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NASA NTRS2017

New Development in NASA's Rodent Research Hardware for Conducting Long Duration Biomedical and Basic Research in Space

Animal models, particularly rodents, are the foundation of pre-clinical research to understand human diseases and evaluate new therapeutics, and play a key role in advancing biomedical discoveries both on Earth and in space. The National Research Councils Decadal survey emphasized the importance of expanding NASAs life sciences research to perform long duration, rodent experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). To accomplish this objective, flight hardware, operations, and science capabilities were developed at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) to enhance science return for both commercial (CASIS) and government-sponsored rodent research. The Rodent Research program at NASA ARC has pioneered a new research capability on the International Space Station and has progressed toward translating research to the ISS utilizing commercial rockets, collaborating with academia and science industry, while training crewmembers to assist in performing research on orbit. Throughout phases of these missions, our practices, hardware and operations have evolved from tested to developed standards, and we are able to modify and customize our procedure and operations for mission specific requirements. The Rodent Research Habitat is capable of providing a living environment for animals on ISS according to standard animal welfare requirements. Using the cameras in the Habitat, the Rodent Research team has the ability to perform daily health checks on animals, and further analyze the collected videos for behavioral studies. A recent development of the Rodent Research hardware is inclusion of enrichment, to provide the animals the ability to rest and huddle. The Enrichment Hut is designed carefully for adult mice (up to 35 week old) within animal welfare, engineering, and operations constraints. The Hut is made out of the same stainless steel mesh as the cage interior, it has an ingress and an egress to allow animals move freely, and a hinge door to allow crewmembers remove the animals easily. The Rodent Research team has also developed Live Animal Return (LAR) capability, which will be implemented during Rodent Research-5 mission for the first time. The animals will be transported from the Habitat to a Transporter, which will return on the Dragon capsule and splashes down in the Pacific Ocean. Once SpaceX retrieves the Dragon, all powered payloads will be transferred to a SeaVan and transferred to the Long Beach pier. The NASA team then receives the transporter and delivers to a PI-designated laboratory within 120 mile radius of Long Beach. This is a significant improvement allowing researchers to examine animals within 72 hrs. of reentry or to conduct recovery experiments. Together, the hardware improvements and experience that the Rodent Research team has gained working with principal investigators and ISS crew to conduct complex experiments on orbit are expanding capabilities for long duration rodent research on the ISS to achieve both basic science and biomedical objectives.

ISS↗

NASA NTRS2017

Object and Facial Recognition in Augmented and Virtual Reality: Investigation into Software, Hardware and Potential Uses

As augmented and virtual reality grows in popularity, and more researchers focus on its development, other fields of technology have grown in the hopes of integrating with the up-and-coming hardware currently on the market. Namely, there has been a focus on how to make an intuitive, hands-free human-computer interaction (HCI) utilizing AR and VR that allows users to control their technology with little to no physical interaction with hardware. Computer vision, which is utilized in devices such as the Microsoft Kinect, webcams and other similar hardware has shown potential in assisting with the development of a HCI system that requires next to no human interaction with computing hardware and software. Object and facial recognition are two subsets of computer vision, both of which can be applied to HCI systems in the fields of medicine, security, industrial development and other similar areas.

object recognition↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

An Overview of NASA-STD-1008: Classifications and Requirements for Testing Systems and Hardware to be Exposed to Dust in Planetary Environments

As we return to the Moon with Artemis, hardware will inevitably be exposed to lunar dust. Encountering the surface of a dusty planetary body brings significant hazards to the hardware. A team of subject matter experts across NASA were brought together to create a standard for addressing the best means of performing ground testing of hardware and systems to guard against the expected negative effects that dust may bring. This effort resulted in NASA-STD-1008: Classifications and Requirements for Testing Systems and Hardware to be Exposed to Dust in Planetary Environments. The NASA Technical Standard went through an Agency wide review and was approved for public release in September 2021.

