NASA Systems Autonomy Demonstration Program: A Step Toward Space Station Automation

<div class="htmlview paragraph">The development of virtual environment technology at NASA Ames Research Center and other research institutions has created opportunities for enhancing human performance. The application of this technology to training astronaut flight crews planning to go onboard the International Space Station has already begun at the NASA Johnson Space Center. A unique application of virtual environments to crew training is envisioned at NASA Ames Research Center which combines state of the art technology with haptic feedback to create a method for training crewmembers on critical life sciences operations which require fine motor skills. This paper describes such a concept, known as the Virtual Glovebox, as well as surveys other applications of virtual environments to astronaut crew training.</div>

<div class="htmlview paragraph">The Space Station Projects Office (SSPO) at NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC) is responsible for operational plans for plant and animal research in the Life Sciences Research Facility (LSRF) aboard the Space Station. As a planning database, the SSPO uses scientists' descriptions of experiment operations, configured into scenarios for typical 90-day missions. Both research tasks and tasks involving specimen care and housekeeping are included. Four of these scenarios were used to test a computer program named <i>OpSim</i>, developed by the ARC Space Human Factors Office specifically to simulate Space Station operations. The tasks for each scenario were set up for inputting to <i>OpSim</i>, simulations were executed and program output was analyzed. Some scenarios were simulated more than once, at different levels of crew time availability and of laboratory automation. The test showed that <i>OpSim</i> gives an informative picture of mission operations, and that it responds appropriately to changes in variables such as crew availability and automation. <i>OpSim</i> should become widely used to model Space Station operations and develop realistic plans.</div>

<div class="htmlview paragraph">In accordance with a national commitment to an operational manned Space Station by the early 1990's, much of NASA's advanced space technology effort is being focused on specific Space Station requirements. In the area of thermal management, capabilities such as evolutionary on-orbit growth, indefinite life through maintenance, and flexibility to accommodate a time-varying complement of users constitute requirements that are radically different from those of previous or current missions. A generic thermal management technology development program, sponsored by the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology, has been under way at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) for several years. During 1984, this program was significantly augmented to address specific Space Station needs in the areas of prototype hardware development, ground test-bed demonstrations, and Space Shuttle Orbiter flight experiments. A short discussion of the JSC program history is presented, a brief review of the current status of several ongoing studies and hardware demonstration tasks is provided, and future technology development plans are discussed.</div>

The Robotic Systems Technology Branch at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) is currently developing robot systems to reduce the Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) and planetary exploration burden on astronauts. One such system, Robonaut, is capable of interfacing with external Space Station systems that currently have only human interfaces. Robonaut is human scale, anthropomorphic, and designed to approach the dexterity of a space-suited astronaut. Robonaut can perform numerous human rated tasks, including actuating tether hooks, manipulating flexible materials, soldering wires, grasping handrails to move along space station mockups, and mating connectors. More recently, developments in autonomous control and perception for Robonaut have enabled dexterous, real-time man-machine interaction. Robonaut is now capable of acting as a practical autonomous assistant to the human, providing and accepting tools by reacting to body language. A versatile, vision-based algorithm for matching range silhouettes is used for monitoring human activity as well as estimating tool pose.

Comparison of Artemis I Radiation Measurements with Orion EFT-1 and ISS Data Ramona Gaza, Ph.D. On behalf of the Space Radiation Analysis Group Leidos, Space Exploration and Mission Operations, Houston, TX 77058, USA Space Radiation Analysis Group, NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX 77058, USA Corresponding author: ramona.gaza-1@nasa.gov The first major spaceflight of NASA's Artemis program to return humans to the Moon, the Artemis I uncrewed mission, has been flown successfully November 16 - December 11, 2022, for a total mission duration of 25.5 days. The Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG) at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) has provided a suit of passive radiation detectors and active instruments in support of multiple Artemis I Science Payloads. The same passive technology has been flying in support of the International Space Station (ISS) for more than 20 years and has been successfully flown on the NASA Orion Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) launched on December 5, 2014, with a duration of only 4.5 hours. The Orion EFT-1 trajectory included two orbits around the Moon with a high apogee which was different from the from the Artemis I distant retrograde orbit trajectory, resulting in a significant radiation exposure difference through the Van Allen belts. On ISS, the average daily dose is modulated by the 11-year solar cycle and solar minimum dose values will differ from solar maximum daily doses. This presentation will include an overview of the Artemis 1 science payloads radiation data in comparison with the Orion EFT-1 and ISS measurements.

In support of propulsion system thruster development activity for Space Station Freedom (SSF), NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) conducted a hydrazine thruster technology demonstration program. The goal of this program was to identify impulse life capability of state-of-the-art long life hydrazine thrusters nominally rated for 50 pounds thrust at 300 psia supply pressure. The SSF propulsion system requirement for impulse life of this thruster class is 1.5 million pounds-seconds, corresponding to a throughput of approximately 6400 pounds of propellant. Long life thrusters were procured from The Marquardt Company, Hamilton Standard, and Rocket Research Company, Testing at JSC was completed on the thruster designs to quantify life while simulating expected thruster firing duty cycles and durations for SSF. This paper presents a review of the SSF propulsion system hydrazine thruster requirements, summaries of the three long life thruster designs procured by JSC and acceptance test results for each thruster, the JSC thruster life evaluation test program, and the results of the JSC test program.

