Nasa Technology News

The DIY Podcast topic module about fitness explains that space station crew members use treadmill exercises to maintain bone mass, cardiovascular fitness and muscle endurance. The device that's mentioned and demonstrated is the Treadmill Vibration Isolation System, or TVIS. Now, a new treadmill to go along with TVIS has been added to the station, and you may want to include it in your classroom's podcast about fitness.

A new Progress cargo resupply vehicle launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station at 9:14 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 14. Less than nine minutes later, the ISS Progress 35 reached its preliminary orbit and deployed its solar arrays and navigational antennas.

Progress 35 is set to dock to the station on Saturday, Oct. 17 at 9:41 p.m. with more than two tons of oxygen, air, propellant and other supplies and equipment aboard.

Once the Expedition 21 crew members have unloaded the cargo, Progress 35 will be filled with trash and station discards. It will be undocked from the station and like its predecessors deorbited to burn in the Earth's atmosphere.

But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module.

This challenge originated in 2007 as the Personal Air Vehicle Challenge and in 2008 it was called the General Aviation Technology Challenge. In those challenges the teams demonstrated light aircraft that incorporate improvements to maximize fuel efficiency, reduce noise and improve safety. These innovations are intended to result in aircraft with less negative impacts on the environment and on their communities. These are features that might be applied in the full range of private, commercial and military aircraft of the future. Awards totaling $250,000 were made in the 2007 competition and awards totaling $97,000 were made in 2008.

To compute the equivalence, the energy content of the electricity or fuel will be compared to one gallon of gasoline. The expectation is that electric, bio-fueled and hybrid-powered aircraft will compete. The competition will not be held until the summer of 2011, so that teams have time to develop and test truly novel aircraft.

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 and a series of subsequent legislation recognizes transfer of Federally owned or originated technology to be a national priority and the mission of each Federal agency. Accordingly, NASA is obliged to provide for the widest practicable dissemination of information concerning results of NASA's activities. The legislation specifically mandates that each Federal agency have a formal technology transfer program, and take an active role in transferring technology to the private sector and state and local governments for the purposes of commercial and other application of the technology for the national benefit.

Licensing terms are negotiated on a case-by-case basis, although technology fields of use are defined as narrowly as practical in every case; exclusive licenses are uncommon, but still possible in exceptional cases. IPP also facilitates the reporting of new technologies by both NASA and contractor inventors, as well as assesses the commercial potential and strategic value of those technologies to NASA's missions. Therefore, IPP facilitates the protection of NASA's rights in intellectual property to which it has title, thus providing the basis for licensing and technology transfer.

Nasa Technology News: The deadline is fast-approaching for undergraduate students to submit their team proposals to NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program. Proposals must be received by 11:59 p.m. CDT , Wednesday, Oct. 28.

The aircraft will fly approximately 30 roller-coaster-like climbs and dips during experiment flights to produce periods of weightlessness and hyper-gravity ranging from 0 g to 2 g.

All applicants must be full-time students, U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old. NASA will announce selected teams Dec. 9. Teams will fly in the summer of 2010. Selected teams also may invite a full-time, accredited journalist to fly with them and document the team's experiment and experiences.

Bringing ET-134 to Kennedy Space Center has one purpose; launch STS-130 to the International Space Station. NASA's top priority today is to fly the space shuttle safely and complete construction of the space station. It's been a long road getting from there to here!

The over flight will be fast; and the time of day is important because space station is best viewed just before dawn or the beginning of morning nautical twilight and just after fading evening light or the ending of evening nautical twilight; perhaps the station will approach from the southwest, sail over your town in 2-5 minutes at 220 miles above you and depart to the Northeast.

When I joined NASA in 1991, I was immediately joined at the hip with space station. It has been part of my daily duties ever since in one public affairs capacity or another. The space station has evolved from development models and design charts to real hardware during the intervening years. It is simply a marvel, flying through space at 17,000 miles per hour, brighter than the stars; so much so you might say it is a star...well, it is a Star!

