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At least 109 records · Page 6

Systems Engineering Technical Authority: A Path to Mission Success

The systems engineering of space missions to study planet Earth has been an important focus of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) since its inception. But all space missions are becoming increasingly complex and this fact, reinforced by some major mishaps, has caused NASA to reevaluate their approach to achieving safety and mission success. A new approach ensures that there are adequate checks and balances in place to maximize the probability of safety and mission success. To this end the agency created the concept of Technical Authority which identifies a key individual accountable and responsible for the technical integrity of a flight mission as well as a project-independent reporting path. At the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) this responsibility ultimately begins with the Mission Systems Engineer (MSE) for each satellite mission. This paper discusses the Technical Authority process and then describes some unique steps that are being taken at the GSFC to support these MSEs in meeting their responsibilities.

Andary, James F.↗

Equatorial Winds on Saturn and the Stratospheric Oscillation

The zonal jets on the giant planets are generally thought to be stable with time. Recently, there are still some debates about the general thought. Here, we report a significant temporal variation of the equatorial jet at high-altitude on Saturn. Long-term (2004-2009) observations by Cassini reveal that wind speed at the 60-mbar level increased from 270 m/s in 2004 to 290 m/s in 2008, while the wind speed has been mostly constant over time at the 500-mbar level in the southern equatorial region. The Cassini observations further reveal that the equatorial jet intensified approximately 60 m/s in the stratosphere (1-5 mbar) from 2005 to 2008. The fact that the wind acceleration is weaker at the 60-mbar level (approximately 20 m/s) than at the 1-mbar level (approximately 60 m/s) demonstrates that the equatorial oscillation is damped when it propagates downwards to the tropopause around 60 mbar. The direct measurement of the varying equatorial jet around the tropopause also serves as a key boundary condition when deriving the thermal wind fields in the stratosphere.

Li, Liming↗

Nuclear Thermal Rocket (Ntr) Propulsion: A Proven Game-Changing Technology for Future Human Exploration Missions

The NTR represents the next evolutionary step in high performance rocket propulsion. It generates high thrust and has a specific impulse (Isp) of approx.900 seconds (s) or more V twice that of today s best chemical rockets. The technology is also proven. During the previous Rover and NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications) nuclear rocket programs, 20 rocket reactors were designed, built and ground tested. These tests demonstrated: (1) a wide range of thrust; (2) high temperature carbide-based nuclear fuel; (3) sustained engine operation; (4) accumulated lifetime; and (5) restart capability V all the requirements needed for a human mission to Mars. Ceramic metal cermet fuel was also pursued, as a backup option. The NTR also has significant growth and evolution potential. Configured as a bimodal system, it can generate electrical power for the spacecraft. Adding an oxygen afterburner nozzle introduces a variable thrust and Isp capability and allows bipropellant operation. In NASA s recent Mars Design Reference Architecture (DRA) 5.0 study, the NTR was selected as the preferred propulsion option because of its proven technology, higher performance, lower launch mass, simple assembly and mission operations. In contrast to other advanced propulsion options, NTP requires no large technology scale-ups. In fact, the smallest engine tested during the Rover program V the 25,000 lbf (25 klbf) Pewee engine is sufficient for human Mars missions when used in a clustered engine arrangement. The Copernicus crewed spacecraft design developed in DRA 5.0 has significant capability and a human exploration strategy is outlined here that uses Copernicus and its key components for precursor near Earth asteroid (NEA) and Mars orbital missions prior to a Mars landing mission. Initially, the basic Copernicus vehicle can enable reusable 1-year round trip human missions to candidate NEAs like 1991 JW and Apophis in the late 2020 s to check out vehicle systems. Afterwards, the Copernicus spacecraft and its 2 key components, now configured as an Earth Return Vehicle / propellant tanker, would be used for a short round trip (approx.18 - 20 months)/short orbital stay (60 days) Mars / Phobos survey mission in 2033 using a split mission approach. The paper also discusses NASA s current Foundational Technology Development activities and its pre-decisional plans for future system-level Technology Demonstrations that include ground testing a small (approx.7.5 klbf) scalable NTR before the decade is out with a flight test shortly thereafter.

