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The Triana observatory was built at NASA GSFC in the late 1990's, then placed into storage. After approximately ten years it was removed from storage and repurposed as the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). This presentation outlines the contamination control program lessons learned during the integration, test and launch of DSCOVR.
Finding solutions to thermal coating issues on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission was a very challenging and unique endeavor. As a passive thermal control system, coatings provide the desired thermal, optical, and electrical charging properties, while surviving a harsh space environment. DSCOVR mission hardware was repurposed from the late 1990s satellite known as Triana. As a satellite that was shelved for over a decade, the coating surfaces consequently degraded with age, and became fairly outdated. Although the mission successfully launched in February 2015, there were unfamiliar observations and unanticipated issues with the coating surfaces during the revival phases of the project. For example, the thermal coatings on DSCOVR experienced particulate contamination and resistivity requirement problems, among other issues. While finding solutions to these issues, valuable lessons were learned in thermal coatings that may provide great insight to future spaceflight missions in similar situations.
The Logistics Reduction (LR) project within the Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) program is tasked with reducing logistical mass and repurposing logistical items. Multipurpose Cargo Transfer Bags (MCTB) are designed to be the same external volume as a regular cargo transfer bag, the common logistics carrier for the International Space Station. After use as a cargo bag, the MCTB can be unzipped and unfolded to be reused. This Acoustic MCTBs transform into acoustic blankets after the initial logistics carrying objective is complete.
NASA's Logistical Reduction and Repurposing (LRR) project is a collaborative effort in which NASA is determined to reduce total logistical mass through reduction, reuse and recycling of various wastes and components of long duration space missions and habitats. LRR is focusing on four distinct advanced areas of study: Advanced Clothing System, Logistics-to-Living, Heat Melt Compactor and Trash to Supply Gas (TtSG). The objective of TtSG is to develop technologies that convert material waste, human waste and food waste into high-value products. High-value products include life support oxygen and water, rocket fuels, raw material production feedstocks, and other energy sources. There are multiple pathways for converting waste to products involving single or multi-step processes. This paper discusses thermal oxidation methods of converting waste to methane. Different wastes, including food, food packaging, Maximum Absorbent Garments (MAGs), human waste simulants, and cotton washcloths have been evaluated in a thermal degradation reactor under conditions promoting pyrolysis, gasification or incineration. The goal was to evaluate the degradation processes at varying temperatures and ramp cycles and to maximize production of desirable products and minimize high molecular weight hydrocarbon (tar) production. Catalytic cracking was also evaluated to minimize tar production. The quantities of C02, CO, CH4, and H20 were measured under the different thermal degradation conditions. The conversion efficiencies of these products were used to determine the best methods for producing desired products.
The Logistics Reduction (LR) project within the Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) division is tasked with reducing logistical mass and repurposing logistical items. Multipurpose Cargo Transfer Bags (MCTB) have been designed such that they can serve the same purpose as a Cargo Transfer Bag (CTB), the common logistics carrying bag for the International Space Station (ISS). After use as a cargo carrier, a regular CTB becomes trash, whereas the MCTB can be unfolded into a flat panel for reuse. Concepts and potential benefits for various MCTB applications will be discussed including partitions, crew quarters, solar radiation storm shelters, acoustic blankets, and forward osmosis water processing. Acoustic MCTBs are currently in use on ISS to reduce the noise generated by the T2 treadmill, which reaches the hazard limit at high speeds. The development of the AMCTB included identification of keep out zones, acoustic properties, deployment considerations, and structural testing. Features developed for these considerations are applicable to MCTBs for all crew outfitting applications.
The Logistics Reduction (LR) project within Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) is tasked with reducing logistical mass and repurposing logistical items. Multipurpose Cargo Transfer Bags (MCTB) have been designed such that they can serve the same purpose as a Cargo Transfer Bag (CTB), the common logistics carrying bag for the International Space Station (ISS). After use as a cargo carrier, a regular CTB becomes trash, whereas the MCTB can be unfolded into a flat panel for reuse. Concepts and potential benefits for various MCTB applications will be discussed including partitions, crew quarters, solar radiation storm shelters, acoustic blankets, and forward osmosis water processing. Acoustic MCTBs are currently in use on ISS to reduce the noise generated by the T2 treadmill, which reaches the hazard limit at high speeds. The development of the AMCTB included identification of keep-out zones, acoustic properties, deployment considerations, and structural testing. Features developed for these considerations are applicable to MCTBs for all crew outfitting applications.