lunar dust↗

NASA NTRS2022

Testing Mars 2020 Flight Software and Hardware in the Surface System Development Environment

The Mars 2020 (M2020) Perseverance Rover is NASA's most advanced planetary rover mission to date. It includes a novel Sample Caching Subsystem (SCS) which will collect rock cores for possible future return to Earth, as well as an improved mobility system with enhanced autonomous navigation which will enable it to traverse faster and farther than prior rovers. The development of both systems required extensive flight software and flight hardware testing. To support this testing, we developed the Surface System Development Environment (SSDEV) and used it for a wide variety of testing. SSDEV is a bundled subset of M2020 Flight Software which runs on commercially available Linux computers and can be combined with multiple backend options for simulation and hardware control. The SSDEV architecture enabled our teams to perform much more testing of flight software and flight hardware than would have otherwise been possible. As a secondary benefit, the SSDEV-based test campaigns also helped our teams enter the operations phase of the mission with greater readiness of operations products and tools. In this paper, we summarize the motivation for SSDEV, provide an overview of the SSDEV architecture, list several examples of how SSDEV was used, and summarize lessons learned. SSDEV is not a substitute for integrated testing with flight-like avionics, but it enabled substantially more testing than would have otherwise been possible and also provided some unique benefits. We recommend architectures like SSDEV to future projects that need to perform extensive hardware and software testing using a limited set of flight-like avionics.

Wai, Dennis↗

NASA NTRS2012

A New Approach in Force-Limited Vibration Testing of Flight Hardware

The force-limited vibration test approaches discussed in NASA-7004C were developed to reduce overtesting associated with base shake vibration tests of aerospace hardware where the interface responses are excited coherently. This handbook outlines several different methods of specifying the force limits. The rationale for force limiting is based on the disparity between the impedances of typical aerospace mounting structures and the large impedances of vibration test shakers when the interfaces in general are coherently excited. Among these approaches, the semi-empirical method is presently the most widely used method to derive the force limits. The inclusion of the incoherent excitation of the aerospace structures at mounting interfaces has not been accounted for in the past and provides the basis for more realistic force limits for qualifying the hardware using shaker testing. In this paper current methods for defining the force limiting specifications discussed in the NASA handbook are reviewed using data from a series of acoustic and vibration tests. A new approach based on considering the incoherent excitation of the structural mounting interfaces using acoustic test data is also discussed. It is believed that the new approach provides much more realistic force limits that may further remove conservatism inherent in shaker vibration testing not accounted for by methods discussed in the NASA handbook. A discussion on using FEM/BEM analysis to obtain realistic force limits for flight hardware is provided.

force limiting responses↗

NASA NTRS2020

Micro Raman Spectroscopy for Characterizing Molecular Contamination on Space Flight Hardware

In the field of contamination control,many unknowns exist. Often, contamination control engineers have to utilize multiple spectroscopic, macroscopic, and microscopic tools to identify contamination sources when there is a potential contamination exposure to space flight hardware. Understanding the chemical composition of the molecular contamination provides an opportunity for contamination control engineers to determine if this contamination is problematic or benign. In this study, an existing witness plate program for monitoring space flight hardware during the assembly, integration, and testing phases is coupled with micro Raman spectroscopy analysis. The main goal of this study is to determine the limitations, reproducibility, and throughput of micro Raman spectroscopy for characterizing molecular contamination. Micro Raman Spectroscopy will be an additional tool used by contamination control engineers to monitor the cleanliness of space flight hardware.

