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New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T)

The New Observing Strategies (NOS) initiative within the NASA Earth Science Technology Office(ESTO)Advanced Information Systems Technology(AIST) program envisions future Earth science missions with distributed sensors(nodes) interconnected by a communications fabric that enables dynamic and intelligent operations [1].Some NOS concepts resemble systems-of-systems or collaborative systems where operational authority is distributed among multiple systems, necessitating new methods for systems engineering and design to cope with more decentralized control over constituent systems[2].The New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T, verbalized as "enoh es tee") is a computational environment to develop, test, mature, and socialize new operating concepts and technology for NOS. NOS-T provides infrastructure to integrate and orchestrate user-contributed applications for system-of-systems test cases with true distributed control over constituent systems. The overall concept, illustrated in Figure 1, interconnects individual user applications and a NOS-T manager application via common information system infrastructure to coordinate the execution of virtual Earth science missions. NOS-T enables principal investigators to conduct test runs in the same environment, systematically changing variables to assess the overall efficacy of the proposed new observing strategies. Recorded data and outcomes provide evidence to advance technology readiness level and improve or innovate upon existing Earth science measurement techniques

Paul Grogan↗

Advanced technologies to support earth orbiting systems

Within NASA, the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology (OAST) is conducting a major, ongoing engineering research and technology program directed toward the support of future programs, with a major focus on technology for future space science missions. OAST is conducting a substantial effort to identify the technologies required to support the evolution of Mission to Planet Earth. The effort consists of studies, workshops, and technology research programs to explore: (1) new concepts for multisatellite, earth-observing instrumentation and sensor sets; (2) information system advances for continuous and reliable processing of terabit per day data streams; and (3) infrastructure development, including spacecraft bus technology and operations for substantial performance, cost, and reliabiltiy gains. This paper discusses the technological needs of future earth science systems, reviews current and planned activities, and highlights significant achievements in the research and technology program.

Rosen, Robert↗

Non Radiation Hardened Microprocessors in Spaced Based Remote Sensing Systems

The CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations) mission is a comprehensive suite of active and passive sensors including a 20Hz 230mj Nd:YAG lidar, a visible wavelength Earth-looking camera and an imaging infrared radiometer. CALIPSO flies in formation with the Earth Observing System Post-Meridian (EOS PM) train, provides continuous, near-simultaneous measurements and is a planned 3 year mission. CALIPSO was launched into a 98 degree sun synchronous Earth orbit in April of 2006 to study clouds and aerosols and acquires over 5 gigabytes of data every 24 hours. The ground track of one CALIPSO orbit as well as high and low intensity South Atlantic Anomaly outlines is shown. CALIPSO passes through the SAA several times each day. Spaced based remote sensing systems that include multiple instruments and/or instruments such as lidar generate large volumes of data and require robust real-time hardware and software mechanisms and high throughput processors. Due to onboard storage restrictions and telemetry downlink limitations these systems must pre-process and reduce the data before sending it to the ground. This onboard processing and realtime requirement load may mean that newer more powerful processors are needed even though acceptable radiation-hardened versions have not yet been released. CALIPSO's single board computer payload controller processor is actually a set of four (4) voting non-radiation hardened COTS Power PC 603r's built on a single width VME card by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (GDAIS). Significant radiation concerns for CALIPSO and other Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites include the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), the north and south poles and strong solar events. Over much of South America and extending into the South Atlantic Ocean the Van Allen radiation belts dip to just 200-800km and spacecraft entering this area are subjected to high energy protons and experience higher than normal Single Event Upset (SEU) and Single Event Latch-up (SEL) rates. Although less significant, spacecraft flying in the area around the poles experience similar upsets. Finally, powerful solar proton events in the range of 10MeV/10pfu to 100MeV/1pfu as are forecasted and tracked by NOAA's Space Environment Center in Colorado can result in Single Event Upset (SEU), Single Event Latch-up (SEL) and permanent failures such as Single Event Gate Rupture (SEGR) in some technologies. (Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) are another source, especially for gate rupture) CALIPSO mitigates common radiation concerns in its data handling through the use of redundant processors, radiation-hardened Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC), hardware-based Error Detection and Correction (EDAC), processor and memory scrubbing, redundant boot code and mirrored files. After presenting a system overview this paper will expand on each of these strategies. Where applicable, related on-orbit data collected since the CALIPSO initial boot on May 4, 2006 will be noted.

