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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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NASA NTRS2019

Setting Sail for the Sun: The NEA Scout & Solar Cruiser Missions

Join HAL5 as we welcome back Les Johnson, who will talk about his work on developing solar sails at Marshall Space Flight Center and its role in propulsion and exploration of the Sun. With the successful flights of NASA's NanoSail-D and the Planetary Society's LightSail, solar sails are making the transition from an interesting idea to be demonstrated to technology ready for use on space missions. Scientists and engineers here in Huntsville are doing just that with the development of the Near Earth Asteroid Scout's 925 square foot solar sail that will fly in 2020. And that's not all, in August, a team led by NASA MSFC was selected as a finalist to develop an 18,000 square foot solar sail for a project called, Solar Cruiser, that may fly as early as 2024. If you would like to learn the fundamentals of solar sailing and get the scoop on these two innovative and exciting missions, then hang on as we "Set Sail for the Sun!"

Heliophysics↗
NASA NTRS2020

LUNAR SURFACE GEOSCIENCE TRAINING FOR ASTRONAUTS

Geoscientists have been training and preparing astronauts to observe the Earth from space and explore other planetary surfaces with a legacy that reaches back to the early days of the space program. Continuing this legacy and critical function, a core NASA team has been closely coordinating with the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) as well as academic, research institutions, and other governmental partners to conduct a comprehensive geoscience training program that ranges from initial astronaut candidate training to preparing assigned crew for future lunar surface missions. Described below are the three program training phases (summarized in Figure 1), along with recent program highlights and forward planning. Given NASA’s increased planning and development efforts regarding near-term lunar surface science activities, we welcome ideas, concepts, capabilities, collaborations, and innovations to this astronaut training program.

T. G. Graff↗
NASA NTRS2017

TPSAS-NF1676L-26965-DND

A comprehensive understanding of the spatial and temporal distributions of clouds on a global scale can be best achieved when the vertical distributions and multi-layer occurrence frequencies obtained from active remote sensors are fully integrated with the horizontal distributions currently provided by passive sensors. The Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) satellite lidar onboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) spacecraft was specially designed to acquire aerosol and cloud profiles with unprecedented high vertical resolution and accuracy. As a part of the A-Train satellite constellation, CALIPSO has been operating routinely for more than 10 years and continues to provide a wealth of cloud observations to describe the mean state and inter-annual variability. Recently a suite of level 3 (L3) cloud products has been under development by the CALIPSO lidar science working group at the NASA Langley Research Center. These products describe 3-dimensional (3D) cloud occurrence and 3D ice cloud extinction coefficients and ice water content. Future evolution of the products will add observations from the Imaging Infrared Radiometer onboard CALIPSO. Here we present a brief introduction and provide results from a product prototype. We will characterize the inter-annual vertical variability of zonal cloud occurrence and ice water content during the last 10 years. Suggestions and comments are welcome to help us design and provide better cloud climatology products using CALIOP observations for our cloud community.

Xia Cai↗
NASA NTRS2020

Technical Risks Associated with Heat Melt Compaction Systems

The processing of trash and waste is a welcome and valuable addition to humans living and working in space. Besides the obvious desire to have a pleasant and productive habitation environment, trash management has many practicalbenefits for crew health, resource recovery, and volume reclamation through garbage compaction. The Trash Compaction and Processing System (TCPS), which is a NASA project to develop a trash processing system for long-duration spaceflight, is currently undergoing concept development with engineering prototype validation through two contracted efforts. The development efforts are being supported with activities associated with the NASA Generation 2 Heat Melt Compactor (HMC). The HMC is a facility that compacts trash, recovers water, heats the trash to eliminate biological activity, and manages gas and vapor effluents. The resulting residual processed trash is a compact tile that is free of biological growth and that can be used for augmenting radiation shields. The work being conducted with the HMC focuses on high risk technical areas with respect to operations, subsystem performance, and ISS effluent management interface requirements. This paper gives an overview of the technical risks and the current use of the HMC as a facility for reducing risk.

HMC↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Dust Mitigation: Impacts & Opportunities for Science on the Lunar South Pole

Lunar dust will be a feature of all lunar surface science investigations, whether welcome or not. While lunar dust may pose problems for some investigations, it is also the subject of many critical scientific discoveries made since the Apollo days. Dust mitigation, or learning how to work with and around the inevitable dust we will encounter on the surface, is not a new concept. However, new initiatives throughout NASA are underway in an effort to tackle dust mitigation strategically for the Artemis program. Dust mitigation efforts and technologies will enable successful lunar surface science investigations.

lunar dust↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

3-Dimensional Advanced Workflow

Have you ever been frustrated with the 2-dimensional nature of implementing complex Advanced Workflows (AWF) in your RSA Archer environment? Does the lack of concurrent, parallel workflows make you scratch your head and ask, ‘Why?’ Has your AWF gotten so complicated and convoluted that navigating through a maze-like plate of spaghetti looks simple and straightforward by comparison? If so, come listen to how NASA leverages Questionnaires to add an extra dimension and welcome simplification to complex Advanced Workflow configurations!