Borowski, Stanley K.↗

A multi-wavelength study of 30 Doradus: The Interstellar Medium in a low-metallicity galaxy

We report maps of the 158 micron (C II) line, the 63 micron and 146 micron (C I) lines, the 2.2 micron Br gamma line, and the 2.6 mm CO (1-0) line toward the 30 Doradus complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The maps of all tracers emphasize the shell-like structure of the 30 Doradus region which is seen edge-on. The fact that the molecular gas as traced by CO (1-0) and the photo dissociated gas as traced by (C II) are co-extensive over tens of parsecs can only be explained by a highly fragmented structure of the interstellar medium which allows UV radiation to penetrate deep into the molecular cloud. Clumpiness is also the key to understanding the extremely high (C II)/CO line intensity ratios.

Poglitsch, Albrecht↗

Chrono-Validation of Near-Real-Time Landslide Susceptibility Models via Plugin Statistical Simulations

The idea behind any validation scheme in landslide susceptibility studies is to test whether a model calibrated on a certain data can predict an unknown dataset of the same nature (landslide presences/absences and covariates). Almost the entirety of landslide susceptibility studies are validated by subsetting a single dataset into a training and test sets. This dataset usually corresponds either to event-specific or to historical inventories. Very rarely, a multi-temporal inventory is available and, in the few cases where this condition is met, the validation practices involve training a model on a specific landslide inventory, deriving a single predictive equation and validating it on a subsequent landslide inventory. This commonly leads landslide predictive studies, even those with a strong statistical rigor, to neglect the uncertainty estimation in their modeling scheme. In statistics, validation can also be performed via statistical simulations. This means that after fitting a given model, one can generate any number of predictive functions and test their predictive skills on any type and number of unknown datasets. In this work, we take a similar direction and we apply it to model and validate three separate co-seismic inventories, including an uncertainty estimation phase. We mapped these inventories within the same area in Indonesia, for three earthquakes occurred in 2012, 2017 and 2018. Specifically, we build three event-specific Bayesian Generalize Additive Models of the binomial family. From each model we then simulate 1000 predictive realizations over the remaining two inventories, by using a plug-in scheme where all the morphometric covariates are kept fixed and only the ground motion is replaced according to the prediction target. By doing so, we introduce a new analytical tool for near-real-time landslide predictive purposes, which is able to produce a probabilistic model which stands in between the definitions of susceptibility and hazard. In fact, our model is able to accurately estimate “where” and “when” - although not “how frequently” - landslide have occurred by featuring the multitemporal information of the trigger. In our findings, the simulations are quite similar to the fitted models; and the nine combinations we analyse produce excellent performance. This result confirms the assumption that “the past is the key to the future”, as we show that the relative contribution of each variable and their interactions in each probabilistic model remains practically the same across temporal replicates. This information is not trivial because it supports the routines implemented in global near-real-time applications.

Temporal validation↗

Model Adaptation for Prognostics in a Particle Filtering Framework

One of the key motivating factors for using particle filters for prognostics is the ability to include model parameters as part of the state vector to be estimated. This performs model adaptation in conjunction with state tracking, and thus, produces a tuned model that can used for long term predictions. This feature of particle filters works in most part due to the fact that they are not subject to the "curse of dimensionality", i.e. the exponential growth of computational complexity with state dimension. However, in practice, this property holds for "well-designed" particle filters only as dimensionality increases. This paper explores the notion of wellness of design in the context of predicting remaining useful life for individual discharge cycles of Li-ion batteries. Prognostic metrics are used to analyze the tradeoff between different model designs and prediction performance. Results demonstrate how sensitivity analysis may be used to arrive at a well-designed prognostic model that can take advantage of the model adaptation properties of a particle filter.

