Spaceflight Industries (United States)

Air medical transport of critically ill and injured patients began during World War II. Now air transport has become an integral part of health care, nationally and internationally. With the development of portable medical equipment critical care has extended beyond the hospital by bringing critical care to the scene or to rural hospitals. Air medical programs transport critically ill and injured patients by helicopter or airplane while continuously providing critical care enroute. These transports are interfacility from accident scenes, disaster areas, and remote locations where the patient is transported to a tertiary care center so that definitive care will be provided. The 2 modes of air transport are rotor wing (helicopters) and fixed wing (airplanes). Air medical transport is utilized when ground transportation is not conducive to patient criticality or location relative to a tertiary care center. There are many factors to consider when choosing a mode of transport, and each mode has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Air medical programs place emphasis on clinical care, safety, and quality assurance, with the patient being the focused beneficiary. This article addresses implementation and management of rotor wing air medical transport with a focus on standards of care, safety, and quality.

A new method for quantifying facility performance has been discussed in this study that encompasses uncertainties associated with thermophysical property measurement. Four key thermophysical properties: density, volumetric thermal expansion coefficient, surface tension, and viscosity of liquid Au have been measured in microgravity environment using two different levitation facilities. Levitation experiments were conducted using the Electrostatic Levitation Furnace (ELF) onboard the ISS in Argon and air, and the TEMPUS Electromagnetic Levitation (EML) facility on a Novespace Zero-G aircraft parabolic flight in Argon. The traditional Maximum Amplitude method was augmented through the use of Frequency Crossover method to identify the natural frequency for oscillations induced on a molten sample during Faraday forcing in ESL. The EML tests were conducted using a pulse excitation method where two techniques, one imaging and one non-imaging, were used to study surface oscillations. The results from both facilities are in excellent agreement with the published literature values. A detailed study of the accuracy and precision of the measured values has also been presented in this work to evaluate facility performance.

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-4026.vid Advancement continues in the development of human mission architectures from public and private space operators and across Artemis, lunar Human Landing System, Gateway, and Mars transit platforms. Despite advances in the understanding of crew needs for long-duration spaceflight, NASA and its partners recognize the importance of a more complete set of countermeasures to address crew performance in this setting. Exploration-class missions hold these countermeasures as requirements for the support of autonomous decision making and crew health and performance. In particular, resilience is viewed as a central trait of expeditionary behavior and as a foundation for other traits required for success in this setting. Previous work has described the conceptual basis of an integrated training paradigm for the cultivation of innate resilience, with the goal of providing a robust, self-sustaining, and autonomous crew environment among already high performing individuals and teams. The present work builds upon foundational concepts in crew subjective performance assessments, neurofeedback-mediated performance training, and the development and support of expeditionary skill sets. Critically, training protocols leveraging brain-computer interface require further development, but have the capacity to be directly integrated with performance assessments before and during flight. Multiphasic experiments are planned to establish the relationship of integrated training with crew performance. These experiments will focus on the correlation of core traits with expeditionary performance, the establishment of neurofeedback protocols for use in performance standards, and training for performance outcomes using a quantitative-qualitative bridge. Initial results are expected to demonstrate how the reciprocal role of expeditionary experience and performance traits support successful expeditionary outcomes. The connection between resilience and performance outcomes has clear terrestrial applications in addition to use within exploration-class flight profiles. Ongoing work is aimed at the development of technological infrastructure for the support of individual and team resilience and our capacity for success in exploration-class settings.

We address six different classification tasks related to fine-grained building attributes: construction type, number of floors, pitch and geometry of the roof, facade material, and occupancy class. Tackling such a remote building analysis problem became possible only recently due to growing large-scale datasets of urban scenes. To this end, we introduce a new benchmarking dataset, consisting of 49426 images (top-view and street-view) of 9674 buildings. These photos are further assembled, together with the geometric metadata. The dataset showcases various real-world challenges, such as occlusions, blur, partially visible objects, and a broad spectrum of buildings. We propose a new \emph{projection pooling layer}, creating a unified, top-view representation of the top-view and the side views in a high-dimensional space. It allows us to utilize the building and imagery metadata seamlessly. Introducing this layer improves classification accuracy -- compared to highly tuned baseline models -- indicating its suitability for building analysis.