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs provide an opportunity for small, high technology companies and research institutions (RI) to participate in Government sponsored research and development (R&D) efforts in key technology areas.

If you are a small business concern with 500 or fewer employees, or a non-profit RI, such as a university or a research laboratory with ties to a Small Business Concern (SBC), then NASA encourages you to learn more about these programs and significant sources of seed funding for the development of your innovations. The SBIR Phase 1 contracts last for 12 months with a maximum funding of $100,000, and Phase 2 contracts last for 24 months with a maximum funding of $600,000.

Much of what we gain from our space exploration is in the scientific and technological progress that comes in the process of doing it. Many of those technologies are the direct result of NASA supported funding for both internal R&D projects performed at NASA centers and external research from the small business community.

For NASA, Technology infusion is the process of strategically binding technical needs and potential solutions. These innovative solutions, be they hardware or software; enhancing or enabling; near-term or far-term; low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) or High TRL, NASA internally or externally developed; must all be managed through some aspect of transition from their originating source to the targeted challenges within NASA's programs and projects.

The IPP, Technology Infusion Element includes the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) , the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) and the IPP Seed Fund . Together these programs provide pathways from these originating sources to IPPs' technology portfolio, and provide enabling infrastructures that enhance the infusion of these technologies in NASA missions and programs. These programs allow the agency to implement successful technology

Nineteen teams pushed their robot competitors to the limit, and three teams claimed a total of $750,000 in NASA prizes at this year's Regolith Excavation Challenge on Oct. 18. This is the first time in the competition's three-year history that any team qualified for a cash prize, the largest NASA has awarded to date.

After two days of intense competition hosted at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., organizers conferred first place prize of $500,000 to Paul's Robotics of Worcester, Mass. Terra Engineering of Gardena, Calif., was a three-time returning competitor and was awarded second place prize of $150,000, and Team Braundo of Rancho Palos Verde, Calif., took the third place of $100,000 as a first-time competitor.

Competitors were required to use mobile, robotic digging machines capable of excavating at least 330 pounds of simulated moon dirt, known as regolith, and depositing it into a container in 30 minutes or less. The rules required the remotely controlled vehicles to contain their own power sources and weigh no more than 176 pounds.

The winning excavator lifted 1,103 pounds within the allotted time. Runners-up excavated 595 pounds and 580 pounds, respectively. Team E-REX of Little Rock, Ark., earned a special mention for transferring the most regolith in a single deposit -- 165 pounds.

"It's really encouraging that we saw three teams achieve the minimum requirements and shows that innovation is not only alive but growing," said Lynn Baroff, executive director of the California Space Education and Workforce Institute, who lead the panel of judges. "It's really great that through this competition NASA is actively seeking to recognize citizen inventors from across the nation whose ideas may one day contribute to space exploration."

The Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) develops new technologies that will enable NASA to conduct future human exploration missions, while reducing mission risk and cost. The primary customers of the ETDP are the designers of flight systems in the Constellation Systems Program. By maturing new technologies to the level of demonstration in a relevant environment early enough to support a flight system's Preliminary Design Review (PDR), NASA can significantly reduce both cost and risk.

ETDP is currently maturing near-term technologies to enable first flight of the Orion in 2014, and developing long-lead technologies needed for the lunar exploration missions no later than 2020.

The projects in the ETDP were formulated to address the high priority technology needs for lunar exploration identified by the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), with further refinement by the Lunar Architecture Team (LAT). All technology projects are managed at NASA Centers.

A successful NASA flight test has shown that a spacecraft returning to Earth can use an inflatable heat shield to slow and protect itself as it enters the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. This was the first time anyone has successfully flown an inflatable reentry capsule, according to engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center .

The Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment, or IRVE, was vacuum-packed into a 15-inch diameter payload "shroud" and launched on a small sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. Nitrogen inflated the 10-foot (3 m) diameter heat shield, made of several layers of silicone-coated industrial fabric, to a mushroom shape in space several minutes after liftoff.