Decoursey, Robert J.↗

ESTO Investments in Innovative Sensor Technologies for Remote Sensing

For more then 18 years NASA Earth Science Technology Office has been investing in remote sensing technologies. During this period ESTO has invested in more then 900 tasks. These tasks are managed under multiple programs like Instrument Incubator Program (IIP), Advanced Component Technology (ACT), Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST), In-Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies (InVEST), Sustainable Land Imaging - Technology (SLI-T) and others. This covers the whole spectrum of technologies from component to full up satellite in space and software. Over the years many of these technologies have been infused into space missions like Aquarius, SMAP, CYGNSS, SWOT, TEMPO and others. Over the years ESTO is actively investing in Infrared sensor technologies for space applications. Recent investments have been for SLI-T and InVEST program. On these tasks technology development is from simple Bolometers to Advanced Photonic waveguide based spectrometers. Some of the details on these missions and technologies will be presented.

Babu, Sachidananda R.↗

NeMO-Net The Neural Multi-Modal Observation Training Network for Global Coral Reef Assessment

In the past decade, coral reefs worldwide have experienced unprecedented stresses due to climate change, ocean acidification, and anthropomorphic pressures, instigating massive bleaching and die-off of these fragile and diverse ecosystems. Furthermore, remote sensing of these shallow marine habitats is hindered by ocean wave distortion, refraction and optical attenuation, leading invariably to data products that are often of low resolution and signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. However, recent advances in UAV and Fluid Lensing technology have allowed us to capture multispectral 3D imagery of these systems at sub-cm scales from above the water surface, giving us an unprecedented view of their growth and decay. Exploiting the fine-scaled features of these datasets, machine learning methods such as MAP, PCA, and SVM can not only accurately classify the living cover and morphology of these reef systems (below 8 error), but are also able to map the spectral space between airborne and satellite imagery, augmenting and improving the classification accuracy of previously low-resolution datasets.We are currently implementing NeMO-Net, the first open-source deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and interactive active learning and training software to accurately assess the present and past dynamics of coral reef ecosystems through determination of percent living cover and morphology. NeMO-Net will be built upon the QGIS platform to ingest UAV, airborne and satellite datasets from various sources and sensor capabilities, and through data-fusion determine the coral reef ecosystem makeup globally at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. To achieve this, we will exploit virtual data augmentation, the use of semi-supervised learning, and active learning through a tablet platform allowing for users to manually train uncertain or difficult to classify datasets. The project will make use of Pythons extensive libraries for machine learning, as well as extending integration to GPU and High-End Computing Capability (HECC) on the Pleiades supercomputing cluster, located at NASA Ames. The project is being supported by NASAs Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST-16) Program.

Remote Sensin↗

NeMO-Net: The Neural Multi-Modal Observation and Training Network for Global Coral Reef Assessment

In the past decade, coral reefs worldwide have experienced unprecedented stresses due to climate change, ocean acidification, and anthropomorphic pressures, instigating massive bleaching and die-off of these fragile and diverse ecosystems. Furthermore, remote sensing of these shallow marine habitats is hindered by ocean wave distortion, refraction and optical attenuation, leading invariably to data products that are often of low resolution and signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. However, recent advances in UAV and Fluid Lensing technology have allowed us to capture multispectral 3D imagery of these systems at sub-cm scales from above the water surface, giving us an unprecedented view of their growth and decay. Exploiting the fine-scaled features of these datasets, machine learning methods such as MAP, PCA, and SVM can not only accurately classify the living cover and morphology of these reef systems (below 8 percent error), but are also able to map the spectral space between airborne and satellite imagery, augmenting and improving the classification accuracy of previously low-resolution datasets. We are currently implementing NeMO-Net, the first open-source deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and interactive active learning and training software to accurately assess the present and past dynamics of coral reef ecosystems through determination of percent living cover and morphology. NeMO-Net will be built upon the QGIS platform to ingest UAV, airborne and satellite datasets from various sources and sensor capabilities, and through data-fusion determine the coral reef ecosystem makeup globally at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. To achieve this, we will exploit virtual data augmentation, the use of semi-supervised learning, and active learning through a tablet platform allowing for users to manually train uncertain or difficult to classify datasets. The project will make use of Pythons extensive libraries for machine learning, as well as extending integration to GPU and High-End Computing Capability (HECC) on the Pleiades supercomputing cluster, located at NASA Ames. The project is being supported by NASAs Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST-16) Program.

NeMO-Net↗

Alternatives in the complement and structure of NASA teleprocessing resources

The results are presented of a program to identify technical innovations which would have an impact on NASA data processing and describe as fully as possible the development work necessary to exploit them. Seven of these options for NASA development, as the opportunities to participate in and enhance the advancing information system technology were called, are reported. A detailed treatment is given of three of the options, involving minicomputers, mass storage devices and software development techniques. These areas were picked by NASA as having the most potential for improving their operations.