This paper describes a design effort for a prototype ultra-wideband (UWB) tracking system that is currently under development at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). The system is being studied for use in tracking of lunar/Mars rovers during early exploration missions when satellite navigation systems are not available. The UWB technology is exploited to implement the tracking system due to its properties such as high data rate, fine time resolution, low power spectral density and multipath immunity. A two-cluster prototype design using commercially available UWB products is proposed to implement the angle of arrival (AOA) tracking methodology in this research effort. Simulations show that the AOA algorithm can achieve the fine tracking resolution with low noise time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimates. The outdoor tests demonstrate the UWB tracking feasibility.

A new 20 K helium refrigerator installed at NASA Johnson Space Center's Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL) was successfully commissioned and tested in 2012. The refrigerator is used to create a deep space environment within SESL's Chamber A to perform ground testing of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The chamber previously and currently still has helium cryo-pumping panels (CPP) and liquid nitrogen shrouds used to create low earth orbit environments. Now with the new refrigerator and new helium shrouds the chamber can create a deep space environment. The process design, system analysis, specification development, and commissioning oversight were performed by the cryogenics department at Jefferson Lab, while the contracts and system installation was performed by the ESC group at JSC. Commissioning data indicate an inverse coefficient of performance better than 70 W/W for a 18 kW load at 20 K (accounting for liquid nitrogen pre-cooling power) that remains essentially constant down to one third of this load. Even at 10 percent of the maximum capacity, the performance is better than 150 W/W at 20 K. The refrigerator exceeded all design goals and demonstrated the ability to support a wide load range from 10 kW at 15 K to 100 kW at 100 K. The refrigerator is capable of operating at any load temperature from 15 K to ambient with tight temperature stability. The new shroud (23 metric tons of aluminum) can be cooled from room temperature to 20 K in 24 hours. This paper will outline the design, project execution and commissioning results.

Direct characterization of potentially habitable terrestrial exoplanets around Sun-like stars requires extremely precise instrumentation capable of measuring a planet-star contrast ratio of 10-10. This instrumentation challenge pushes the limits of optical technology, with state-of-the-art coronagraphs requiring extremely precise wavefront control and large, complex, and expensive instrument designs. These bulk optics coronagraph instruments typically have limited measurable optical bandwidths and high sensitivity to the overall telescope pupil design (i.e. on-axis vs off-axis telescope configurations) and high sensitivity to optical aberrations. The AstroPIC project is applying programmable integrated photonics to develop a new kind of coronagraph instrument that is capable of reaching the theoretical limits of optimal coronagraph performance. This will result in a coronagraph instrument that is orders of magnitude smaller, less massive, and more flexible compared to traditional bulk optics designs, with the goal of increasing the Exo-Earth science yield of NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory flagship mission. The AstroPIC project is leveraging commercial silicon photonics fabrication to develop a coronagraph instrument that couples light from a telescope pupil plane into a mesh of integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometers on a photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The coupling is achieved by using a lenslet array to sample and focus the telescope pupil into an array of grating coupler waveguide inputs on the PIC, as shown in Figure 1a. Once the light from the telescope pupil is coupled onto the PIC, the interferometer mesh can be controlled by tuning thermal phase shifters in each interferometer to implement a mode-sorting algorithm in order to separate the starlight and planet light modes at high contrast levels. An integrated photonic testbed at NASA Ames Research Center is being developed to demonstrate coupling from a realistic telescope pupil into the PIC and will be used to characterize the contrast, throughput, and optical bandwidth of the coronagraph instrument. Figure 1b shows the design of the testbed, which will be used to experiment with different control algorithms for setting the tunable phase shifters in the photonic mesh and assess the factors limiting contrast on the chip to inform future iterations of the PIC design. Figure 1: (a) Diagram of AstroPIC instrument concept coupling the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) pupil into an array of grating couplers using a microlens array. A mesh of Mach Zehnder Interferometers (MZIs) are tuned to separate starlight spatial modes from planet spatial modes. (b) Design of integrated photonics testbed under development at NASA Ames Research Center. The AstroPIC project has also developed simulations of the PIC coronagraph instrument concept in order to predict the coupling from the telescope pupil into the chip and simulate the photonic mesh behavior. Specifically, we are studying the application of the AstroPIC instrument concept to the NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) flagship mission, which is currently in the pre-design phase. These simulations have shown that the AstroPIC concept is very robust to telescope pupil shape and aberrations for both on- and off-axis telescope configurations, and that the potential science yield of the AstroPIC coronagraph is very high even for relatively small numbers of input couplers. We find that the AstroPIC concept is particularly advantageous for accessing planets located at small inner working angles relative to the host star, which is extremely challenging for traditional coronagraph designs. Figure 2 shows these simulation results for an example HWO-like pupil, summarizing the predicted exo-Earth science yield as a function of (a) number of PIC input grating coupler channels, (b) starlight suppression order, and (c) end to end transmission efficiency. Figure 2: Predicted number of exo-Earths characterized over the HWO mission lifetime as a function of (a) number of input grating coupler PIC channels, (b) PIC starlight suppression order (number of output channels that are designated as starlight vs signal light), and (c) end-to-end transmission efficiency of the PIC instrument. These simulations are conducted using the FRIDAY yield calculation package.In this presentation, we will describe the AstroPIC instrument concept and how programmable photonics can be used to implement the optimal coronagraph operator. We will then present the development of an integrated photonics testbed at NASA Ames Research Center, which is being built to demonstrate the AstroPIC concept with a realistic telescope pupil directly coupled into the integrated photonic instrument. We will also review recent simulation results predicting the performance of next-generation AstroPIC instrument designs. Finally, we will discuss the next steps needed to mature this technology for future space telescope missions and ground telescope applications, including incorporating novel photonic component designs into the mesh architecture to improve the throughput and optical bandwidth of the instrument.

