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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 127 records · Page 7

Rapid Contingency Simulation Modeling of the NASA Crew Launch Vehicle

The NASA Crew Launch Vehicle is a two-stage orbital launcher designed to meet NASA's current as well as future needs for human space flight. In order to free the designers to explore more possibilities during the design phase, a need exists for the ability to quickly perform simulation on both the baseline vehicle as well as the vehicle after proposed changes due to mission planning, vehicle configuration and avionics changes, proposed new guidance and control algorithms, and any other contingencies the designers may wish to consider. Further, after the vehicle is designed and built, the need will remain for such analysis in the event of future mission planning. An easily reconfigurable, modular, nonlinear six-degree-of-freedom simulation matching NASA Marshall's in-house high-fidelity simulator is created with the ability to quickly perform simulation and analysis of the Crew Launch Vehicle throughout the entire launch profile. Simulation results are presented and discussed, and an example comparison fly-off between two candidate controllers is presented.

Betts, Kevin M.↗

ISS Contingency Attitude Control Recovery Method for Loss of Automatic Thruster Control

In this paper, the attitude control issues associated with International Space Station (ISS) loss of automatic thruster control capability are discussed and methods for attitude control recovery are presented. This scenario was experienced recently during Shuttle mission STS-117 and ISS Stage 13A in June 2007 when the Russian GN&C computers, which command the ISS thrusters, failed. Without automatic propulsive attitude control, the ISS would not be able to regain attitude control after the Orbiter undocked. The core issues associated with recovering long-term attitude control using CMGs are described as well as the systems engineering analysis to identify recovery options. It is shown that the recovery method can be separated into a procedure for rate damping to a safe harbor gravity gradient stable orientation and a capability to maneuver the vehicle to the necessary initial conditions for long term attitude hold. A manual control option using Soyuz and Progress vehicle thrusters is investigated for rate damping and maneuvers. The issues with implementing such an option are presented and the key issue of closed-loop stability is addressed. A new non-propulsive alternative to thruster control, Zero Propellant Maneuver (ZPM) attitude control method is introduced and its rate damping and maneuver performance evaluated. It is shown that ZPM can meet the tight attitude and rate error tolerances needed for long term attitude control. A combination of manual thruster rate damping to a safe harbor attitude followed by a ZPM to Stage long term attitude control orientation was selected by the Anomaly Resolution Team as the alternate attitude control method for such a contingency.

Bedrossian, Nazareth↗

Wautersia: The Contingency Water Container Bacterial Contamination Investigation

The Orbiter delivers water to the International Space Station (ISS) in Contingency Water Containers (CWCs) on each flight to the ISS. These CWCs are routinely sampled during each mission to verify the quality of the delivered water. Of the 5 samples returned on STS118/ 13A.1 in August 2007, two exhibited microbial growth exceeding potable water acceptability limits and historical data by orders of magnitude . The microbe was identified as Wautersia species and an investigation was launched to find the source of the contamination. Since then, samples collected on subsequent flights indicated additional CWCs had the same bacteria, as well as several on-orbit systems. An investigation was launched to try to find and address the source of the bacterial contamination. This paper will discuss how Wautersia was found, what Wautersia is, the investigation, and resolution.

Shkedi, Brienne↗

Orion Optical Navigation for Loss of Communication Lunar Return Contingencies

The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) will replace the Space Shuttle and serve as the next-generation spaceship to carry humans back to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo program. For nominal lunar mission operations, the Mission Control Navigation team will utilize radiometric measurements to determine the position and velocity of Orion and uplink state information to support Lunar return. However, in the loss of communications contingency return scenario, Orion must safely return the crew to the Earth's surface. The navigation design solution for this loss of communications scenario is optical navigation consisting of lunar landmark tracking in low lunar orbit and star- horizon angular measurements coupled with apparent planetary diameter for Earth return trajectories. This paper describes the optical measurement errors and the navigation filter that will process those measurements to support navigation for safe crew return.

Getchius, Joel↗

NASA Headquarters Space Operations Center: Providing Situational Awareness for Spaceflight Contingency Response

This paper discusses the NASA Headquarters mishap response process for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs, and how the process has evolved based on lessons learned from the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents. It also describes the NASA Headquarters Space Operations Center (SOC) and its special role in facilitating senior management's overall situational awareness of critical spaceflight operations, before, during, and after a mishap, to ensure a timely and effective contingency response.