Saha, Bhaskar↗

NASA EOSDIS Data Usage Metrics- Insight and Assessment

NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project collects Earth science data usage metrics on a daily basis through the ESDIS Metrics System (EMS). This includes metrics on distribution of data products, users, data volumes, and number of files, which are key parameters in evaluating system-level performance of any of the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) encompassed by NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Data and Information System (EOSDIS). EOSDIS data usage metrics illustrate the benefits of making NASA data openly available to the public and show a rapid growth in data distribution to a worldwide user community. In fact, each year since 2014 the EOSDIS has distributed over one billion data files of products from EOS satellite, airborne, and in situ observations. An assessment of the long-term trends of data usage metrics and user characterization provides insights into data usability.This study will focus on describing the EMS as a metrics collection tool and will provide a comprehensive analysis of EOSDIS data usage metrics over the last 10 years. This study will also characterize the product distribution metrics by various tools and services, such as Giovanni, the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP), and subsets, to address how these tools/services have extended the usage of data in the EOSDIS collection. Data usage patterns based on discipline and study area will further assist in understanding how EOSDIS data user needs have evolved over time. Results from this study will provide useful information for the DAACs that can help them improve the functionality of their tools and services as well as more efficiently allocate the resources necessary for enhanced access and availability of their data products. Knowledge of these metrics may also benefit user discovery of data in the EOSDIS collection, promote research collaboration, and stimulate new ideas from work and research conducted using specific datasets and data collections.

Kafle, Durga N.↗

Protecting Venus from Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors

It is well accepted that the dense, thick atmosphere of Venus prevents most small cosmic bodies from reaching the surface and forming craters. We have examined this atmospheric intervention in detail, incorporating the lessons learned from the extensive modeling of impactor deceleration and flattening motivated by the SL-9 impacts with Jupiter. We employ a "pancake" model, which best matches detailed code simulations of atmospheric energy deposition, and Schmidt-Holsapple crater scaling modified for complex (flattened) craters. We adopt the distributions of Venus-crossing asteroids and comets determined by E.M. Shoemaker and co-workers, as well as generalizations of these distributions. Our nominal simulation of the venusian crater record is shown below, calibrated to the total number of venusian craters (940). As nearly all craters on Venus are well-preserved and relatively uniformly distributed, such simulations constrain the age of the surface. The fit is reasonable, with a nominal crater retention age of approx. 700 Ma. The fit at the large-crater end is improved if the number of large asteroids is increased, which Shoemaker argues is in fact more representative of the long-term (over several 100 Ma) average, and if Halley-family comets are included. The ages we obtain under a variety of modeling choices that produce good fits (including using Shoemaker's preferred crater scaling) are approx. 700-900 Ma, substantially greater than the most widely cited age estimate in the literature (-300 Ma). The key difference is that we find very large depletions in the production of 20-30-km craters (see figure) compared with previous estimates, the size range at which atmospheric effects are often calibrated or assumed nearly negligible. As venusian global resurfacing recedes deeper into history, the likelihood that Venus is resting between bouts of activity diminishes. Venus, like Mars, may instead be dying or dead.

McKinnon, William B.↗

An in silico assessment of gene function and organization of the phenylpropanoid pathway metabolic networks in Arabidopsis thaliana and limitations thereof

The Arabidopsis genome sequencing in 2000 gave to science the first blueprint of a vascular plant. Its successful completion also prompted the US National Science Foundation to launch the Arabidopsis 2010 initiative, the goal of which is to identify the function of each gene by 2010. In this study, an exhaustive analysis of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) databases, together with all currently compiled EST sequence data, was carried out in order to determine to what extent the various metabolic networks from phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL) to the monolignols were organized and/or could be predicted. In these databases, there are some 65 genes which have been annotated as encoding putative enzymatic steps in monolignol biosynthesis, although many of them have only very low homology to monolignol pathway genes of known function in other plant systems. Our detailed analysis revealed that presently only 13 genes (two PALs, a cinnamate-4-hydroxylase, a p-coumarate-3-hydroxylase, a ferulate-5-hydroxylase, three 4-coumarate-CoA ligases, a cinnamic acid O-methyl transferase, two cinnamoyl-CoA reductases) and two cinnamyl alcohol dehydrogenases can be classified as having a bona fide (definitive) function; the remaining 52 genes currently have undetermined physiological roles. The EST database entries for this particular set of genes also provided little new insight into how the monolignol pathway was organized in the different tissues and organs, this being perhaps a consequence of both limitations in how tissue samples were collected and in the incomplete nature of the EST collections. This analysis thus underscores the fact that even with genomic sequencing, presumed to provide the entire suite of putative genes in the monolignol-forming pathway, a very large effort needs to be conducted to establish actual catalytic roles (including enzyme versatility), as well as the physiological function(s) for each member of the (multi)gene families present and the metabolic networks that are operative. Additionally, one key to identifying physiological functions for many of these (and other) unknown genes, and their corresponding metabolic networks, awaits the development of technologies to comprehensively study molecular processes at the single cell level in particular tissues and organs, in order to establish the actual metabolic context.

