Solar System Exploration

The present invention is an auto tracking antenna platform upon which multiple antenna elements can be mounted to track a common moving object. The antenna tracking platform generally comprises a bottom pedestal enclosing a rotary azimuth actuator for controlled-rotary motion about the single...

This tool is now being used in the flight operations environment to document the MRO and multi-mission autogen/apgen model files. These hypertext maps are also being used in multi-mission autogen/apgen training sessions. The autogen hyper text map generator parses the autogen script and the autogen...

Using collected metrology data, the ACCS system significantly increases the efficiency of the entire camera calibration process, resulting in reduced costs and turnaround time. Even in extreme conditions, the tool performs calibrations with minimal user input.

This software is used in an automated cryogenic control system developed to monitor and control the operation of small-scale crycoolers. The system was designed to automate cryogenically cooled low-noise-amplifier systems used in the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN). It automates the entire operation...

The software expands the effort of characterizing frequency stability performance of the ground system in the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN). This method significantly increases the amount of data available for analysis, roughly by two orders of magnitude; making it possible to conduct trend...

ASPEN automates space mission planning and other tasks that involve the reasoning of time, states, resources, and actions.

Patterned after the Cassini Resource Exchange (CRE), Sholtz and Associates established the Automated Credit Exchange (ACE), an Internet-based concept that automates the auctioning of pollution credits" in Southern California. An early challenge of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cassini mission was...

This software attempts to predict whether our retrieval algorithm to recover CO2 concentration from the input spectra of GOSAT (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite) will converge or diverge. This was accomplished to eliminate needless runtime on runs that would never converge. Thus, a space of 50...

Computer vision techniques have been applied to implement algorithms that detect rocks from images. At NAC nominal resolution it is possible to fully resolve boulder 2.5m or larger and detect boulders as small as 1.2m. With knowledge of the sun angles, the shadows detected from the images are used...

This software is currently being used by the Phoenix mission for landing site selection. So far 39 HiRISE imagery (> 28 GB) covering one sigma landing ellipse of the three primary landing sites have been processed and their rock distribution maps have been produced. Over 10 million hazard rocks...