Michoud Assembly Facility

Participants in the Physics Education Workshop at the 5th IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics heard about, among other topics, a study exploring why students have difficulty with concepts related to magnetism (and whether explicitly evoking gender affects the results), work in Europe to develop materials to help teachers implement inquiry-based science education, and the use of peer instruction and online collaboration to help teacher-candidates develop questioning skills.

This chapter discusses artificial computational intelligence methods as applied to cost prediction. We present the development of a suite of hybrid fuzzy-neural systems for predicting the cost of performing engine tests at NASA’s Stennis Space Center testing facilities. The system is composed of several adaptive network-based fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS), with or without neural subsystems. The output produced by each system in the suite is a rough order of magnitude (ROM) cost estimate for performing the engine test. Basic systems predict cost based solely on raw test data, whereas others use preprocessing of these data, such as principal components and locally linear embedding (LLE), before entering the fuzzy engines. Backpropagation neural networks and radial basis functions networks (RBFNs) are also used to aid in the cost prediction by merging the costs estimated by several ANFIS into a final cost estimate.

The results are reported of a survey conducted among senior managers within the government and participating companies to identify the items that could improve industry's way of doing business with NASA. New and recommended practices in management, operations, organization, procurement, and procedures are discussed. The development of multitiered requirement systems for NASA programs is addressed.

The effective aerodynamic characteristics for the debris resulting from the Space Shuttle External Tank (ET) are required for estimating the impact points of the debris. The paper develops a methodology that determines the effective values of the aerodynamic parameters required for performing the less complex three-degree-of-freedom (DOF) debris impact analyses. For all of the debris types, 6-DOF mass property and aerodynamic data are computed. From many 6-DOF trajectory simulations, standard deviation range values are calculated. With 3-DOF trajectory matching, these range values are used to determine the effective ballistic coefficient and the range of lift-to-drag ratios for each of the ET debris types defined.

The Shuttle program plans to recover all flight hardware except the External Tank (ET). The ET reentry task requires the quaranteed safe disposal in a remote section and specific footprint of the Indian Ocean or the Antarctic Pacific. The ET is separated from the Orbiter at near orbital speeds and must reenter tumbling, to neutralize lift in an essentially ballistic trajectory. The aerothermodynamic heating becomes an intriguing, complex, and sophisticated series of flow field, boundary layer, and gas dynamic problems that is an important new technology in the reentering disposal task. The singular aspect given in this paper is the general heating distributions for all tumbling attitudes. The objective is to maintain simplicity in form but with variable coefficients to be analytically scaled to account for free molecule, convective laminar and turbulent flow, real gas dissociation or any Reynolds number or Mach number effects.

Fracture toughness and cyclic crack propagation data for Ti-5A1-2.5Sn extra-low interstitial (ELI) castings, 0.51 and 2.54 cm (0.20 and 1.00 in.) thick, at 394, 294, 77, and 20 K (250, 70, −320, and −423° F), are presented. Both surface flaw and compact tension geometries were tested. Comparison is made with other titanium alloys in both wrought and cast forms. Crack propagation resistance is comparable to wrought Ti-5A1-2.5Sn ELI, even with the extremely coarse as-cast grain size encountered.

Covers advancements in spacecraft and tactical and strategic missile systems, including subsystem design and application, mission design and analysis, materials and structures, developments in space sciences, space processing and manufacturing, space operations, and applications of space technologies to other fields.