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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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152 records · Page 9
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2002

Mosad and Stream Vision For A Telerobotic, Flying Camera System

Two full custom camera systems using the Multiplexed OverSample Analog to Digital (MOSAD) conversion technology for visible light sensing were built and demonstrated. They include a photo gate sensor and a photo diode sensor. The system includes the camera assembly, driver interface assembly, a frame stabler board with integrated decimeter and Windows 2000 compatible software for real time image display. An array size of 320X240 with 16 micron pixel pitch was developed for compatibility with 0.3 inch CCTV optics. With 1.2 micron technology, a 73% fill factor was achieved. Noise measurements indicated 9 to 11 bits operating with 13.7 bits best case. Power measured under 10 milliwatts at 400 samples per second. Nonuniformity variation was below noise floor. Pictures were taken with different cameras during the characterization study to demonstrate the operable range. The successful conclusion of this program demonstrates the utility of the MOSAD for NASA missions, providing superior performance over CMOS and lower cost and power consumption over CCD. The MOSAD approach also provides a path to radiation hardening for space based applications.

Mandl, William↗
NASA NTRS2008

NASA Tech Briefs, September 2008

Topics covered include: Nanotip Carpets as Antireflection Surfaces; Nano-Engineered Catalysts for Direct Methanol Fuel Cells; Capillography of Mats of Nanofibers; Directed Growth of Carbon Nanotubes Across Gaps; High-Voltage, Asymmetric-Waveform Generator; Magic-T Junction Using Microstrip/Slotline Transitions; On-Wafer Measurement of a Silicon-Based CMOS VCO at 324 GHz; Group-III Nitride Field Emitters; HEMT Amplifiers and Equipment for their On-Wafer Testing; Thermal Spray Formation of Polymer Coatings; Improved Gas Filling and Sealing of an HC-PCF; Making More-Complex Molecules Using Superthermal Atom/Molecule Collisions; Nematic Cells for Digital Light Deflection; Improved Silica Aerogel Composite Materials; Microgravity, Mesh-Crawling Legged Robots; Advanced Active-Magnetic-Bearing Thrust- Measurement System; Thermally Actuated Hydraulic Pumps; A New, Highly Improved Two-Cycle Engine; Flexible Structural-Health-Monitoring Sheets; Alignment Pins for Assembling and Disassembling Structures; Purifying Nucleic Acids from Samples of Extremely Low Biomass; Adjustable-Viewing-Angle Endoscopic Tool for Skull Base and Brain Surgery; UV-Resistant Non-Spore-Forming Bacteria From Spacecraft-Assembly Facilities; Hard-X-Ray/Soft-Gamma-Ray Imaging Sensor Assembly for Astronomy; Simplified Modeling of Oxidation of Hydrocarbons; Near-Field Spectroscopy with Nanoparticles Deposited by AFM; Light Collimator and Monitor for a Spectroradiometer; Hyperspectral Fluorescence and Reflectance Imaging Instrument; Improving the Optical Quality Factor of the WGM Resonator; Ultra-Stable Beacon Source for Laboratory Testing of Optical Tracking; Transmissive Diffractive Optical Element Solar Concentrators; Delaying Trains of Short Light Pulses in WGM Resonators; Toward Better Modeling of Supercritical Turbulent Mixing; JPEG 2000 Encoding with Perceptual Distortion Control; Intelligent Integrated Health Management for a System of Systems; Delay Banking for Managing Air Traffic; and Spline-Based Smoothing of Airfoil Curvatures.

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NASA NTRS2004

NASA Tech Briefs, July 2004

Topics: Optoelectronic Sensor System for Guidance in Docking; Hybrid Piezoelectric/Fiber-Optic Sensor Sheets; Multisensor Arrays for Greater Reliability and Accuracy; Integrated-Optic Oxygen Sensors; Ka-Band Autonomous Formation Flying Sensor; CMOS VLSI Active-Pixel Sensor for Tracking; Lightweight, Self-Deploying Foam Antenna Structures; Electrically Small Microstrip Quarter-Wave Monopole Antennas; A 2-to-28-MHz Phase-Locked Loop; Portable Electromyograph; Open-Source Software for Modeling of Nanoelectronic Devices; Software for Generating Strip Maps from SAR Data; Calibration Software for use with Jurassicprok; Software for Probabilistic Risk Reduction; Software Processes SAR Motion-Measurement Data; Improved Method of Purifying Carbon Nanotubes; Patterned Growth of Carbon Nanotubes or Nanofibers; Lightweight, Rack-Mountable Composite Cold Plate/Shelves; SiC-Based Miniature High-Temperature Cantilever Anemometer; Inlet Housing for a Partial-Admission Turbine; Lightweight Thermoformed Structural Components and Optics; Growing High-Quality InAs Quantum Dots for Infrared Lasers; Selected Papers on Protoplanetary Disks; Module for Oxygenating Water without Generating Bubbles; Coastal Research Imaging Spectrometer; Rapid Switching and Modulation by use of Coupled VCSELs; Laser-Induced-Fluorescence Photogrammetry and Videogrammetry; Laboratory Apparatus Generates Dual-Species Cold Atomic Beam; Laser Ablation of Materials for Propulsion of Spacecraft; Small Active Radiation Monitor; Hybrid Image-Plane/Stereo Manipulation; Partitioning a Gridded Rectangle into Smaller Rectangles; Digital Radar-Signal Processors Implemented in FPGAs; Part 1 of a Computational Study of a Drop-Laden Mixing Layer; and Some Improvements in Signal-Conditioning Circuits.