Source record↗

Information systems

Space-derived information is the principal product of our civilian space program. Associated data from earth-orbital and planetary spacecraft will exceed the equivalent of some 500 television pictures per second during the 1980's. Cost-effective management of this data flood requires a new look at NASA's overall information systems. Advanced technologies being pursued by industry and NASA could provide order-of-magnitude reductions in data-handling costs and times to permit a massive increase in the use of space-acquired data for both individual and national needs. This paper discusses attendant thrusts in efficient data acquisition, instrument pointing, real-time data management, and low-cost data distribution. Current and planned technology activities in these areas and their anticipated impact on future space missions are described.

Kurzhals, P. R.↗

Real-Time On-Board Processing Validation of MSPI Ground Camera Images

The Earth Sciences Decadal Survey identifies a multiangle, multispectral, high-accuracy polarization imager as one requirement for the Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission. JPL has been developing a Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager (MSPI) as a candidate to fill this need. A key technology development needed for MSPI is on-board signal processing to calculate polarimetry data as imaged by each of the 9 cameras forming the instrument. With funding from NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program, JPL is solving the real-time data processing requirements to demonstrate, for the first time, how signal data at 95 Mbytes/sec over 16-channels for each of the 9 multiangle cameras in the spaceborne instrument can be reduced on-board to 0.45 Mbytes/sec. This will produce the intensity and polarization data needed to characterize aerosol and cloud microphysical properties. Using the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA including PowerPC440 processors we have implemented a least squares fitting algorithm that extracts intensity and polarimetric parameters in real-time, thereby substantially reducing the image data volume for spacecraft downlink without loss of science information.

Earth Sciences Decadal Survey↗

Real-Time On-Board Airborne Demonstration of High-Speed On-Board Data Processing for Science Instruments (HOPS)

The project called High-Speed On-Board Data Processing for Science Instruments (HOPS) has been funded by NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) program since April, 2012. The HOPS team recently completed two flight campaigns during the summer of 2014 on two different aircrafts with two different science instruments. The first flight campaign was in July, 2014 based at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, VA on the NASA's HU-25 aircraft. The science instrument that flew with HOPS was Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons (ASCENDS) CarbonHawk Experiment Simulator (ACES) funded by NASA's Instrument Incubator Program (IIP). The second campaign was in August, 2014 based at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) in Palmdale, CA on the NASA's DC-8 aircraft. HOPS flew with the Multifunctional Fiber Laser Lidar (MFLL) instrument developed by Excelis Inc. The goal of the campaigns was to perform an end-to-end demonstration of the capabilities of the HOPS prototype system (HOPS COTS) while running the most computationally intensive part of the ASCENDS algorithm real-time on-board. The comparison of the two flight campaigns and the results of the functionality tests of the HOPS COTS are presented in this paper.

Beyon, Jeffrey Y.↗

High-Speed On-Board Data Processing for Science Instruments: HOPS

The project called High-Speed On-Board Data Processing for Science Instruments (HOPS) has been funded by NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) program during April, 2012 â€" April, 2015. HOPS is an enabler for science missions with extremely high data processing rates. In this three-year effort of HOPS, Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons (ASCENDS) and 3-D Winds were of interest in particular. As for ASCENDS, HOPS replaces time domain data processing with frequency domain processing while making the real-time on-board data processing possible. As for 3-D Winds, HOPS offers real-time high-resolution wind profiling with 4,096-point fast Fourier transform (FFT). HOPS is adaptable with quick turn-around time. Since HOPS offers reusable user-friendly computational elements, its FPGA IP Core can be modified for a shorter development period if the algorithm changes. The FPGA and memory bandwidth of HOPS is 20 GB/sec while the typical maximum processor-to-SDRAM bandwidth of the commercial radiation tolerant high-end processors is about 130-150 MB/sec. The inter-board communication bandwidth of HOPS is 4 GB/sec while the effective processor-to-cPCI bandwidth of commercial radiation tolerant high-end boards is about 50-75 MB/sec. Also, HOPS offers VHDL cores for the easy and efficient implementation of ASCENDS and 3-D Winds, and other similar algorithms. A general overview of the 3-year development of HOPS is the goal of this presentation.

Beyon, Jeffrey↗

The InSAR Scientific Computing Environment 3.0: A Flexible Framework for NISAR Operational and User-Led Science Processing

The InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE) was first developed under the NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology as a flexible, extensible object-oriented framework for Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) processing. The ISCE framework uses Python 3 at the workflow level, controlling modules of compiled code for functional processing, and managing inputs, outputs, and other flow control services. The currently released version, called ISCE 2.1, is distributed to the research community through the Western North America InSAR Consortium under a research license. The ISCE team is working on the next generation of the code in order to prepare for the NASAISRO SAR (NISAR) mission operational processing. Innovations in this code include augmentation or conversion of the custom Python framework elements in ISCE with the Pyre framework, new workflows for interferometric and polarimetric stack processing, a more intuitive and graphically based user interface, and flow control for hybrid computing environments including CPU/GPU clusters, logging and error tracking facilities, and new more efficient computational modules that exploit graphical processor units (GPUs) when available. The ISCE 3.0 framework is designed to work in an operational environment as well as on a single user’s laptop or compute cluster, with services to discover capabilities and scale computations accordingly.