Abstract Objective Critically unwell patients in rural and remote areas of Queensland, Australia, often require airway management with rapid sequence intubation (RSI) prior to retrieval to a tertiary centre. Retrieval Services Queensland (RSQ) coordinate retrievals and support rural hospitals, including via telehealth. We aimed to describe the demographics of patients intubated in Queensland hospitals requiring subsequent aeromedical retrieval. This retrospective cohort study compared patients intubated by a retrieval team, including a LifeFlight Retrieval Medicine (LRM) doctor, to those intubated by the local hospital team. MethodsRetrospective cohort study of all patients intubated in hospitals in Queensland, Australia, requiring subsequent aeromedical retrieval (including an LRM doctor) between January 2019 and December 2019. Data collected included: time of day, mission priority, geographical location of hospital, rurality, diagnosis, failure/assistance with intubation. Descriptive statistics were complemented by logistic regression analyses. Results In 2019, 684 patients were intubated in hospitals in Queensland, Australia, requiring subsequent aeromedical retrieval by a team including an LRM doctor. 131 (19.2%) were intubated by the retrieval team, and 553 (80.8%) were intubated by the local hospital team. The retrieval team was more likely to intubate as the age of the patient increased. In the most rural and remote areas, 64 (43.2%) of patients were intubated by the retrieval team, compared with 84 (56.8%) by the local team. In this subgroup of rural and remote patients, the composite diagnosis of ‘injuries, poisons, toxicology and drugs’ was significantly more likely to be associated with the local team intubating. ConclusionA retrieval team is more likely to be required for intubation of patients in rural and remote hospitals in Queensland, Australia. Service provision for critically unwell patients, coordinated by RSQ, is effective and well-managed. Rural and remote hospitals should be given special preference and consideration for timely dispatch of the retrieval team for assistance with these cases.Trial RegistrationEthical approval for this project was granted by the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Human Research Ethics Committee (LNR/2020/QRBW/64917). A waiver of consent was granted given the retrospective and deidentified nature of the study.

Human-autonomy teaming using physiological sensors poses a novel sensor fusion problem due to the dynamic nature of the sensor models and the difficulty of modeling their temporal and inter-subject variability. Developing analytical models therefore requires defining objective criteria for selection and weighting of sensors under an appropriate fusion paradigm. We investigate a selection methodology grounded in two intuitions: 1) that maximizing the relevance between sensors and target classes will enhance overall performance within a given fusion scheme; and 2) that minimizing redundancy amongst the selected sensors will not harm fusion performance and may improve precision and recall. We apply these intuitions to a human-autonomy image classification task. Preliminary results indicate strong support for the relevance hypothesis and weaker effects for the redundancy hypothesis. This relationship and its application to human-autonomy sensor fusion are explored within a framework employing three common fusion methodologies: Naive Bayes fusion, Dempster-Shafer theory, and Dynamic Belief Fusion.

Postprocess capable of converting the cutter location data to machine control data is an important interface between the NC programming design and manufacture.Due to the fact that current research on multi-axis postprocess methods mostly deals with machine tool configurations whose linear and rotational movements are orthogonal, an efficient postprocess algorithm for the five-axis machine with a tilting head is presented in this paper.DMU 80P which is a five-axis machine with a tilting head is selected as an example.Its mechanism model is proposed in this paper according to the mechanism theory.The kinematics model is established using coordinate transformation,and the solution of this model is discussed.Based on these,a window-based post-processor with multi-choice function was developed by VS2010 language.Through the verification by the commercial solid cutting software VERICUT,the feasibility of the algorithm proposed is demonstrated.At last,a real impeller cutting experiment has been conducted and the result further verifies the correctness of the algorithm.

Pulsating heat pipes are high efficiency heat transfer components having a great potential application in the field of electronic cooling and space applications. In this investigation, an experiment was conducted to study the influence of working fluid thermophysical properties on the thermal performance of flat-plate closed loop pulsating heat pipes (FCLPHP). The analysis of the forces acting on the liquid-vapor mixture shows that the surface tension, viscosity and latent heat of vaporization have important impact on the thermal performance of FCLPHP. The overall thermal resistance decreases with the decrease in surface tension, viscosity and latent heat of vaporization, leading to the heat transfer improvement of FCLPHP. An experimental correlation was developed to describe the relationship among the relative overall thermal resistance and the relative thermophysical properties. With the correlation, a sensitivity analysis was made. The results show that latent heat of vaporization is the prior factor to the all others to impact the thermal performance of FCLPHP.

Considering the specialty of the welding with weaving during the manufacturing process of the thick plate welding structure, a coordinate transformation method is put forward to simulate this process. The results indicate that the arc weaving process leads to the increasing temperature gradient in the regions near the weld bead, which also raises the peak values of transverse residual stresses. Combining the characteristic of the welding with weaving and the conversation of energy law, simplified banding heat source models are developed.