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DOE OSTI2025

Gate-Tunable Short-Wave Infrared Polycrystalline GeSn Phototransistors on Noncrystalline Substrates

GeSn is a group-IV alloy with immense potential to advance microelectronics technology due to its intrinsic compatibility with existing Si CMOS processes. With a sufficiently high Sn composition, GeSn is classified as a direct bandgap semiconductor. Polycrystalline GeSn holds several additional advantages, including its significantly lower synthesis cost compared to its epitaxial counterpart, as well as the versatility to grow these films on a variety of substrates. Here, in this work, we present a polycrystalline thin-film GeSn phototransistor on a fused silica substrate with a Sn composition of ~10%, showing a photoresponse in the short-wave infrared wavelength range, critical for emerging sensing applications. This device shows a gate-tunable response, with responsivities approaching up to 1.7 mA/W with only a 30 nm-thick GeSn layer. Furthermore, phototransistors offer additional adaptability through gating, which allows for the reduction of dark current. This not only enhances the signal-to-noise ratio but also offers more flexible integration with various image sensor readout implementations using different substrates. The specific detectivity of this phototransistor is within an order of magnitude of those of previously reported GeSn photodetectors grown by molecular beam epitaxy and chemical vapor deposition, even though the absorber is 3 to 20× thinner while the electrode spacing for photocarrier transport is approximately 15× longer than the carrier diffusion length in this work, showing great potential benefits of extending similar device structures to epitaxial GeSn layers. As these GeSn phototransistors utilize a noncrystalline substrate, our work establishes a fundamentally more versatile path toward monolithically integrated GeSn-based photodetectors for next-generation multimodal sensors.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
NASA NTRS2018

Observing Ice Sublimation From Water-Doped Lunar Simulant at Cryogenic Temperatures

NASA's Resource Prospector (RP) mission is intended to characterize the three-dimensional nature of volatiles in lunar polar and permanently shadowed regions. The Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS) observes while a drill penetrates to a maximum depth of 1 m. Any 10 cm increment of soil identified as containing water ice can be delivered to a heating crucible with the evolved gas delivered to a gas chromatograph / mass spectrometer. NIRVSS consists of two components; a spectrometer box (SB) and bracket assembly (BA), connected by two fiber optic cables. The SB contains separate short- and long-wavelength spectrometers, SW and LW respectively, that collectively span the 1600-3400 nm range. The BA contains an IR emitter (lamp), drill observation camera (DOC, 2048 x 2048 CMOS detector), 8 different wavelength LEDs, and a longwave calibration sensor (LCS) measuring the surface emissivity at four IR wavelengths. Tests of various RP sub-systems have been under-taken in a large cryo-vacuum chamber at Glenn Re-search Center. The chamber accommodates a tube (1.2 m high x 25.4 cm diameter) filled with lunar simulant, NU-LHT-3M, prepared with known abundances of water. Thermocouples are embedded at different depths, and also across the surface of the soil tube. In the chamber the tube is cooled with LN2 as the pressure is reduced to approx. 5-6x10(exp -6) Torr. For the May 2016 tests two soil tubes were prepared with initially 2.5 Wt.% water. The shroud surrounding the soil tube was held at different temperatures for each tube to simulate a warm and cold lunar environment. Table 1 provides a summary of experimental conditions and Figure 1 shows the nominal view of the NIRVSS components, the drill foot, and the top of the soil tube. Once the average soil temperature reached approx. 178 K, drilling commenced. During drilling activities NIRVSS was alternating between obtaining spectra and obtaining images. Here we discuss NIRVSS spectral data obtained during controlled drill percussions.