Buckley, Sean M.↗

An Advanced Open-Source Platform for Air Quality Analysis, Visualization, and Prediction

Ambient air pollution is the largest environmental health risk factor, leading to several million premature deaths globally per year. The challenge of combating poor air quality is exacerbated by growing urban populations, changing emissions, and a warming climate. While there have been many advances monitoring and modeling of atmospheric composition, reflected in the dramatic increase in archived Earth Observations, there is no single measurement or method that alone can provide an accurate depiction of the entire atmosphere. The rapidly growing collections of observational and modeling data require us to be smarter about what data to include, and how such data is used. In recent years, NASA has invested significantly in advancing the concepts for Analytics Collaborative Framework (ACF) [5] and New Observing Strategies (NOS) [4] to tackle our software infrastructure need for harmonized data management and dynamic acquisition of diverse measurements for on-demand, interactive, multivariate analysis, and access [3]. It is not enough to have a big data, standalone analytics solution; it is critical that we start integrating data from remote sensing, modeling, and in-situ networks in a harmonized manner that enables timely and data-driven decision-making for air quality management. This work presents the design and development of an Air Quality Analytics Collaborative Framework (AQ ACF), as part of NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) effort, to establish a data, machine-learning, and numerically driven platform for air quality analysis, visualization, and prediction.

Liu, Qian↗

Standards for Interoperable Digital Twins

On September 18, 2023, NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program conducted a mini-workshop that brought together seven experts to survey and discuss "Standards for Interoperable Digital Twins". Since three years, the AIST Program has been developing technologies and prototypes for Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT). During those developments and after the ESDT Workshop held in October 2022, it became clear that standard for ESDT interoperability were needed and should be defined as soon as possible. To address this challenge, the AIST program will survey ongoing development for Digital Twins standards in various domains and the September 18, 2023 Workshop represented the first step towards this understanding. Speakers during this event included: Michael Grieves (Digital Twin Institute), Siri Jodha Singh Khalsa (IEEE GRSS Standards), Trent Tinker (OGC), Ryan Berkheimer (NOAA), John Stone (NVIDIA), Thomas Geenen (ECMWF-DestinE) and Arne Berre (SINTEF-Iliad DTO and EDITO). This movie represents the recording of this event.

Earth Science Remote Sensing↗

A Design Heritage-Based Forecasting Methodology for Risk Informed Management of Advanced Systems

The development of next generation systems often carries with it the promise of improved performance, greater reliability, and reduced operational costs. These expectations arise from the use of novel designs, new materials, advanced integration and production technologies intended for functionality replacing the previous generation. However, the novelty of these nascent technologies is accompanied by lack of operational experience and, in many cases, no actual testing as well. Therefore some of the enthusiasm surrounding most new technologies may be due to inflated aspirations from lack of knowledge rather than actual future expectations. This paper proposes a design heritage approach for improved reliability forecasting of advanced system components. The basis of the design heritage approach is to relate advanced system components to similar designs currently in operation. The demonstrated performance of these components could then be used to forecast the expected performance and reliability of comparable advanced technology components. In this approach the greater the divergence of the advanced component designs from the current systems the higher the uncertainty that accompanies the associated failure estimates. Designers of advanced systems are faced with many difficult decisions. One of the most common and more difficult types of these decisions are those related to the choice between design alternatives. In the past decision-makers have found these decisions to be extremely difficult to make because they often involve the trade-off between a known performing fielded design and a promising paper design. When it comes to expected reliability performance the paper design always looks better because it is on paper and it addresses all the know failure modes of the fielded design. On the other hand there is a long, and sometimes very difficult road, between the promise of a paper design and its fulfillment; with the possibility that sometimes the reliability promise is not fulfilled at all. Decision makers in advanced technology areas have always known to discount the performance claims of a design to a degree in proportion to its stage of development, and at times have preferred the more mature design over the one of lesser maturity even with the latter promising substantially better performance once fielded. As with the broader measures of performance this has also been true for projected reliability performance. Paper estimates of potential advances in design reliability are to a degree uncertain in proportion to the maturity of the features being proposed to secure those advances. This is especially true when performance-enhancing features in other areas are also planned to be part of the development program.

Maggio, Gaspare↗