Capabilities Development: From International Space Station and the Moon to Mars

The President of the United States, in signing Space Policy Directive-1, directed the NASA Administrator to lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO), the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations. NASA is charged to land American astronauts on the lunar South Pole in 2024 and to continue a campaign of sustainable lunar surface exploration in order to develop necessary technologies and capabilities to enable initial human missions to Mars. NASAs lunar surface exploration plans are part of a continuum of activities utilizing platforms in low Earth orbit (LEO), cislunar space, and the lunar surface to demonstrate advanced technologies, advance operations concepts, and develop countermeasures to lessen the impacts of the space environment and long duration exposure on the crew working in space. NASA is using a capability-driven approach to identify critical gaps to be addressed as part of a focused program to reduce risk for future deep space exploration missions building to eventual human missions to the surface of Mars. Teams of discipline experts from across NASA identify capability gaps between the current state of the art and the needs of proposed exploration missions and develop integrated strategies and roadmaps for filling those gaps. These inputs include assessment of platform needs for demonstration and testing of new capabilities. Generally, the International Space Station (ISS) and Gateway are needed for demonstration of capabilities for Mars transit, while Lunar surface activities focus on development of capabilities and operational protocols for Mars surface. This paper discusses the activities required to advance critical exploration capabilities, focusing on selection of demonstration and test location based upon the unique environments and characteristics of the ISS, Gateway, and potential lunar surface assets. The optimal strategy will be a combination of ISS/LEO, Gateway, and lunar surface testing; however, not all capabilities require a deep space exploration missions

An Analysis of a Real Mobility Trace Based on Standard Mobility Metrics

Better understanding mobility, being it from pedestrians or any other moving object, is practical and insightful. Practical due to its applications to the fundamentals of communication, with special attention to wireless communication. Insightful because it might pinpoint the pros and cons of how we are moving, or being moved, around. There are plenty of studies focused on mobility in mobile wireless networks, including the proposals of several synthetic mobility models. Getting real mobility traces is not an easy task, but there has been some efforts to provide traces to the public through repositories. Synthetic mobility models are usually analyzed through mobility metrics, which are designed to capture mobility subtleties. This work research on the applicability of some representative mobility metrics for real traces analysis. To achieve that goal, a case study is accomplished with a dataset of mobility traces of taxi cabs in the city of Rome/Italy. The results suggest that the mobility metrics under consideration are capable of capturing mobility properties which would otherwise require more sophisticated analytical approaches

Evaluation of content dissemination strategies in urban vehicular networks

The main drivers for the continuous development of Vehicularad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are safety applications and services. However, in recent years, new interests have emerged regarding the introduction of new applications and services for non-urgent content (e.g., videos, ads, sensing and touristic information) dissemination. However, there is a lack of real studies considering content dissemination strategies to understand when and to whom the content should be disseminated using real vehicular traces gathered from real vehicular networks. This work presents a realistic study of strategies for dissemination of non-urgent contente with the main goal of improving contente delivery as well as minimizing network congestion and resource usage. First, we perform an exhaustive network characterization. Then, several content strategies are specified and evaluated in different scenarios (city center and parking lot). All the obtained results show that there are two content distribution strategies that clearly set themselves apart due to their superior performance: Local Rarest Bundle First and Local Rarest Generation First.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Exploring Interactions in Vehicular Networks

International audienceVehicular networks are networks comprised by vehicles trav-eling cities and highways. During their trajectories, these vehicles interact with other vehicles and road side units in order to make safer and enjoyable trac. These interactions may be influenced by several factors. To mention a few: vehicle speed, roads condition, time of day and weather. Moreover, driver behavior and its interests can influence in vehicle features. In this context, the Vehicular Social Networks arise as a new perspective to vehicular networks, where the vehicles " socialize " and share common interests. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of vehicles using two mobility scenarios, in order to classify them according to the interactions performed, identifying common interests and similar routines. Thus, we use metrics of complex networks and statistical techniques. Results prove the existence of routines and human features in Vehicular Networks

Forensic Tracking and Surveillance

Digital forensics is an emerging field that has uniquely brought together academics, practitioners and law enforcement. Research in this area was inspired by the numerous challenges posed by the increased sophistication of criminal tools. Traditionally, digital forensics has been confined to the extraction of digital evidence from electronic devices. This direct extraction of digital evidence, however, no longer suffices. Indeed, extracting completely raw data without further processing and/or filtering is, in some cases, useless. These problems can be tackled by the so-called ``computational forensics" where the reconstructs evidence are undertaken further processing. One important application of computational forensics is criminal tracking, which we collectively call ``forensic tracking" and is the main subject of this thesis. This thesis adopts an algorithmic approach to investigate the feasibility of conducting forensic tracking in various environments and settings. Unlike conventional tracking, forensic tracking has to be passive such that the target (who is usually a suspect) should not be aware of the tracking process. We begin by adopting pedestrian setting and propose several online (real-time) forensic tracking algorithms to track a single or multiple targets passively. Beside the core tracking algorithms, we also propose other auxiliary algorithms to improve the robustness and resilience of tracking. We then extend the scope and consider vehicular forensic tracking, where we investigate both online and offline tracking. In online vehicular tracking, we also propose algorithms for motion prediction to estimate the near future movement of target vehicles. Offline vehicular tracking, on the other hand, entails the post-hoc extraction and probabilistic reconstruction of vehicular traces, which we adopt Bayesian approach for. Finally, the contributions of the thesis concludes with building an algorithmic solution for multi-modal tracking, which is a mixed environment combining both pedestrian and vehicular settings

Automation and Control of Vehicle Flow using Raspberry Pi

The number of vehicles in the world's cities increases exponentially, this is the case of Latin American cities, and particularly in the city of Portoviejo, province of Manabí in Ecuador, has been growing considerably in recent years, the city has been expanding towards its surroundings. Due to this big number of vehicles, which also adds little planning to improve the use of public transport, little planning to improve urban vehicular flow, the centralization of administrative area and main shops in the city, are the main reasons why in certain times of the day the traffic can become a little slow. Universidad Técnica de Manabí, has the objective of modernizing the improvement of vehicular flow in its surroundings and in addition to automating the vehicular entrance to its facilities through the automation of the respective permit for visiting drivers and staff. In this paper we show the methodology and tools necessary to create a system to control vehicles entry and exit using a Raspberry Pi, an analysis of the different technologies that can be used to improve vehicular flow is also included, approaching the Internet of Things