Roush, T. L.↗
NASA NTRS2008

NASA Tech Briefs, November 2008

Topics covered include: Digital Phase Meter for a Laser Heterodyne Interferometer; Vision System Measures Motions of Robot and External Objects; Advanced Precipitation Radar Antenna to Measure Rainfall From Space; Wide-Band Radar for Measuring Thickness of Sea Ice; Vertical Isolation for Photodiodes in CMOS Imagers; Wide-Band Microwave Receivers Using Photonic Processing; L-Band Transmit/Receive Module for Phase-Stable Array Antennas; Microwave Power Combiner/Switch Utilizing a Faraday Rotator; Compact Low-Loss Planar Magic-T; Using Pipelined XNOR Logic to Reduce SEU Risks in State Machines; Quasi-Optical Transmission Line for 94-GHz Radar; Next Generation Flight Controller Trainer System; Converting from DDOR SASF to APF; Converting from CVF to AAF; Documenting AUTOGEN and APGEN Model Files; Sequence History Update Tool; Extraction and Analysis of Display Data; MRO DKF Post-Processing Tool; Rig Diagnostic Tools; MRO Sequence Checking Tool; Science Activity Planner for the MER Mission; UAVSAR Flight-Planning System; Templates for Deposition of Microscopic Pointed Structures; Adjustable Membrane Mirrors Incorporating G-Elastomers; Hall-Effect Thruster Utilizing Bismuth as Propellant; High-Temperature Crystal-Growth Cartridge Tubes Made by VPS; Quench Crucibles Reinforced with Metal; Deep-Sea Hydrothermal-Vent Sampler; Mars Rocket Propulsion System; Two-Stage Passive Vibration Isolator; Improved Thermal Design of a Compression Mold; Enhanced Pseudo-Waypoint Guidance for Spacecraft Maneuvers; Altimetry Using GPS-Reflection/Occultation Interferometry; Thermally Driven Josephson Effect; Perturbation Effects on a Supercritical C7H16/N2 Mixing Layer; Gold Nanoparticle Labels Amplify Ellipsometric Signals; Phase Matching of Diverse Modes in a WGM Resonator; WGM Resonators for Terahertz-to-Optical Frequency Conversion; Determining Concentration of Nanoparticles from Ellipsometry; Microwave-to-Optical Conversion in WGM Resonators; Four-Pass Coupler for Laser-Diode-Pumped Solid-State Laser; Low-Resolution Raman-Spectroscopy Combustion Thermometry; Temperature Sensors Based on WGM Optical Resonators; Varying the Divergence of Multiple Parallel Laser Beams; Efficient Algorithm for Rectangular Spiral Search; Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance Integrated with Replication; Targeting and Localization for Mars Rover Operations; Terrain-Adaptive Navigation Architecture; Self-Adjusting Hash Tables for Embedded Flight Applications; Schema for Spacecraft-Command Dictionary; Combined GMSK Communications and PN Ranging; System-Level Integration of Mass Memory; Network-Attached Solid-State Recorder Architecture; Method of Cross-Linking Aerogels Using a One-Pot Reaction Scheme; An Efficient Reachability Analysis Algorithm.

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DOE OSTI2023

Skipper-CCD sensors for the Oscura experiment: requirements and preliminary tests

Oscura is a proposed multi-kg skipper-CCD experiment designed for a dark matter (DM) direct detection search that will reach unprecedented sensitivity to sub-GeV DM-electron interactions with its 10 kg detector array. Oscura is planning to operate at SNOLAB with 2070 m overburden, and aims to reach a background goal of less than one event in each electron bin in the 2–10 electron ionization-signal region for the full 30 kg-year exposure, with a radiation background rate of 0.01 dru.[1 dru (differential rate unit) corresponds to 1 event/kg/day/keV.] In order to achieve this goal, Oscura must address each potential source of background events, including instrumental backgrounds. In this work, we discuss the main instrumental background sources and the strategy to control them, establishing a set of constraints on the sensors' performance parameters. We present results from the tests of the first fabricated Oscura prototype sensors, evaluate their performance in the context of the established constraints and estimate the Oscura instrumental background based on these results.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

Design, upgrade and characterization of the silicon photomultiplier front-end for the AMIGA detector at the Pierre Auger Observatory

AMIGA (Auger Muons and Infill for the Ground Array) is an upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory to complement the study of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) by measuring the muon content of extensive air showers (EAS). It consists of an array of 61 water Cherenkov detectors on a denser spacing in combination with underground scintillation detectors used for muon density measurement. Each detector is composed of three scintillation modules, with 10 m 2 detection area per module, buried at 2.3 m depth, resulting in a total detection area of 30 m 2 . Silicon photomultiplier sensors (SiPM) measure the amount of scintillation light generated by charged particles traversing the modules. In this paper, the design of the front-end electronics to process the signals of those SiPMs and test results from the laboratory and from the Pierre Auger Observatory are described. Compared to our previous prototype, the new electronics shows a higher performance, higher efficiency and lower power consumption, and it has a new acquisition system with increased dynamic range that allows measurements closer to the shower core. The new acquisition system is based on the measurement of the total charge signal that the muonic component of the cosmic ray shower generates in the detector.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