RSA Archer↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Common Scientific and Technological Interests Between Astrobiology and Space Biology

The disciplines of astrobiology (AB) and space biology (SB) clearly have common interests, however they have not been pursued jointly. SB and AB are inextricably linked, both intellectually and technologically. They can now be effectively linked operationally. Cross-cutting joint collaborations will enhance innovation and increase cost effectiveness. Session topics include joint science questions, technologies, instrumentation, and missions. Examples include life detection, overlapping planetary protection concerns, biofilms, radiation, hyper- and hypogravity, applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, interoperable databases, facilities (i.e., spacecraft, lunar surface efforts, simulation chambers, analog sites, etc.), training opportunities, and other topics relevant to AB and SB joint ventures. We welcome contributions on this very broad topical area to facilitate cross-fertilization of these disciplines that are of great importance to NASA.

astrobiology↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Transforming Science Prioritization Processes Using Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have potential to augment significantly the current labor-intensive processes of science prioritization, specifically by the National Academies’ Decadal Survey on behalf of NASA and NSF. Here we summarize what we believe to be the first exploratory demonstration-of-concept results from an application of AI/ML to Survey science prioritization. Specifically, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to reveal trends in published astrophysics research that may indicate science priorities and which could be applied to strategic planning. For the purpose of the work that we summarize here, AI/ML is able to analyze – that is, to “understand,” in a manner of speaking – a vast amount of text to reveal complex relationships among research topics, including the growth or decline of science community activities in those topics over time. We trained ourselves and AI/ML algorithms by using ~400,000 abstracts in the period 1998 to 2010 to “forecast” the Academies’ Astro2010 recommendations and compare with the solicited white papers. Comparing our results with actual Astro2010 recommendations allowed us to identify candidate metrics that better predicted the actual results of the Survey. We found, for example, that Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of papers published in a topic area is a good proxy measure for importance of this topic area of research. With this training complete, we identified candidate astrophysics astrophysics science priorities for the 2021+ period using the research during 2007 - 2019 . We conclude that appropriate application of AI can potentially significantly reduce the current workload of the Decadal Survey processes and reveal otherwise unrecognized characteristics in the body of astronomical research. We emphasize throughout the exploratory nature of our work, encouraging colleagues to pursue promising results further. Our most critical governing assumption was that increased (or decreased) research activity can be used to identify scientific or technology topic areas worthy of increased (or decreased) future emphasis. We discuss advantages, limitations, and recognize the “black box” nature of our technique. We note ethics issues associated, for example, with using AI/ML to reveal “hidden” meanings and biases in published work. Furthermore, inevitable improvements in AI may soon enable widespread and welcome identification of and advocacy for science and technology priorities by disparate and diverse groups and organizations. Consequently, we continue to urge a near-term, in-depth evaluation of appropriate applications of AI, including implications and consequences, as well as support for multiple follow-on assessments, of which ours is only a beginning.

Artificial Intelligence↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Assimilating Lessons Learned – From URGE to NASA's Student Airborne Science Activation (SaSa) Project

In the first half of 2021, formal and informal pods at several universities and NASA Center affiliates participated in the Unlearning Racism in Geosciences (URGE) curriculum and deliverables. As a result, several members from different URGE pods are propagating and applying the URGE lessons learned to the new 5-year NASA Student Airborne Science Activation project (SaSa). Starting in the Summer of 2022, SaSa will provide an 8-week summer Earth Science research experience focused on attracting and retaining early undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups from minority-serving institutions (MSIs). The multicenter and field-based research experience will provide the students access to and experience with NASA airborne resources. Additionally, integrating NASA material into the MSI curricula and providing student mentorship at both MSIs and NASA Centers will enhance students' exposure to Earth Science research. The objectives of URGE and SaSa are highly compatible with one another, and the project timing allows for the integration of URGE lessons early in the SaSa curriculum design phase. As of December 2021, the first SaSa summer program application will be open and the first SaSa semester at the host MSIs will be completed. This presentation will discuss the assimilation of URGE lessons learned from our respective pods into the first SaSa academic semester and into the preparations for the first SaSa summer cohort. We will welcome additional feedback from the broader URGE community in advance of SaSa's first summer session.