"This was a huge success," said Mary Beth Wusk, IRVE project manager, based at Langley . "IRVE was a small-scale demonstrator. Now that we've proven the concept, we'd like to build more advanced aeroshells capable of handling higher heat rates."

The Black Brant 9 rocket took about four minutes to lift the experiment to an altitude of 131 miles (211 km). Less than a minute later it was released from its cover and started inflating on schedule at 124 miles (199.5 km) up. The inflation of the shield took less than 90 seconds.

"Everything performed well even into the subsonic range where we weren't sure what to expect," said Neil Cheatwood, IRVE principal investigator and chief scientist for the Hypersonics Project of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Fundamental Aeronautics Program. "The telemetry looks good. The inflatable bladder held up well."

Inflatable heat shields hold promise for future planetary missions, according to researchers. To land more mass on Mars at higher surface elevations, for instance, mission planners need to maximize the drag area of the entry system.

The view from the gondola of a hot-air balloon gives one a glimpse into the reasons why ballooning is a popular hobby, according to Tom Tschida, a photographer at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, Calif.

"I hung out with the crew as the balloon was readied," Tschida recalled. "The pilot, Randy Wright, briefed the Peacock's crew about what would happen. A set of stairs was brought over for us to climb into the balloon. The crew did everything else," he added.

Tschida's photographic creative juices also flowed in different ways in the air. "Up in the balloon, I naturally shot more wide than I did on the ground to take advantage of the different perspectives," he said. "From the air you experience and see the whole thing and the view - which must be the biggest draw for balloonists."

Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, announced a new government cloud computing initiative at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., on Sept. 15, 2009.

Kundra unveiled the new Apps.gov platform, an online storefront for federal agencies to browse and purchase cloud-based information technology (IT) services and predicted it would significantly lower government costs and increase innovation.

Scientist and engineers are adjusting LRO's orbit to have it fly its closest approach to the Cabeus target site just 90 seconds after the Centaur impacts the lunar surface.

During and after impact LRO's LAMP far UV spectrometer will search for evidence of significant water ice or water signatures and how they evolve in the moon's atmosphere. LRO's Diviner radiometer will peer into the impact site to measure the heating effects caused by impact and how the temperature changes over time. LRO will continue to study the impact site using its suite of instruments long after the dust settles.

A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton , Va. , have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: "If you can slice it, we can build it."

"You start with a drawing of the part you want to build, you push a button, and out comes the part," said Karen Taminger, the technology lead for the Virginia-based research project that is part of NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Program.

In reality, EBF3 works in a vacuum chamber, where an electron beam is focused on a constantly feeding source of metal, which is melted and then applied as called for by a drawing—one layer at a time—on top of a rotating surface until the part is complete.

While the options for using EBF3 are more limited than what science fiction allows, the potential for the process is no less out of this world, with promising relevance in aviation, spaceflight—even the medical community, Taminger said.

To make EBF3 work there are two key requirements: A detailed three-dimensional drawing of the object to be created must be available, and the material the object is to be made from must be compatible for use with an electron beam

The huge assembly standing in Northrop Grumman Corporation's high bay looks a lot like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, but it's a full-scale simulator of the space telescope's key elements.

"Having a functioning demonstration article enables us to see how components, which were developed and tested individually, fit together as a whole system," said Martin Mohan, Webb Telescope program manager for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems sector. "The simulator is an effective risk reduction tool to help us validate design approaches early."

John E. Decker, Deputy Associate Director for the Webb Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said, "Simulators are important for the development of any spacecraft, and they are absolutely critical for one with the size and complexity of the Webb Telescope. We have already learned many important lessons from this simulator, and we expect to learn many more."

Northrop has conducted a variety of tests with the simulator, including checking the clearances between sunshield membranes and the telescope to evaluating membrane management hardware and simulating the backplane support structure's alignment measurements for future testing.