Microscope↗

NASA NTRS1994

Space Hardware Design for Long Life with High Reliability

In 1991, the Cassini Project at JPL funded a study to identify rules for design and test of hardware required to function reliably in space for very long lifetimes. The widest possible range of hardware issues were considered consistent with three constraints: (1) Software and mission rules were addressed only to the extent they affected hardware performance; (2) the rules developed were applicable to a single spacecraft, and multiple spacecraft to achieve mission success were not considered; and (3) high reliability rules were considered only in their relationship to long life. The study was subsequently published as a JPL document. One major conclusion of the workshop was that unattended space missions extending out to 25 years or more are feasible.

hardware↗

NASA NTRS1972

A method of hardware qualification for flight by analyses, similarity and integrated testing

The results are described of a study on four pieces of flight hardware from the Saturn 1U and S-4B stages to determine whether the objectives of the formal qualification tests on that hardware could have been obtained within that program by methods other than performing the qualification tests. These methods include qualification by analyses, similarity and integrated testing, i.e., distribution of the objectives among the other tests in the program. It was found that it is feasible to delete the requirements for formal qualification testing provided that it is accomplished early in the program to allow adequate planning for accomplishing the qualification objectives by other means. Additionally, a scorekeeping system was defined that is simple, straightforward, easy to implement. This scorekeeping system provides complete visibility of equivalent qualification status at any point during the program. A set of groundrules for implementing this study was established as a result of findings on the specific items of hardware studied.

Andriulli, J. B.↗

NASA NTRS1974

Skylab biomedical hardware development

The development of hardware to support biomedical experimentation and operations in the Skylab vehicle presented unique technical problems. Designs were required to enable the accurate measurement of many varied physiological parameters and to compensate for zero g such that uninhibited equipment operation would be possible. Because of problems that occurred during the orbital workshop launch, special tests were run and new equipment was designed and built for use by the first Skylab crew. Design concepts used in the development of hardware to support cardiovascular, pulmonary, vestibular, body, and specimen mass measuring experiments are discussed. Additionally, major problem areas and the corresponding design solutions, as well as knowledge gained that will be pertinent for future life sciences hardware development, are presented.

Huffstetler, W. J., Jr.↗

NASA NTRS1974

Hardware realization of sampled-data controllers

This paper examines the hardware implementation process for digital controllers (filters), beginning with the desired z-domain transfer function of the digital compensator and ending in the selection of a hardware realization scheme. The final hardware realization is shown to be affected by quantization noise, dynamic range considerations, limit cycles, coefficient roundoff, and filter structure. A design example is included to illustrate the implementation process for a digital rate filter for vehicle control of the space shuttle. This paper develops open-loop techniques which may be extended to the closed-loop case.

Nagle, H. T., Jr.↗

NASA NTRS1982

Design and evaluation of a fault-tolerant multiprocessor using hardware recovery blocks

A fault-tolerant multiprocessor with a rollback recovery mechanism is discussed. The rollback mechanism is based on the hardware recovery block which is a hardware equivalent to the software recovery block. The hardware recovery block is constructed by consecutive state-save operations and several state-save units in every processor and memory module. When a fault is detected, the multiprocessor reconfigures itself to replace the faulty component and then the process originally assigned to the faulty component retreats to one of the previously saved states in order to resume fault-free execution. A mathematical model is proposed to calculate both the coverage of multi-step rollback recovery and the risk of restart. A performance evaluation in terms of task execution time is also presented.

Lee, Y. H.↗

NASA NTRS1983

A fast, programmable hardware architecture for spaceborne SAR processing

The launch of spaceborne SARs during the 1980's is discussed. The satellite SARs require high quality and high throughput ground processors. Compression ratios in range and azimuth of greater than 500 and 150 respectively lead to frequency domain processing and data computation rates in excess of 2000 million real operations per second for C-band SARs under consideration. Various hardware architectures are examined and two promising candidates and proceeds to recommend a fast, programmable hardware architecture for spaceborne SAR processing are selected. Modularity and programmability are introduced as desirable attributes for the purpose of HTSP hardware selection.