Kristina Pistone↗
NASA NTRS2021

J. E. Nichols and D. M. Peteet reply

The quantification of northern peatland carbon stocks is vital to our understanding of the global carbon cycle, and we welcome the opportunity to respond to the comments submitted in the preceding “Matters Arising” (Yu et al., Ratcliffe et al.). In response to Yu et al., we provide additional clarification of how data from the Neotoma Paleoecological Database (NPD) are stored and used. We also repeated our quantification of northern peat carbon stocks using only radiocarbon data vetted by other publications. However, our conclusions are unchanged by the elimination of the additional data. We respond to Ratcliffe et al. by addressing the conflict between the “time-history” and “inventory methods.” We calculated northern peatland carbon stocks by the inventory method using our dataset and carefully quantify the uncertainties. We find that while the mean values for carbon stock differ by twofold, the uncertainties around those means are larger than previously acknowledged and are overlapping. This result emphasizes the need for continued work by the carbon cycle science community to understand and quantify uncertainty in terrestrial carbon stock estimates.

Peatlands↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Adventures in Astronomical Time Series Analysis

Welcome to a tour of the volatile, highly active Universe — in stark contrast to earlier serene ``clockwork’’ visions. Innovative data analysis techniques have illuminated explosive physical processes animating these systems. Examples include a Fourier transform suited to the irregular sampling characteristic of much astronomical data, but time domain techniques will be emphasized for these applications: gamma-ray activity in the Crab Nebula, gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei, and gravitational waves. I hope this talk will change some of the ways you carry out statistical data analysis.

Jeffrey D Scargle↗
NASA NTRS2022

Virtual Reality Simulation Tour of the NASA Glenn Wind Tunnel Facility Lobby

Welcome to the Eight by six foot Supersonic Wind Tunnel Research Facility located at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH. This wind tunnel complex is part of NASA's Aerosciences Evaluation and Test Capabilities (AETC) portfolio of testing facilities. Complex hosts two wind tunnels 8 x 6 for supersonic testing and the 9 x 15 for low-speed acoustic testing. Explore the lobby and view the different objects within. Once you are looking at an object you can left click for additional information. All items in lobby are interactive, and can be viewed using the arrow keys and mouse as indicated on the bottom of the video.

AETC↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Assessment Overview: Regional Impacts of Using the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB for Lightning IDSS

The new generation of GOES satellites has presented a wealth of novel observations and data products to the National Weather Service forecasters throughout the country. While high quality, low latency data is always welcome in operational environments, it is valuable to understand how new information is interpreted, and how it complements and supplements existing datasets. To that end, NASA SPoRT, in partnership with the NWS, hosted a formal assessment of the use of the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB to anticipate lightning initiation as indicated by either GLM, NLDN, or both, using an approach outlined by Elsenheimer and Gravelle (2019). As is typical for SPoRT assessments, we focused on a targeted time period (about 6 weeks in June and July 2021) and provided a brief training module to help forecasters become familiar with the application we were targeting and the objectives of our assessment. Unlike typical SPoRT assessments, we focused on a broad geographic region, coordinating with NWS Regional offices to garner participation from several different WFOs throughout the country. Given the field of view and observation angles of GOES-East and GOES-West, which anecdotally impacts GLM lightning observations in particular, having a geographically diverse participant list helps us interpret how these viewing differences may impact interpretation of the RGB and its value in anticipating lightning. Not unexpectedly, we found that the participating forecasters expressed that they could readily interpret the RGB to recognize glaciation and, in the absence of lightning data, use the RGB to anticipate that lightning was possible, for the purpose of impact-based decision support services (IDSS). Lead times from observations of glaciation to first flash were 19 minutes on average, and -10C isothermal reflectivities ranged from 34.5 to 52.5 dBZ. Herein, we present the detailed results of the formal assessment period and provide next steps and recommendations based on forecaster feedback for using the DCPD RGB in the context of anticipating lightning initiation and for IDSS, including regional differences in observations.

satellite remote sensing↗
NASA NTRS2022

The Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health Newsletter

This volume of the Newsletter discusses the Johnson Space Center Clinic (JSC) restarting in-person Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health (LSAH) Formers Examinations after being on hold due to COVID-19 as well as introducing a forthcoming option for LSAH Virtual Surveillance. JSC welcomes three new members of the JSC Clinic who will be heavily involved in Formers Exams. Finally, from the LSAH team, the newsletter talks about how your health data is utilized through the IMPALA platform for research such as the SANS Maturation Project, and building the LSAH Evidence Base to understand prostate cancer trends in the astronaut corps compared to other comparison cohorts.