NASA Program Fundamental Space Biology↗

Changes in Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice as a Microcosm of Global Climate Change

Polar sea ice is a key element of the climate system and has now been monitored through satellite observations for over three and a half decades. The satellite observations reveal considerable information about polar ice and its changes since the late 1970s, including a prominent downward trend in Arctic sea ice coverage and a much lesser upward trend in Antarctic sea ice coverage, illustrative of the important fact that climate change entails spatial contrasts. The decreasing ice coverage in the Arctic corresponds well with contemporaneous Arctic warming and exhibits particularly large decreases in the summers of 2007 and 2012, influenced by both preconditioning and atmospheric conditions. The increasing ice coverage in the Antarctic is not as readily explained, but spatial differences in the Antarctic trends suggest a possible connection with atmospheric circulation changes that have perhaps been influenced by the Antarctic ozone hole. The changes in the polar ice covers and the issues surrounding those changes have many commonalities with broader climate changes and their surrounding issues, allowing the sea ice changes to be viewed in some important ways as a microcosm of global climate change.

Arctic↗

Anionic Pt in Silicate Melts at Low Oxygen Fugacity: Speciation, Partitioning and Implications for Core Formation Processes on Asteroids

Most siderophile element concentrations in planetary mantles can be explained by metal/ silicate equilibration at high temperature and pressure during core formation. Highly siderophile elements (HSE = Au, Re, and the Pt-group elements), however, usually have higher mantle abundances than predicted by partitioning models, suggesting that their concentrations have been set by late accretion of material that did not equilibrate with the core. The partitioning of HSE at the low oxygen fugacities relevant for core formation is however poorly constrained due to the lack of sufficient experimental constraints to describe the variations of partitioning with key variables like temperature, pressure, and oxygen fugacity. To better understand the relative roles of metal/silicate partitioning and late accretion, we performed a self-consistent set of experiments that parameterizes the influence of oxygen fugacity, temperature and melt composition on the partitioning of Pt, one of the HSE, between metal and silicate melts. The major outcome of this project is the fact that Pt dissolves in an anionic form in silicate melts, causing a dependence of partitioning on oxygen fugacity opposite to that reported in previous studies.

Medard, E.↗

Data Science and the Knowledge Discovery Adventure

This talk will cover the important steps involved in the data science and knowledge discovery process: • Initial fact gathering (interview domain experts, review reports, articles, state-of-the-art) • Identify the problem (prediction, classification, statistical analysis, etc.) • Survey supporting data sources • Understand the data (numerical, categorical, text, sampling rate, data quality issues, etc.) • Selecting relevant features and sources • Acquire the data (set up agreements with the data stewards, APIs to download, etc.) • Merge data sources (temporal, spatial, common key, other ontologies...) • Feature Engineering (non linear domain knowledge or physics-based relationships) • Build data processing pipeline (may need to tap into data stream, develop parallel processing algorithm, federated learning etc.) • Build model and test (tune hyper-parameters, cross validation.) • Analyze/Validate results (do the results make sense. Does it answer the original question). • Deploy/Publish (Monitor and assess benefits)

Data science↗

Ground-based simulation of LEO environment: Investigations of a select LDEF material: FEP Teflon (trademark)

The Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) has produced a wealth of data on materials degradation in the low earth orbit (LEO) space environment and has conclusively shown that surface chemistry (as opposed to surface physics-sputtering) is the key to understanding and predicting the degradation of materials in the LEO environment. It is also clear that materials degradation and spacecraft contamination are closely linked and that the fundamental mechanisms responsible for this linking are in general not well understood especially in the area of synergistic effects. The study of the fundamental mechanisms underlying materials degradation in LEO is hampered by the fact that the degradation process itself is not observed during the actual exposure to the environment. Rather the aftermath of the degradation process is studied, i.e., the material that remains after exposure is observed and mechanisms are proposed to explain the observed results. The EOIM-3 flight experiment is an attempt to bring sophisticated diagnostic equipment into the space environment and monitor the degradation process in real time through the use of mass spectrometry. More experiments of this nature which would include surface sensitive diagnostics (Auger and photoelectron spectroscopes) are needed to truly unravel the basic chemical mechanisms involved in the materials degradation process. Since these in-space capabilities will most likely not be available in the near future, ground-based LEO simulation facilities employing sophisticated diagnostics are needed to further advance the basic understanding of the materials degradation mechanisms. The LEO simulation facility developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory has been used to investigate the atomic oxygen/vacuum ultraviolet (AO/VUV) enhanced degradation of FEP Teflon. The results show that photo-ejection of polymer fragments occur at elevated temperature (200 C), that VUV synergistic rare gas sputtering of polymer fragments occur even at 25 C, and that combined OA/VUV interaction produces a wide variety of gas phase reaction products.

Cross, Jon B.↗

Model studies of the beam-filling error for rain-rate retrieval with microwave radiometers

Low-frequency (less than 20 GHz) single-channel microwave retrievals of rain rate encounter the problem of beam-filling error. This error stems from the fact that the relationship between microwave brightness temperature and rain rate is nonlinear, coupled with the fact that the field of view is large or comparable to important scales of variability of the rain field. This means that one may not simply insert the area average of the brightness temperature into the formula for rain rate without incurring both bias and random error. The statistical heterogeneity of the rain-rate field in the footprint of the instrument is key to determining the nature of these errors. This paper makes use of a series of random rain-rate fields to study the size of the bias and random error associated with beam filling. A number of examples are analyzed in detail: the binomially distributed field, the gamma, the Gaussian, the mixed gamma, the lognormal, and the mixed lognormal ('mixed' here means there is a finite probability of no rain rate at a point of space-time). Of particular interest are the applicability of a simple error formula due to Chiu and collaborators and a formula that might hold in the large field of view limit. It is found that the simple formula holds for Gaussian rain-rate fields but begins to fail for highly skewed fields such as the mixed lognormal. While not conclusively demonstrated here, it is suggested that the notionof climatologically adjusting the retrievals to remove the beam-filling bias is a reasonable proposition.

Ha, Eunho↗

An Exobiological Strategy for Mars Exploration

The idea of searching for evidence of life on Mars may strike some as far-fetched, even fanciful. But there is a compelling logic to such a quest, as well as an equally compelling excitement. Early environments were apparently sufficiently similar on Mars and Earth, and life arose so rapidly on Earth once conditions became clement, that emergence of life on both planets at that time is scarcely less plausible than emergence on only one. Furthermore, although a fossil on Mars might seem at first like a proverbial needle in a haystack, experience on Earth tell us that if we know where to look, finding evidence of ancient life is not particularly difficult, especially when one considers that such evidence can be relatively widely disseminated in the form of chemical or isotopic signatures. The key is to recognize that the search for ancient life on Mars will involve a logically designed sequence of missions, each of which will focus on defining ever more closely where and how biosignatures may be found. Although one can never rule out a chance discovery, this quest should not be approached as one that will yield to a single, expeditious mission. (In fact, the proposed strategy lends itself particularly well to the use of a series of relatively small, inexpensive spacecraft, rather than a single flagship-class mission). The search for life on Mars will take time and commitment, but the reward could be a discovery of inestimable importance, not just to science, but to humanity as a whole.

