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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 73 records · Page 4
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2018

Incorporating AEGIS Autonomous Science into Mars Science Laboratory Rover Mission Operations

The AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science) intelligent targeting software system has been in use on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission since 2016. The system allows on-board autonomous selection of targets for the ChemCam remote geochemistry instrument based on analysis of images taken by the rover. This paper describes the deployment of AEGIS to MSL and the operational use of the system since rollout to science operations in May of 2016.

Deflores, Lauren↗
NASA NTRS2022

Should’ve Could’ve: Progress in the Systems Engineering of the Mars2020 On-Board Planner

Mars rover operations has traditionally controlled behavior using meticulously compiled, so-called “Master” sequences that enforce deterministic timing and ordering of activities. While the approach is effective at managing risk and complexity, it can also be inefficient. Extended operations of the Mars2020 rover envisions a fundamentally different scheduling and execution approach. Atomic activities are constrained by mission operators in time, resource usage, and a structure of dependencies. The rover flight software will create and re-create schedules, responding to available energy, data volume, actual activity durations and execution status, observed temperatures, and other on-board state. Schedules are expected to change substantially in the course of execution. The solution space is prohibitively large and probabilistic in nature. A range of emergent behavior is accessible depending on the interaction between actual on-board state and a given formulation of constraints. For years, the specification and implementation of this capability have been considered and refined, as testing and analysis have mapped the contours of the system. Many concepts that could have been adopted were rejected, and in some cases, emergent properties have been exposed and beaten back with approaches to steer the behavior. This paper discusses some of the design history and underlying reasoning in the systems engineering of the first autonomous activity planner on Mars.

Kuhn, Stephen R↗
NASA NTRS2005

Photo-realistic Terrain Modeling and Visualization for Mars Exploration Rover Science Operations

Modern NASA planetary exploration missions employ complex systems of hardware and software managed by large teams of. engineers and scientists in order to study remote environments. The most complex and successful of these recent projects is the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center delivered a 30 visualization program, Viz, to the MER mission that provides an immersive, interactive environment for science analysis of the remote planetary surface. In addition, Ames provided the Athena Science Team with high-quality terrain reconstructions generated with the Ames Stereo-pipeline. The on-site support team for these software systems responded to unanticipated opportunities to generate 30 terrain models during the primary MER mission. This paper describes Viz, the Stereo-pipeline, and the experiences of the on-site team supporting the scientists at JPL during the primary MER mission.

Edwards, Laurence↗
NASA NTRS2019

MSL relay coordination and tactical planning in the era of InSight, MAVEN, and TGO

This study examines an approach for optimizing the scheduling of regular relay communications between the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover and the non-sun-synchronous Mars orbiters MAVEN and TGO as well as the impacts of the approaching InSight landing on MSL relay and tactical planning. Rover operations require knowledge of recently executed activities, termed decisional data, in order to inform tactical activity planning. As a result, timely and routine data return is critical for nominal rover operations. Mars orbiters are used as relay assets to achieve such timeliness.

Thomas, Steven↗
NASA NTRS2011

Comparing Apollo and Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Operations Paradigms for Human Exploration During NASA Desert-Rats Science Operations

NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS) field test is one of several analog tests that NASA conducts each year to combine operations development, technology advances and science under planetary surface conditions. The D-RATS focus is testing preliminary operational concepts for extravehicular activity (EVA) systems in the field using simulated surface operations and EVA hardware and procedures. For 2010 hardware included the Space Exploration Vehicles, Habitat Demonstration Units, Tri-ATHLETE, and a suite of new geology sample collection tools, including a self-contained GeoLab glove box for conducting in-field analysis of various collected rock samples. The D-RATS activities develop technical skills and experience for the mission planners, engineers, scientists, technicians, and astronauts responsible for realizing the goals of exploring planetary surfaces.

Yingst, R. A.↗
NASA NTRS2022

A Modular Framework for Integrating and Visualizing Telemetry for Mars 2020 Rover Mechanism Operations

The analysis of mechanism telemetry requires a wide variety of tools to quickly and effectively assess spacecraft state, capture long-term trends in system performance, and identify and track anomalous events. Such analysis often requires spacecraft telemetry to first be transformed into derived fields and aggregated statistics before operators can begin their analysis. In past missions, aspects of this process have been automated, but operators were expected to use their own tools and procedures to understand and visualize the data, which led to redundant and inconsistent tools and processes. The Mech Data Tools Python library (MDT) was developed to provide a flexible, unified tool set for operators to extract and analyze mechanism telemetry over the life of the Mars 2020 surface mission. MDT consists of a set of configurable components that implement standard interfaces for ingesting input and producing output. Components can be chained together to form a data processing pipeline. Data are ingested from several sources within the greater Mars 2020 cloud infrastructure and stored in pandas DataFrames, which allows users to leverage the data manipulation capabilities present within the widely-used pandas library. Visualization capabilities are provided through the Plotly library, which generates interactive plots for users to interpret. Following the beginning of Mars 2020 surface operations, usage of MDT has spread to all mechanism-focused subsystems and has demonstrated great utility in analyzing early surface activities. This paper describes MDT’s evolution from heritage mechanism telemetry tools, the critical architecture decisions and challenges faced over MDT’s two years of development, and current applications of MDT in support of mechanism operations.