On certain nights, an arresting green line pierces the sky above NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , Md. It's a laser directed at the moon, visible when the air is humid. No, we're not repelling an invasion. Instead, we're tracking our own spacecraft.

The first laser ranging effort to track a spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit on a daily basis produces distance measurements accurate to about four inches (10 centimeters). For comparison, the microwave stations tracking LRO measure its range to a precision of about 65 feet (20 meters).

"Current lunar maps are not as accurate as we'll need to return people safely to the moon," said Ronald Zellar of NASA Goddard, team lead for the LRO laser ranging system. "In order to make an accurate map, first you need to know where you are. Knowing the precise range to LRO is necessary for its instruments to produce much more accurate maps, with errors reduced to the size of humans or rovers."

"A further benefit of laser ranging to LRO is that it can improve knowledge of the moon's orientation and gravity, which are central to understanding its interior structure and to precision navigation," said Gregory Neumann, a Geophysicist at NASA Goddard.

Engineers use a telescope at the ground station on the Goddard campus to direct laser pulses toward LRO. The range to LRO is calculated by measuring how long it took the laser to reach the spacecraft.

The laser ranging to LRO is one way, meaning that the laser is directed at LRO, which records the time of arrival and sends the data back to ground stations on Earth by its radio telemetry link. This is the first time repeated, one-way tracking has been used for spacecraft ranging. Typical satellite laser ranging, used for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, is two way, meaning the laser is simply reflected off the spacecraft and the time of flight recorded when it returns to the ground.

The advantage of LRO's one-way system is that a less expensive, lower-power laser system can be used -- especially important since the distance to LRO is hundreds of times greater than that to most Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Also, only a small receiver is needed on the spacecraft instead of a large retro-reflector array.

Launch scrubs are nothing new at NASA's Kennedy Space Center . In fact, there have been 116 space shuttle scrubs; 72 for technical reasons and 45 for inclement weather.

During the summer, bad weather, particularly lightning, seems to strike as the countdown clock nears zero. Maybe it's because Kennedy and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station are well within what meteorologists call, "Lightning Alley."

Of course, NASA already can locate lightning strikes when they hit the ground with the Cloud to Ground Lightning Surveillance System, or CGLSS, and the National Lightning Detection Network. The agency also can locate lightning channels in a cloud with the Lightning Detection and Ranging Network, or LDAR II.

But according to Professor Tom Marshall of the University of Mississippi , humans have yet to truly figure out lightning.

So, Marshall and one of his senior students, Lauren Vickers, visited Kennedy to test a new antenna that might someday measure the level of individual lightning flashes and their return strokes. A measurement that could give launch managers information to make their "go-no go" decisions easier... decisions that might save money.

"We're trying to extend some measurement of cloud-to-ground lightning here at Kennedy," Marshall said. "We may find a return stroke is larger, and therefore, one for us to target." The strength of these strokes might someday determine if future launch vehicles, such as Ares I, must undergo testing if lightning strikes nearby.

"What Professor Marshall's work is going to enable us to do is determine more precisely than we can now exactly where charges are located in clouds and how big those charges are when lightning strikes," said Dr. Frank Merceret, director of research for the Kennedy Weather Office. "The problem lies in the fact that NASA does not know where the charge center is located in the clouds.

"The Lightning Advisory Panel (LAP), which develops and recommends our lightning launch commit criteria (LLCC), has been wrestling with that issue for quite some time and his project may give the panel information that will help provide more accurate lightning readings before a launch."

A launch vehicle traveling through an anvil cloud, a cloud mostly made of ice that forms on top of thunderstorms, can trigger lightning at much lower electric field levels than natural lightning requires. This triggered lightning can damage vehicles or its cargo. In 1987, an Atlas-Centaur rocket was destroyed when its launch triggered such lightning. To prevent such accidents, the LLCC -- a strict set of lightning avoidance rules -- was modified by the LAP.

The LAP, which is made up of top lightning experts from various government agencies and academia, continues to review and modify those criteria for both the Eastern and Western ranges.