Maxwell, Theresa G.↗

Development of a Contingency Gas Analyzer for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle

NASA's experience with electrochemical sensors in a hand-held toxic gas monitor serves as a basis for the development of a fixed on-board instrument, the Contingency Gas Analyzer (CGA), for monitoring selected toxic combustion products as well as oxygen and carbon dioxide on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). Oxygen and carbon dioxide are major components of the cabin environment and accurate measurement of these compounds is critical to maintaining a safe working environment for the crew. Fire or thermal degradation events may produce harmful levels of toxic products, including carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), and hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the environment. These three components, besides being toxic in their own right, can serve as surrogates for a panoply of hazardous combustion products. On orbit monitoring of these surrogates provides for crew health and safety by indicating the presence of toxic combustion products in the environment before, during and after combustion or thermal degradation events. Issues identified in previous NASA experiences mandate hardening the instrument and components to endure the mechanical and operational stresses of the CEV environment while maintaining high analytical fidelity. Specific functional challenges involve protecting the sensors from various anticipated events- such as rapid pressure changes, low cabin pressures, and extreme vibration/shock exposures- and extending the sensor lifetime and calibration periods far beyond the current state of the art to avoid the need for on-orbit calibration. This paper focuses on lessons learned from the earlier NASA hardware, current testing results, and engineering solutions to the identified problems. Of particular focus will be the means for protecting the sensors, addressing well known cross-sensitivity issues and the efficacy of a novel self monitoring mechanism for extending sensor calibration periods.

Niu, Bill↗

Experiences with Extra-Vehicular Activities in Response to Critical ISS Contingencies

Initial "Big 14" work was put to the test for the first time in 2010. Deficiencies were found in some of the planning and approaches to that work; Failure Response Assessment Team created in 2010 to address deficiencies -Identify and perform engineering analysis in operations products prior to failure; incorporate results into operations products -Identify actions for protecting ISS against a Next Worse Failure after the first failure occurs -Better document not only EVA products but also planning products, assumptions, and open actions; Pre-failure investments against critical failures best postures ISS for swift response and recovery -A type of insurance policy -Has proven effective in a number of contingency EVA cases since 2010. Planning for MBSU R&R in 2012, Second PM R&R in 2013, EXT MDM R&R in 2014; Current FRAT schedule projects completion of all analysis in 2018

Van Cise, Edward A.↗

Passive, Collapsible Contingency Urinal for Human Space Flight

Fluid transport systems for spacecraft face acute challenges because of the persistently unfamiliar and unforgiving low-gravity environment. IRPI, LLC, has developed a contingency wastewater collection and processing device that provides passive liquid collation, containment, bubble separation, and droplet coalescence functions. The lightweight, low-volume, low-cost, and potentially disposable device may be used for subsequent sampling, metering, storage, disposal, and/or reuse. The approach includes a fractal wetting design that incorporates smart capillary fluidics. This work could have a broad impact on capillary-based fluid management on spacecraft and on Earth.

Jenson, Ryan↗

Automated Contingency Management for Water Recycling System

To enable effective management, planning, and operations for future missions that involve a crewed space habitat, operational support must be migrated from Earth to the habitat. Intelligent System Health Management technologies (ISHM) promise to enable the future space habitats to increase the safety and mission success while minimizing operational risks. In this paper, Water Recycling System (WRS) deployed at NASA Ames Research Center's Sustainability Base is used for verification and validation of the proposed solution. Our work includes the development of the WRS simulation model based on its dynamic physical characteristics and the design of Automatic Contingency Management (ACM) framework that integrates fault diagnosis and optimization. In WRS modeling, a nominal model with fault injectors is developed. Fault detection and isolation techniques are then developed for isolating causes and identifying the severity of the faults. Dynamic Programming (DP) based fault mitigation strategies are designed to accommodate the faults in the system. A series of simulations are presented with different fault modes and the results indicate that the proposed ACM system can alleviate the fault in the WRS optimally regarding energy consumption and effects of the fault.

Systems Health Management↗

Contingency Trajectory Design for a Lunar Orbit Insertion Maneuver Failure by the LADEE Spacecraft

This paper presents results from a contingency trajectory analysis performed for the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission in the event of a missed lunar-orbit insertion (LOI) maneuver by the LADEE spacecraft. The effects of varying solar perturbations in the vicinity of the weak stability boundary (WSB) in the Sun-Earth system on the trajectory design are analyzed and discussed. It is shown that geocentric recovery trajectory options existed for the LADEE spacecraft, depending on the spacecrafts recovery time to perform an Earth escape-prevention maneuver after the hypothetical LOI maneuver failure and subsequent path traveled through the Sun-Earth WSB. If Earth-escape occurred, a heliocentric recovery option existed, but with reduced science capability for the spacecraft in an eccentric, not circular near-equatorial retrograde lunar orbit.