Wolsieffer, Ben↗
NASA NTRS2017

Prototyping an Onboard Scheduler for the Mars 2020 Rover

Efficiently operating a rover on the surface of Mars is challenging. Two factors combine to make this job particularly difficult: 1) communication opportunities are limited, 2) certain aspects of rover performance are difficult to predict. With limited communications, the rover must be given instructions on what to do for one or more Martian days at a time. In addition, the duration of many rover activities can be hard to predict, which leads to unpredictable energy use. Traditionally, conservatism is used to keep the rover safe and healthy. This approach, however can lead to a measurable loss in rover productivity. To regain some of this productivity, the Mars 2020 mission is prototyping the use of onboard scheduling software. The primary objective of this software is to identify and utilize opportunities that arise when actual rover performance is more efficient than the original, conservative prediction.

Benowitz, Ed↗
NASA NTRS2007

NASA Tech Briefs, January 2007

Topics covered include: Flexible Skins Containing Integrated Sensors and Circuitry; Artificial Hair Cells for Sensing Flows; Video Guidance Sensor and Time-of-Flight Rangefinder; Optical Beam-Shear Sensors; Multiple-Agent Air/Ground Autonomous Exploration Systems; A 640 512-Pixel Portable Long-Wavelength Infrared Camera; An Array of Optical Receivers for Deep-Space Communications; Microstrip Antenna Arrays on Multilayer LCP Substrates; Applications for Subvocal Speech; Multiloop Rapid-Rise/Rapid Fall High-Voltage Power Supply; The PICWidget; Fusing Symbolic and Numerical Diagnostic Computations; Probabilistic Reasoning for Robustness in Automated Planning; Short-Term Forecasting of Radiation Belt and Ring Current; JMS Proxy and C/C++ Client SDK; XML Flight/Ground Data Dictionary Management; Cross-Compiler for Modeling Space-Flight Systems; Composite Elastic Skins for Shape-Changing Structures; Glass/Ceramic Composites for Sealing Solid Oxide Fuel Cells; Aligning Optical Fibers by Means of Actuated MEMS Wedges; Manufacturing Large Membrane Mirrors at Low Cost; Double-Vacuum-Bag Process for Making Resin- Matrix Composites; Surface Bacterial-Spore Assay Using Tb3+/DPA Luminescence; Simplified Microarray Technique for Identifying mRNA in Rare Samples; High-Resolution, Wide-Field-of-View Scanning Telescope; Multispectral Imager With Improved Filter Wheel and Optics; Integral Radiator and Storage Tank; Compensation for Phase Anisotropy of a Metal Reflector; Optical Characterization of Molecular Contaminant Films; Integrated Hardware and Software for No-Loss Computing; Decision-Tree Formulation With Order-1 Lateral Execution; GIS Methodology for Planning Planetary-Rover Operations; Optimal Calibration of the Spitzer Space Telescope; Automated Detection of Events of Scientific Interest; Representation-Independent Iteration of Sparse Data Arrays; Mission Operations of the Mars Exploration Rovers; and More About Software for No-Loss Computing.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2000

Remotely-Sensed Geology from Lander-Based to Orbital Perspectives: Results for FIDO Rover Field Tests

Tests of the FIDO (Field Integration Design and Operations) rover and Athena-like operational scenarios were conducted May 7-16, 2000. A group located at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, CA, formed the Core Operations Team (COT) that designed experiments and command sequences while another team tracked, maintained, and secured the rover in the field. The COT had no knowledge of the specific field location, thus the tests were done "blind." In addition to FIDO rover instrumentation, the COT had access to LANDSAT 7, TIMS, and AVIRIS regional coverage and color descent images. Using data from the FIDO instruments, primarily a color microscopic imager (CMI), infrared point spectrometer (IPS; 1.5-2.4 microns), and a three-color stereo panoramic camera (Pancam), the COT correlated lithologic features (mineralogy, rock types) from the simulated landing site to a regional scale. The May test results provide an example of how to relate site geology from landed rover investigations to the regional geology using remote sensing. The capability to relate mineralogic signatures using the point IR spectrometer to remotely sensed, multispectral or hyperspectral data proved to be key to integration of the in-situ and remote data. This exercise demonstrated the potential synergy between lander-based and orbital data, and highlighted the need to investigate a landing site in detail and at multiple scales.

Jolliff, B.↗