The dual-frequency, dual-polarized, Doppler radar (D3R) system was developed in support of the ground validation segment of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. Although its main purpose is to provide active, Ku/Ka‐band, dual‐polarized measurements of precipitation, the design presents an opportunity to study its operation in an active/passive mode. The opportunity arises from use of solid-state transmitters employing a multi‐frequency waveform and receiving system. Typically, a sequence of three pulses separated in frequency is transmitted to achieve its radar sensitivity and minimum range. However, one of the three pulses can be disabled with a tolerable decrease in sensitivity and its receive channel can be repurposed to support passive measurements. This work focuses on progress in the characterization of the Ku-band H polarized passive channel operating simultaneously with two active as a step towards the provision of brightness temperatures along with the other radar derived products. The methodology developed will be applied to the V polarized channel and Ka‐band subsystem in the near future. The study consists on the analysis of the antenna performance, receiver architecture, transfer function and achievable number of independent samples, calibration method and preliminary observation analysis. All within the context of the instrument's current configuration and possible future improvements.
Encouraged by the creation of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation within the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1984 and the Commercial Space Act of 1998, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) now relies on an extensive network of support from commercial companies and organizations. At NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), this collaboration opens competitive opportunities for launch providers, including repurposing underutilized Shuttle Program resources, constructing new facilities, and utilizing center services and laboratories. The resulting multi-user spaceport fosters diverse activity, though it engenders risk from hazards associated with various spaceflight processing activities. The KSC Safety & Mission Assurance (S&MA) Directorate, in coordination with the center's Spaceport Integration and Center Planning & Development organizations, has developed a novel approach to protect NASA's workforce, critical assets, and the public from hazardous, space-related activity associated with KSC's multi-user spaceport. For NASA KSC S&MA, the transformation to a multi-user spaceport required implementing methods to foster safe and successful commercial activity while resolving challenges involving: Retirement of the Space Shuttle program; Co-location of multiple NASA programs; Relationships between the NASA programs; Complex relationships between NASA programs and commercial partner operations in exclusive-use facilities; Complex relationships between NASA programs and commercial partner operations in shared-use facilities. NASA KSC S&MA challenges were met with long-term planning and solutions involving cooperation with the Spaceport Integration and Services Directorate. This directorate is responsible for managing active commercial partnerships with customer advocacy and services management, providing a dedicated and consistent level of support to a wide array of commercial operations. This paper explores these solutions, their relevance to the current commercial space industry, and the challenges that continue to drive improvement with a focus on areas of safety management and risk assessment that have been crucial in KSC's evolution into a multi-user spaceport. These solutions may be useful to government entities and private companies looking to partner with the commercial space industry.
The Logistics Reduction and Repurposing project includes the heat melt compactor (HMC), a device that compacts waste containing plastic into a tile that will minimize volume, and may be used as materials for radiation shielding. During the process, a small purge gas stream is directed through the HMC chamber to transport out gasses and humidity released from the process. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center is tasked with developing and delivering a contamination control system to clean the purge gas prior to exhausting it back into the cabin for crew inhalation.
A modular Random Access Frame (RAF) system is proposed as an alternative to the International Standard Payload Rack (ISPR) for internal module layout and outfitting in a Deep Space Habitat (DSH). The ISPR approach was designed to allow for efficient interchangeability of payload and experiments for the International Space Station (ISS) when frequent resupply missions were available (particularly the now-retired Space Shuttle). Though the standard interface approach to the ISPR system allowed integration of subsystems and hardware from a variety of sources and manufacturers, the heavy rack and standoff approach may not be appropriate when resupply or swap-out capabilities are not available, such as on deep space, long-duration missions. The lightweight RAF concept can allow a more dense packing of stowage and equipment, and may be easily broken down for repurposing or reuse. Several example layouts and workstations are presented.