Genova, Anthony L.↗

Contingency Trajectory Design for a Lunar Orbit Insertion Maneuver Failure by the LADEE Spacecraft

A contingency trajectory analysis was performed for NASA Ames Research Center’s (ARC’s) Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in case of a missed lunar orbit insertion (LOI) maneuver. Recovery trajectory options are shown to exist for all LADEE launch opportunities throughout a one year period. Recovery ΔV costs primarily depended on the spacecraft’s apogee location on or near the Sun-Earth weak stability boundary (WSB) and the time needed by the spacecraft to recover (e.g. to “wake up” from “safe” mode) to perform an escape prevention maneuver after the missed LOI.

Genova, A. L.↗

Dynamic Vehicle Assessment for Intelligent Contingency Management for Urban Air Mobility Vehicles

New algorithms will be required to ensure passenger and bystander safety during the expected era of autonomous urban air mobility (UAM) aircraft. This paper examines an approach for assessing the vehicle capability to fly itself and to complete a mission safely. The concepts combine elements of system identification, adaptive control, flight dynamics, envelope predictions, and handling qualities, as well as human pilot intuition. The approach is applied to a simulation of a generic distributed electric propulsion urban air mobility-type aircraft, which was developed under the NASA Transformational Tools and Technologies (TTT) project, Autonomous Systems / Intelligent Contingency Management subproject.

flight envelope prediction↗

Assuring Intelligent Systems: Contingency Management for UAS

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) collaborate with humans to operate in diverse, safety-critical applications. However, assurance technologies need to be integrated into the design process in order to guarantee safe behavior, thereby enabling UAS operations in the National Airspace System (NAS). In this paper, formal methods are integrated with learning-enabled systems representations. The generation and representation of knowledge are captured via monadic second-order logic rules in the cognitive architecture Soar. These rules are translated into timed automata, and a proof of correctness for the translation is provided so that safety and liveness properties can be checked in the formal verification environment Uppaal. This approach is agnostic to the learning mechanism used to generate the learned rules (e.g., chunking, etc.). An example of a fault-tolerant, learning-enabled UAS deciding which of four contingency procedures to execute under a lost link scenario while overflying an urban area is used to illustrate the approach.

Intelligent Systems↗

Benchmark Problem Development for Testing Maturity of Intelligent Contingency Management Tools

Increasingly autonomous Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) vehicles will be required to handle diverse conditions with limited human intervention. Intelligent contingency management (iCM) approaches are under development to address how automated agents can handle unforeseen, unplanned, and unanticipated events. Benchmark scenario is needed to test the maturity of the developed iCM tools and techniques.

Jon Holbrook↗

Event-Driven Modeling and Execution of Robotic Activities and Contingencies in the Europa Lander Mission Concept Using BPMN

TRACE (Traceable Robotic Activity Composer and Executive) is a tool designed to address the model-ing, verification, and execution of planned and con-tingent activities during robotic space missions. These activities can be modeled (i.e., planned) graph-ically in TRACE using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) language. This standardized language is used to model a sequence of robotic ac-tivities tied together by logical constructs, events, and time. TRACE includes verification tools to en-sure feasibility before mission models are executed by TRACE’s executive, which is integrated into the autonomy subsystem via a connector. In this paper, we describe TRACE in detail as it would apply to a conceptual Europa Lander surface mission with planned excavation and sample collection activities, as well as, contingency activities when execution is off-nominal—all highlighting our novel use of BPMN as a lingua franca for the pipeline from mis-sion planning to autonomous execution.

Lim, Grace↗

JWST REAL-TIME MID-COURSE CORRECTION MANEUVER MONITORING CONTINGENCY PREPARATION

The NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission successfully launched on Dec 25, 2021, at 12:20 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). During the 30-day transfer to the second Sun-Earth-Moon (SEM) libration point (L2), JWST executed three mid-course correction (MCC) maneuvers to insert into a quasi-halo orbit about L2. This paper covers the design and modeling for these three maneuvers with a focus on the timeline around the execution of each MCC maneuver. It will summarize the actual on-board events as well as the contingency preparation done for maneuver planning, monitoring, and final post-burn reconstruction of all three MCC maneuvers.

Wayne Yu↗

JWST Real-Time Mid-Course Correction Maneuver Monitoring Contingency Preparation

The NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission successfully launched on Dec 25, 2021, at 12:20 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). During the 30-day transfer to the second Sun-Earth-Moon (SEM) libration point (L2), JWST executed three mid-course correction (MCC) maneuvers to insert into a quasi-halo orbit about L2. This paper covers the design and modeling for these three maneuvers with a focus on the timeline around the execution of each MCC maneuver. It will summarize the actual on-board events as well as the contingency preparation done for maneuver planning, monitoring, and final post-burn reconstruction of all three MCC maneuvers.

Toni Santacroce↗