Although some launch weather guidelines involving shuttles and expendable rockets may differ because a distinction is made for the individual characteristics of each, the LLCC are identical for all vehicles.

"If the shuttle is on the launch pad and a lightning strike occurs nearby, we need to know the distance from the shuttle and the intensity of the lightning to determine if there are any possible effects on the vehicle. If the lightning was close enough and intense enough, operations, including a launch, will be delayed so the team can ensure the shuttle was not damaged," said Kathy Winters, shuttle launch weather officer.

Sniffing out any potential contaminants on the International Space Station where it was stationed for the last six months, the JPL-built electronic nose, or ENose, is homeward bound.

While on the space station, the ENose sampled the air with 32 sensors that can detect various odors and pinpoint which ones are dangerous to humans. The sleek, shoebox-sized ENose, the third generation of its kind, monitored the air for 10 contaminants continuously.

"Our six-month test went very well. The ENose identified formaldehyde, Freon 218, methanol and ethanol, but all of them were at harmless levels," said Amy Ryan, principal investigator of the ENose at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Ryan built the ENose at JPL and has managed the project from its early beginnings in 1996. "An instrument like this could one day remain on the Space Station and monitor air quality in real-time."

In the future, the ENose could be used in monitoring crew cabins for vehicles to the moon and other destinations or be stationed on a moon base. Other potential applications include detecting a smoldering fire before it erupts, sniffing for unexploded land mines and monitoring for chemical spills in a work area. There are also possible applications in medical diagnosis.

"A human nose is not always as sensitive to chemicals as the ENose and our noses cannot even detect some hazardous chemicals," said Ryan. "The ENose can smell trouble and give people advance warning before contamination levels cause harm."

The ENose was flown to the International Space Station by the Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-126 mission in December 2008. It is set to return home today on the Space Shuttle Discovery STS-128, after its 13-day flight.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is starting to come together. A major component of the telescope, the Integrated Science Instrument Module structure, recently arrived at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , Md. for testing in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility.

The Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM, is an important component of the Webb telescope. The ISIM includes the structure, four scientific instruments or cameras, electronics, harnesses, and other components.

When fully assembled, the ISIM will be the size of a small room with the structure acting as a skeleton supporting all of the instruments. Ray Lundquist, ISIM Systems Engineer, at NASA Goddard, commented that "The ISIM structure is truly a one-of-a-kind item. There is no second ISIM being made."

Now that the structure has arrived at Goddard, it will undergo rigorous qualification testing to demonstrate its ability to survive the launch and extreme cold of space, and to precisely hold the science instruments in the correct position with respect to the telescope. Once the ISIM structure passes its qualification testing, the process of integrating into it all of the other ISIM Subsystems, including the Science Instruments, will begin.

In an unpublished paper, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara describe a four-month study in which they connected their servers to a collection of compromised computers known as the Mebroot botnet. Among their findings, the researchers discovered that, while the seedier sites on the Internet--those hosting porn and illegal downloads--were most effective at redirecting users to a malicious download site, business sites were more common among the compromised referrers.

First discovered by researchers in late 2007, the Mebroot network uses compromised websites to redirect visitors to centralized download servers that attempt to infect the victim's computer. The malicious software, named for its tactic of infecting a Windows computer's master boot record (MBR), shows signs of professional programming, including a rapid cycle of debugging, researchers say.

Newcomers to the mobile-phone market are heavy more wireless Web access at the expense of the phone makers that have been around for a while, according to a new report from AdMob. AdMob serves ads to 9,000 mobile Web sites and 3,000 applications. It tallies the types of phones that are querying those sites and releases periodic reports on its findings.

In August, AdMob found that 40 percent of queries came from iPhones, up from 33 percent six months ago. Android users hitting AdMob sites grew to 7 percent of users, up from 2 percent in February. The Palm Pre -- which only just launched in June -- had 4 percent of traffic in August.