Bennett, J. R.↗

NASA NTRS1982

Solar array Shuttle flight experiment - Hardware development and testing

This paper reports on the fabrication and ground testing of (a) a large area, light-weight, flexible substrate developmental solar array wing that has been built for NASA-MSFC and of (b) the supporting structure and data acquisition system (DAS) which, with the wing, will be flown in the Shuttle as an experiment in 1984. The experiment will verify the dynamics, thermodynamic, and electrical performance predictions of the array wing and will demonstrate the structural capability of the array wing for Orbiter launch and re-entry environments. The experiment hardware verification program was designed to minimize costs and risk of experiment performance degradation while maintaining Shuttle and crew safety. The previous full-scale wing hardware tests included an extension mast water table test and wing testing for random vibration, thermal vacuum, and acoustic environments. The results of these tests were used to define wing design modifications and to scope the test program for the experiment hardware.

Elms, R. V.↗

NASA NTRS1985

Hardware test program for evaluation of baseline range/range rate sensor concept

The Hardware Test Program for evaluation of the baseline range/range rate sensor concept was initiated 11 September 1984. This ninth report covers the period 12 May through 11 June 1885. A contract amendment adding a second phase has extended the Hardware Test Program through 10 December 1985. The objective of the added program phase is to establish range and range measurement accuracy and radar signature characteristics for a typical spacecraft target. Phase I of the Hardware Test Program was designed to reduce the risks associated with the Range/Range Rate (R/R) Sensor baseline design approach. These risks are associated with achieving the sensor performance required for the two modes of operation, the Interrupted CW (ICW) mode for initial acquisition and tracking to close-in ranges, and the CW mode, providing coverage during the final docking maneuver. The risks associated with these modes of operation have to do with the realization of adequate sensitivity to operate to their individual maximum ranges.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS1984

Hardware schemes for fast Fourier transform, part 7.4A

Real-time fast fourier transformer (FFT) processing of a MST radar data and cost-effective approaches to hardware FFT generation were studied. Previously devised hardware FFT configurations are described including the estimated number of chips used and the time required to perform a 1024-point FFT. The remaining entries in the table correspond to original designs, which presuppose the availability of a microcomputer and a modestly complicated hardware peripheral. These original designs, all of which implement a radix-4 FFT with twiddle factors, are assigned model numbers to make them easier to refer to.

Stitt, G. R.↗

NASA NTRS1987

Access flight hardware design and development

Several items were found to be of immense value in the design and development of the Assembly Concept for Construction of Erectable Space Structures (ACCESS) hardware. The early availability of mock-up and engineering test hardware helped to develop the concept and prove the feasibility of the experiment. The extensive neutral buoyancy testing was invaluable in developing the procedures and timelines, proving that the hardware functioned as intended, and effectively trained the astronauts. The early involvement of the crew systems/astronaut personnel was extremely beneficial in shaping the design to meet the EVA compatibility requirements. Also, the early definition of coupled loads and on-orbit dynamic responses can not be overemphasized due to the relative uncertainty in the magnitude of these loads and their impact on the design.

Rogers, John F.↗

NASA NTRS1987

Electronic hardware implementations of neutral networks

This paper examines some of the present work on the development of electronic neural network hardware. In particular, the investigations currently under way at JPL on neural network hardware implementations based on custom VLSI technology, novel thin film materials, and an analog-digital hybrid architecture are reviewed. The availability of such hardware will greatly benefit and enhance the present intense research effort on the potential computational capabilities of highly parallel systems based on neural network models.

Thakoor, A. P.↗

NASA NTRS1988

Hardware realization of a baseband processor for a SS-FDMA/TDMA/DAMA system

Hardware implementation of the NASA ACTS baseband processor is described which achieves the system message data handling performance required to perform satellite switching of high-rate baseband data. The hardware meets payload specifications for size, weight, and power. Hardware redundancy applied to critical paths in several functional areas insures that the reliability and life expectancy requirements are fulfilled. The remote reprogrammability of the processor message data handling and routing functions provides system flexibility for dynamic reconfiguration during rapidly changing traffic loads.

Moat, Richard L.↗