During my internship at NASA Johnson Space Center, I worked in the Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG), where I was tasked with a number of projects focused on the automation of tasks and activities related to the operation of the International Space Station (ISS). As I worked on a number of projects, I have written short sections below to give a description for each, followed by more general remarks on the internship experience. My first project is titled "General Exposure Representation EVADOSE", also known as "GEnEVADOSE". This project involved the design and development of a C++/ ROOT framework focused on radiation exposure for extravehicular activity (EVA) planning for the ISS. The utility helps mission managers plan EVAs by displaying information on the cumulative radiation doses that crew will receive during an EVA as a function of the egress time and duration of the activity. SRAG uses a utility called EVADOSE, employing a model of the space radiation environment in low Earth orbit to predict these doses, as while outside the ISS the astronauts will have less shielding from charged particles such as electrons and protons. However, EVADOSE output is cumbersome to work with, and prior to GEnEVADOSE, querying data and producing graphs of ISS trajectories and cumulative doses versus egress time required manual work in Microsoft Excel. GEnEVADOSE automates all this work, reading in EVADOSE output file(s) along with a plaintext file input by the user providing input parameters. GEnEVADOSE will output a text file containing all the necessary dosimetry for each proposed EVA egress time, for each specified EVADOSE file. It also plots cumulative dose versus egress time and the ISS trajectory, and displays all of this information in an auto-generated presentation made in LaTeX. New features have also been added, such as best-case scenarios (egress times corresponding to the least dose), interpolated curves for trajectories, and the ability to query any time in the EVADES output. As mentioned above, GEnEVADOSE makes extensive use of ROOT version 6, the data analysis framework developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and the code is written to the C++11 standard (as are the other projects). My second project is the Automated Mission Reference Exposure Utility (AMREU).Unlike GEnEVADOSE, AMREU is a combination of three frameworks written in both Python and C++, also making use of ROOT (and PyROOT). Run as a combination of daily and weekly cron jobs, these macros query the SRAG database system to determine the active ISS missions, and query minute-by-minute radiation dose information from ISS-TEPC (Tissue Equivalent Proportional Counter), one of the radiation detectors onboard the ISS. Using this information, AMREU creates a corrected data set of daily radiation doses, addressing situations where TEPC may be offline or locked up by correcting doses for days with less than 95% live time (the total amount time the instrument acquires data) by averaging the past 7 days. As not all errors may be automatically detectable, AMREU also allows for manual corrections, checking an updated plaintext file each time it runs. With the corrected data, AMREU generates cumulative dose plots for each mission, and uses a Python script to generate a flight note file (.docx format) containing these plots, as well as information sections to be filled in and modified by the space weather environment officers with information specific to the week. AMREU is set up to run without requiring any user input, and it automatically archives old flight notes and information files for missions that are no longer active. My other projects involve cleaning up a large data set from the Charged Particle Directional Spectrometer (CPDS), joining together many different data sets in order to clean up information in SRAG SQL databases, and developing other automated utilities for displaying information on active solar regions, that may be used by the space weather environment officers to monitor solar activity. I consulted my mentor Dr. Ryan Rios and Dr. Kerry Lee for project requirements and added features, and ROOT developer Edmond Offermann for advice on using the ROOT library. I also received advice and feedback from Dr. Janet Barzilla of SRAG, who tested my code. Besides these inputs, I worked independently, writing all of the code by myself. The code for all these projects is documented throughout, and I have attempted to write it in a modular format. Assuming that ROOT is updated accordingly, these codes are also Y2038-compliant (and Y10K-compliant). This allows the code to be easily referenced, modified and possibly repurposed for non-ISS missions in the future, should the necessary inputs exist. These projects have taught me a lot about coding and software design - I have become a much more skilled C++ programmer and ROOT user, and I also learned to code in Python and PyROOT (and its advantages and disadvantages compared to C++/ ROOT). Furthermore, I have learned about space radiation and radiation modeling, topics that greatly interest me as I pursue a degree in physics. Working alongside experimental physicists like Dr. Rios, I have developed a greater understanding and appreciation for experimental science, something I have always leaned towards but to which I lacked significant exposure. My work in SRAG has also given me the invaluable opportunity to witness the work environment for physicists at NASA, and what a career in academia may look like at a government laboratory such as NASA Johnson Space Center. As I continue my studies and look forward to graduate school and a future career, this experience at NASA has given me a meaningful and enjoyable opportunity to put my skills to use and see what my future career path might hold.
