparing General Mission Analysis Tool for Operational Maneuver Planning of the Advanced Composition Explorer Mission

mission design↗

NASA NTRS1997

Computer-Based Tools for Evaluating Graphical User Interfaces

The user interface is the component of a software system that connects two very complex system: humans and computers. Each of these two systems impose certain requirements on the final product. The user is the judge of the usability and utility of the system; the computer software and hardware are the tools with which the interface is constructed. Mistakes are sometimes made in designing and developing user interfaces because the designers and developers have limited knowledge about human performance (e.g., problem solving, decision making, planning, and reasoning). Even those trained in user interface design make mistakes because they are unable to address all of the known requirements and constraints on design. Evaluation of the user inter-face is therefore a critical phase of the user interface development process. Evaluation should not be considered the final phase of design; but it should be part of an iterative design cycle with the output of evaluation being feed back into design. The goal of this research was to develop a set of computer-based tools for objectively evaluating graphical user interfaces. The research was organized into three phases. The first phase resulted in the development of an embedded evaluation tool which evaluates the usability of a graphical user interface based on a user's performance. An expert system to assist in the design and evaluation of user interfaces based upon rules and guidelines was developed during the second phase. During the final phase of the research an automatic layout tool to be used in the initial design of graphical inter- faces was developed. The research was coordinated with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's Mission Operations Laboratory's efforts in developing onboard payload display specifications for the Space Station.

Moore, Loretta A.↗

NASA NTRS2021

Machine Learning Based Path Planning for Improved Rover Navigation

Enhanced AutoNav (ENav), the baseline surface navigation software for NASA’s Perseverance rover, sorts a list of candidate paths for the rover to traverse, then uses the Approximate Clearance Evaluation (ACE) algorithm to evaluate whether the most highly ranked paths are safe. ACE is crucial for maintaining the safety of the rover, but is computationally expensive. If the most promising candidates in the list of paths are all found to be infeasible, ENav must continue to search the list and run time-consuming ACE evaluations until a feasible path is found. In this paper, we present two heuristics that, given a terrain heightmap around the rover, produce cost estimates that more effectively rank the candidate paths before ACE evaluation. The first heuristic uses Sobel operators and convolution to incorporate the cost of traversing high-gradient terrain. The second heuristic uses a machine learning (ML) model to predict areas that will be deemed untraversable by ACE. We used physics simulations to collect training data for the ML model and to run Monte Carlo trials to quantify navigation performance across a variety of terrains with various slopes and rock distributions. Compared to ENav's baseline performance, integrating the heuristics can lead to a significant reduction in ACE evaluations and average computation time per planning cycle, increase path efficiency, and maintain or improve the rate of successful traverses. This strategy of targeting specific bottlenecks with ML while maintaining the original ACE safety checks provides an example of how ML can be infused into planetary science missions and other safety-critical software.

Yue, Yisong↗

NASA NTRS2000

The Transition from Spacecraft Development Ot Flight Operation: Human Factor Considerations

In the field of aeronautics and astronautics, a paradigm shift has been witnessed by those in academia, research and development, and private industry. Long development life cycles and the budgets to support such programs and projects has given way to aggressive task schedules and leaner resources to draw from all the while challenging assigned individuals to create and produce improved products of processes. however, this "faster, better, cheaper" concept cannot merely be applied to the design, development, and test of complex systems such as earth-orbiting of interplanetary robotic spacecraft. Full advantage is not possible without due consideration and application to mission operations planning and flight operations, Equally as important as the flight system, the mission operations system consisting of qualified personnel, ground hardware and software tools, and verified and validated operational processes, should also be regarded as a complex system requiring personnel to draw upon formal education, training, related experiences, and heuristic reasoning in engineering an effective and efficient system. Unquestionably, qualified personnel are the most important elements of a mission operations system. This paper examines the experiences of the Deep Space I Project, the first in a series of new technology in-flight validation missions sponsored by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), specifically, in developing a subsystems analysis and technology validation team comprised of former spacecraft development personnel. Human factor considerations are investigated from initial concept/vision formulation; through operational process development; personnel test and training; to initial uplink product development and test support. Emphasis has been placed on challenges and applied or recommended solutions, so as to provide opportunities for future programs and projects to address and disposition potential issues and concerns as early as possible to reap the benefits associated with learning from other's past experiences.

Basilio, Ralph R.↗

NASA NTRS2013

GSFC Technology Development Center Report

This report summarizes the activities of the GSFC Technology Development Center (TDC) for 2012 and forecasts planned activities for 2013. The GSFC TDC develops station software including the Field System (FS), scheduling software (SKED), hardware including tools for station timing and meteorology, scheduling algorithms, and operational procedures. It provides a pool of individuals to assist with station implementation, check-out, upgrades, and training.

Himwich, Ed↗