Joseph (Tim) LaVan↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Discovery Synchronization Service (DSS) for UAM

NASA's ATM-X UAM Subproject recently completed the “X4 Strategic Conflict Management Simulation” with seven NC-1 airspace partners to develop and test initial UAM airspace management capabilities, including the Provider of Services for UAM (PSU), to enable strategic conflict management of UAM operations. The simulation environment leveraged the notional architecture from FAA NextGen UAM ConOps v1.0 and used technologies developed as part of UTM standards and applied them to UAM. One of the main technologies used was the Discovery and Synchronization Service (DSS) and some gaps in applying it to UAM were identified during X4. In this Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM), we will share the technical findings from the simulation and welcome industry feedback.

UAM↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Volcanic Field Sites for Artemis Testing and Training

The Artemis Program will reestablish human presence on the Moon and lead to a new era of scientific discovery and exploration. Led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Artemis Program is a collaboration of space agencies and companies around the world. An integrated effort between various disciplines of science, engineering, and mission operations is currently developing methods, facilities, and analog field locations to train astronauts and test hardware and concepts of operations. These efforts aim to best prepare for the next steps of human exploration on the lunar surface and beyond. Numerous terrestrial volcanic field sites were evaluated and selected for their unique roles in helping to prepare for the lunar surface mission phases. This effort heavily leveraged the comprehensive academic research conducted at these field sites, as well as the tremendous Apollo heritage. The currently selected volcanic field sites include the San Francisco Volcanic Field in Northern Arizona, the Potrillo Volcanic Field in southern New Mexico, the highlands of Iceland, and the Southwestern Nevada Volcanic Field. Within each of these volcanic field sites numerous specific testing and training locations are being further developed utilizing the analogous terrain and unique features in these regions. Recent Artemis testing and training events have been conducted at a number of these volcanic field sites by both a dedicated Artemis Geology Training Team and a Joint Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) Testing Team. This presentation will highlight the selected sites as well as the objectives and accomplishments of some of the recent field-testing events and training courses. Additionally, we continually strive to pursue additional sites, locations, data sets, collaborations, and partnerships in this endeavor and welcome knowledge transfer and community input.

Trevor Graff↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Tracing the Cosmic Energy Flow with Parker Solar Probe: Universal Processes

Heliophysics is inherently interdisciplinary, born from multiple subjects to understand how the Sun interacts with its surrounding environment. Heliophysicists and Astrophysicists seldom exchange ideas since the scientific infrastructure partitions research areas by spatial location in the cosmos. Parker Solar Probe (PSP) is sending back puzzling information in regions we have never been before, presenting an opportunity to search for answers in non-traditional ways that are inherently cross-disciplinary. The fundamental processes that govern the physics of the universe, such as wave-particle interactions, turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and shocks, are mechanisms to study cosmic energy flow. We present PSP observations that may enable us to assess the universality of these fundamental processes in – and across boundaries of –various space and astrophysical regimes. Specifically, we focus on the exotic shapes of proton velocity distribution functions and subsequent evolution leading to multi-scale wave generation and particle acceleration. We welcome ideas, tools, and methodologies from all disciplines to understand the systems of systems governing our universe.

J L Verniero↗
NASA NTRS2022

Atmospheric Research 2020 Technical Highlights

Welcome to the 2020 Atmospheres Highlights report. Here we summarize research and scientific communication/outreach accomplishments from the portion of atmospheric science activities at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) that comprises the Earth Science Division’s Atmospheres organization. As in previous years, this report is intended for a broad audience, including colleagues within NASA, scientists outside the Agency, science graduate students, and members of the public. Organizationally, the report covers research activities under the Office of Deputy Organizationally, the report covers research activities under the Office of Deputy Director for Atmospheres (610AT), which is within Earth Sciences Division (Code Director for Atmospheres (610AT), which is within Earth Sciences Division (Code 610) in the Sciences and Exploration Directorate (600). Laboratories and office within 610) in the Sciences and Exploration Directorate (600). Laboratories and office within 610AT include: Mesoscale Atmospheric Processes Laboratory (612), Climate and 610AT include: Mesoscale Atmospheric Processes Laboratory (612), Climate and Radiation Laboratory (613), Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Laboratory (614), Radiation Laboratory (613), Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Laboratory (614), and the Wallops Field Support Office (610.W). As of this writing, the 277 personnel and the Wallops Field Support Office (610.W). As of this writing, the 277 personnel in Code 610AT consist of 53 civil servants and 224 cooperative agreement associates, in Code 610AT consist of 53 civil servants and 224 cooperative agreement associates, postdoctoral fellows and contractors, postdoctoral fellows and contractors.

Annual Report↗