Source record↗

Microwave Observations of Precipitation and the Atmosphere

This research effort had three elements devoted to improving satellite-derived passive microwave retrievals of precipitation rate: morphological rain-rate retrievals, warm rain retrievals, and extension of a study of geostationary satellite options. The morphological precipitation-rate retrieval method uses for the first time the morphological character of the observed storm microwave spectra. The basic concept involves: 1) retrieval of point rainfall rates using current algorithms, 2) using spatial feature vectors of the observations over segmented multi-pixel storms to estimate the integrated rainfall rate for that storm (cu m/s), and 3) normalization of the point rain-rate retrievals to ensure consistency with the storm-wide retrieval. This work is ongoing, but two key steps have been completed: development of a segmentation algorithm for defining spatial regions corresponding to single storms for purposes of estimation, and reduction of some of the data from NAST-M that will be used to support this research going forward. The warm rain retrieval method involved extension of Aquai/AIRS/AMSU/HSB algorithmic work on cloud water retrievals. The central concept involves the fact that passive microwave cloud water retrievals over approx. 0.4 mm are very likely associated with precipitation. Since glaciated precipitation is generally detected quite successfully using scattering signatures evident in the surface-blind 54- and 183-GHz bands, this new method complements the first by permitting precipitation retrievals of non-glaciated events. The method is most successful over ocean, but has detected non-glaciated convective cells over land, perhaps in their early formative stages. This work will require additional exploration and validation prior to publication. Passive microwave instrument configurations for use in geostationary orbit were studied. They employ parabolic reflectors between 2 and 4 meters in diameter, and frequencies up to approx.430 GHz; this corresponds to nadir spot diameters as small as 10 km.

Staelin, David H.↗

RXTE All-Sky Slew Survey. Catalog of X-Ray Sources at B Greater Than 10 deg

We report results of a serendipitous hard X-ray (3-20 keV), nearly all-sky (absolute value of b greater than l0 deg.) survey based on RXTE/PCA observations performed during satellite reorientations in 1996-2002. The survey is 80% (90%) complete to a 4(sigma) limiting flux of approx. = 1.8 (2.5) x 10(exp -l1) erg/s sq cm in the 3-20 keV band. The achieved sensitivity in the 3-8 keV and 8-20 keV subbands is similar to and an order of magnitude higher than that of the previously record HEAO-1 A1 and HEAO-1 A4 all-sky surveys, respectively. A combined 7 x 10(exp 3) sq. deg area of the sky is sampled to flux levels below l0(exp -11) erg/ s sq cm (3-20 keV). In total 294 sources are detected and localized to better than 1 deg. 236 (80%) of these can be confidently associated with a known astrophysical object; another 22 likely result from the superposition of 2 or 3 closely located known sources. 35 detected sources remain unidentified, although for 12 of these we report a likely soft X-ray counterpart from the ROSAT all-sky survey bright source catalog. Of the reliably identified sources, 63 have local origin (Milky Way, LMC or SMC), 64 are clusters of galaxies and 100 are active galactic nuclei (AGN). The fact that the unidentified X-ray sources have hard spectra suggests that the majority of them are AGN, including highly obscured ones (N(sub H) greater than l0(exp 23)/sq cm). For the first time we present a log N-log S diagram for extragalactic sources above 4 x l0(exp -12) erg/ s sq cm at 8-20 keV. Key words. cosmo1ogy:observations - diffuse radiation - X-rays general

Revnivtsev, M.↗

The asteroid rendezvous spacecraft. An adaptation study of TIROS/DMSP technology

The feasibility of using the TIROS/DMSP Earth orbiting meteorological satellite in application to a near Earth asteroid rendezvous mission. System and subsystems analysis was carried out to develop a configuration of the spacecraft suitable for this mission. Mission analysis studies were also done and maneuver/rendezvous scenarios developed for baseline missions to both Anteros and Eros. The fact that the Asteroid mission is the most complex of the Pioneer class missions currently under consideration notwithstanding, the basic conclusion very strongly supports the suitability of the basic TIROS bus for this mission in all systems and subsystems areas, including science accommodation. Further, the modifications which are required due to the unique mission are very low risk and can be accomplished readily. The key issue is that in virtually every key subsystem, the demands of the Asteroid mission are a subset of the basic meteorological satellite mission. This allows a relatively simple reconfiguration to be accomplished without a major system redesign.

Source record↗