In this work we present a molecular level study of N2+N collisions, focusing on excitation of internal energy modes and non-equilibrium dissociation. The computation technique used here is the direct molecular simulation (DMS) method and the molecular interactions have been modeled using an ab−initio potential energy surface (PES) developed at NASA's Ames Research Center. We carried out vibrational excitation calculations between 5000K and 30000K and found that the characteristic vibrational excitation time for the N + N2 process was an order of magnitude lower than that predicted by the Millikan and White correlation. It is observed that during vibrational excitation the high energy tail of the vibrational energy distribution gets over populated first and the lower energy levels get populated as the system evolves. It is found that the non-equilibrium dissociation rate coefficients for the N + N2 process are larger than those for the N2 + N2 process. This is attributed to the non-equilibrium vibrational energy distributions for the N + N2 process being less depleted than that for the N2 +N2 process. For an isothermal simulation we find that the probability of dissociation goes as 1/T(sub tr) for molecules with internal energy (epsilon(sub int)) less than approximately 9.9eV, while for molecules with epsilon (sub int) greater than 9.9eV the dissociation probability was weakly dependent on translational temperature of the system. We compared non-equilibrium dissociation rate coefficients and characteristic vibrational excitation times obtained by using the ab-initio PES developed at NASA's Ames Research Center to those obtained by using an ab-initio PES developed at the University of Minnesota. Good agreement was found between the macroscopic properties and molecular level description of the system obtained by using the two PESs.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was contracted to assist NASA – Johnson Space Center (NASA-JSC) with its investigation into why the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry on February 1, 2003. The main task of this contract was to perform impact experiments on various space shuttle components to determine the effect on various shuttle thermal protection systems, and to determine if such an impact could have been the cause of the Columbia accident. Subsequent to the accident investigation work, SwRI has continued to support the impact research to assist NASA with its Return-to-Flight program. Impacts of various impactor types (projectiles made of external tank foam, ablator material from the solid rocket boosters, ice, Tyvek cover material, Fibrous Insulation Blanket outer fabric, and metal) on various thermal protection systems (targets consisting of reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) wing leading edge (WLE) panels, shuttle thermal tiles and blankets, carrier panels, the main landing gear door thermal barrier (MLGD-TB), shuttle windows, external tank protuberances (feedlines, bellows, etc), and the RCC nosecone were examined. This paper describes the details of these impact studies.

Geographical ReviewVolume 91, Issue 1-2 p. 252-261 A GLOBE THAT FILLS THE SKY: GEOGRAPHY FROM THE SPACE SHUTTLE THOMAS D. JONES, THOMAS D. JONES Dr. Jones is an astronaut with the nasa Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77059.Search for more papers by this author THOMAS D. JONES, THOMAS D. JONES Dr. Jones is an astronaut with the nasa Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77059.Search for more papers by this author First published: 21 April 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2001.tb00479.x AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume91, Issue1-2January‐April 2001Pages 252-261 RelatedInformation

Protecting Lunar Colonies From Space Radiation

Hypervelocity impact testing of the pressurized mating adapters for the International Space Station

Wearable technology used in spaceflight has many applications. Electronic sensing, interaction, and computing designed into comfortable on-body form factors has the potential to augment human capabilities while improving safety, efficiency, autonomy, and ergonomics. This paper discusses our design methods and approach to improving the E-SEWT (Electronic-textile System for the Evaluation of Wearable Technology) project for The Wearable Electronics Application and Research Lab (WEAR Lab) in the Avionic Systems Division at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC).The E-SEWT project is a design-lead study in the form and function of a reconfigurable smart garment to be worn on board the International Space Station (ISS). This specialized garment consists of a base unit and removable sensor components called swatches. This configuration allows the garment to be customized by the wearer to meet their needs to complete a particular task or to suit their personal preferences. The values of a smart garment with a variety of reconfigurable modular units include customization between wearers and tasks, ease in replacing parts and/or updating components for both replacement and testing and flexibility in prototyping and eventually manufacturing. The focus of the design solutions evolved through a process of interacting with test users with a focus on mobility, ergonomics comfort, and ease of use while maintaining optimal data flow.