Motivation. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy charged the nation "to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth." Eight years later, the Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after this first 8-day journey to the moon. As humans had never ventured to another extraterrestrial body, the U.S. government noted the great uncertainty associated with the unknown exposures related to this historic mission. Overview. With this uncertainty in mind, a newly formed Interagency Committee on Back Contamination (ICBC) was established to review the potential for lunar contaminants and establish the prevention of their escape into the biosphere during crew and sample recovery operations from the floating command module to the mobile quarantine facility on the recovery ship and return to the Johnson Space Center. Significance. As a result of the ICBC recommendations, in 1966 NASA planned and built the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The LRL served a great role in service of human space exploration to quarantine Apollo crewmembers, their space vehicles, and the lunar samples collected. Almost an afterthought in the space race to the Moon, the 83,000-square-foot LRL was designed and completed in 1967 for $7.8 million. The core purpose of the LRL was "to protect the public's health, agriculture, and other living resources; to provide lunar sample distribution to approved scientific investigators; and to preserve the scientific integrity of the lunar samples at all times." Its layout was comprised of three major zones: a quarantined Crew Area, a separate but also quarantined Sample Operations Area, and a Support and Administration Area outside the controlled biological barrier. This facility required trained personnel to live and perform within it for several weeks post-flight, to include astronaut crewmembers, flight surgeons, scientists, and vehicle recovery engineers. The LRL holds memories of these historic events but has since been repurposed for NASA's medical and environmental sciences activities, in what is now known as Building 37. As we approach its 50th anniversary, the LRL story will end in demolition as NASA advances its facilities for the next steps in human exploration of space. Learning Objectives: 1. To capture the historical relevance of the NASA Lunar Receiving Laboratory 2. To understand the requirements of receiving crew and samples from the moon for the first time 3. To describe the facility capabilities in protection of public health.
This paper describes the recently developed point of departure design for a long duration, reusable Mars Transit Habitat, which was established during a 2016 NASA habitat design refinement activity supporting the definition of NASA's Evolvable Mars Campaign. As part of its development of sustainable human Mars mission concepts achievable in the 2030s, the Evolvable Mars Campaign has identified desired durations and mass/dimensional limits for long duration Mars habitat designs to enable the currently assumed solar electric and chemical transportation architectures. The Advanced Exploration Systems Mars Transit Habitat Refinement Activity brought together habitat subsystem design expertise from across NASA to develop an increased fidelity, consensus design for a transit habitat within these constraints. The resulting design and data (including a mass equipment list) contained in this paper are intended to help teams across the agency and potential commercial, academic, or international partners understand: 1) the current architecture/habitat guidelines and assumptions, 2) performance targets of such a habitat (particularly in mass, volume, and power), 3) the driving technology/capability developments and architectural solutions which are necessary for achieving these targets, and 4) mass reduction opportunities and research/design needs to inform the development of future research and proposals. Data presented includes: an overview of the habitat refinement activity including motivation and process when informative; full documentation of the baseline design guidelines and assumptions; detailed mass and volume breakdowns; a moderately detailed concept of operations; a preliminary interior layout design with rationale; a list of the required capabilities necessary to enable the desired mass; and identification of any worthwhile trades/analyses which could inform future habitat design efforts. As a whole, the data in the paper show that a transit habitat meeting the 43 metric tons launch mass/trans-Mars injection burn limits specified by the Evolvable Mars Campaign is achievable near the desired timeframe with moderate strategic investments including maintainable life support systems, repurposable structures and packaging, and lightweight exercise modalities. It also identifies operational and technological options to reduce this mass to less than 41 metric tons including staging of launch structure/packaging and alternate structural materials.
The Kepler spacecraft was repurposed for the K2 mission a year after the failure of the second of Kepler's four reaction wheels in 2013 May. The purpose of this document, the K2 Handbook (K2H), is to describe features of K2 operations, performance, data analysis, and archive products which are common to most K2 campaigns, but different in degree or kind from the corresponding features of the Kepler mission.The K2 Handbook is meant to be read with the following companion documents, which are all publicly available:1. Kepler Instrument Handbook (KSCI-19033) provides information about the design, performance and operational constraints of the instrument and an overview of the types of pixel data that are available.2. Kepler Data Processing Handbook (KSCI-19081) describes how pixels downloaded from the spacecraft are converted by the Kepler Data Processing Pipeline into the data products available at the MAST archive3. Kepler Archive Manual (KDMC-100008) describes the format and content of the data products and how to search for them.4. Kepler Data Characteristics Handbook (KSCI-19040) describes recurring non-astrophysical features of the Kepler data due to instrument signatures, spacecraft events or solar activity and explains how these characteristics are handled by the Kepler pipeline.5. The Ecliptic Plane Input Catalog describes the provenance of the positions and Kepler magnitudes used for target management and aperature photometry.6. K2 Data Release Notes (DRN) are on-line documents available on the K2 science website which describe the data inventory, instrumental signatures and events peculiar to individual observing campaigns.
ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun) repurposed two spacecraft to extend their useful science (Angelopoulos, 2010) by moving them via lunar gravity assists from elliptical Earth orbits to L1 and L2 Earth-Moon libration orbits and then to lunar orbits by exploiting the Earth-Moon-Sun dynamical environment. This paper describes the complete design from conceptual plans using weak stability transfer options and lunar gravity assist to the implementation and operational support of the Earth-Moon libration and lunar orbits. The two spacecraft of the ARTEMIS mission will have just entered lunar orbit at this paper's presentation.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard's Rideshare Office estimates that between 2013 and 2022, NASA launches of primary satellites will have left unused more than 20,371 kilograms of excess capacity. This equates to hundreds of millions of dollars in launch-vehicle costs going unutilized. To fill this void with a standard CubeSat or SmallSat spacecraft platform, which when required to be more reliable, still will cost in the neighborhood of $1M a kilogram, making it prohibitively expensive. A newly proposed solution, which NASA is pursuing, is called the Capsulation Satellite or CapSat. CapSat is a modularized, pressurized, thermally controlled spacecraft designed to host ruggedized commercially available instrumentation in a terrestrial like environment on orbit. Using a technique that is under review for a patent, CapSat actively manages internal air temperatures in a manner similar to a household thermostat. This gives CapSat high-thermal stability, which, in turn, provides component longevity. CapSat was specifically designed to take advantage of the United States Air Force (USAF) Rideshare Program and the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Secondary Payload Adaptor, or ESPA ring. The ESPA ring comes in two sizes: standard and Grande. CapSat primarily will take advantage of the ESPA Grande to provide a 300-kilogram payload capability per attachment point, with up to four attachment points per ring. This approach combines a high-mass capability with a proven Rideshare mechanical interface and secondary payload management infrastructure. Opportunities for ESPA based co-manifests are continuing to expand. The CapSat program is currently funded to design and build a limited prototype and perform thermal-vacuum testing. CapSat is currently in the concept/study phase for both single missions and constellation of earth- and space-observing missions. One of these studies includes land imaging using state-of-the-art advanced infrared detector technology. This paper will report on the current status of the CapSat hardware design, testing, and results as well as any openly available advanced concept study results. The CapSat solution is intended to be a game-changing paradigm shift. CapSat will repurpose currently available, already-proven technology to reduce spaceflight hardware costs to less than $50,000 per kilogram.
NASA's Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, has been a resounding success. More than 4000 planet candidates have been identified using data from Kepler primary mission, which ended in 2013, and greater than 2000 of these candidates have been verified as bona fide exoplanets. After the loss of two reaction wheels ended the primary mission, the Kepler spacecraft was repurposed in 2014 to observe many fields on the sky for short periods. This new mission, dubbed K2, has led to the discovery of greater than 600 planet candidates, approximately 200 of which have been verified to date; most of these exoplanets are closer to us than the majority of exoplanets discovered by the primary Kepler mission. TESS, launching in 2018, will survey most of the sky for exoplanets, with emphasis on those orbiting nearby and/or bright host stars, making these planets especially well-suited for follow-up observations with other observatories to characterize atmospheric compositions and other properties. More than one-third of the planet candidates found by NASA's are associated with target stars that have more than one planet candidate, and such 'multis' account for the majority of candidates that have been verified as true planets. The large number of multis tells us that flat multiplanet systems like our Solar System are common. Virtually all of the candidate planetary systems are stable, as tested by numerical integrations that assume a physically motivated mass-radius relationship. Statistical studies performed on these candidate systems reveal a great deal about the architecture of planetary systems, including the typical spacing of orbits and flatness. The characteristics of several of the most interesting confirmed Kepler & K2 multi-planet systems will also be discussed.
NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is being designed to deliver unprecedented capability in dark energy and exoplanet science, and to host a technology demonstration coronagraph for exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy. The observatory design has matured since 2013; we present a comprehensive description of the observatory configuration as refined during the WFIRST Phase-A study. The observatory is based on an existing, repurposed 2.4 meter space telescope coupled with a 288 megapixel near-infrared (0.6 to 2 microns) HgCdTe focal plane array with multiple imaging and spectrographic modes. Together they deliver a 0.28 square degree field of view, which is approximately 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, and a sensitivity that enables rapid science surveys. In addition, the coronagraph technology demonstration will prove the feasibility of new techniques for exoplanet discovery, imaging, and spectral analysis. A composite truss structure meters both instruments to the telescope assembly, and the instruments and the spacecraft are flight serviceable. We present configuration changes since 2013 that improved interfaces, improved testability, and reduced technical risk. We provide an overview of our Integrated Modeling results, performed at an unprecedented level for a phase-A study, to illustrate performance margins with respect to static wavefront error, jitter, and thermal drift.