The Importance of Earth Observations and Data Collaboration within Environmental Intelligence Supporting Arctic Research

Within the IARPC Collaboration Team activities of 2016, Arctic in-situ and remote earth observations advanced topics such as :1) exploring the role for new and innovative autonomous observing technologies in the Arctic; 2) advancing catalytic national and international community based observing efforts in support of the National Strategy for the Arctic Region; and 3) enhancing the use of discovery tools for observing system collaboration such as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Arctic Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA) and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Arctic Collaborative Environment (ACE) project geo reference visualization decision support and exploitation internet based tools. Critical to the success of these earth observations for both in-situ and remote systems is the emerging of new and innovative data collection technologies and comprehensive modeling as well as enhanced communications and cyber infrastructure capabilities which effectively assimilate and dissemination many environmental intelligence products in a timely manner. The Arctic Collaborative Environment (ACE) project is well positioned to greatly enhance user capabilities for accessing, organizing, visualizing, sharing and producing collaborative knowledge for the Arctic

Development of data processing, interpretation and analysis system for the remote sensing of trace atmospheric gas species

The major emphasis is on the advancement of remote sensing technology. In particular, the gas filter correlation radiometer (GFCR) technique was applied to the measurement of trace gas species, such as carbon monoxide (CO), from airborne and Earth orbiting platforms. Through a series of low altitude aircraft flights, high altitude aircraft flights, and orbiting space platform flights, data were collected and analyzed, culminating in the first global map of carbon monoxide concentration in the middle troposphere and stratosphere. The four major areas of this remote sensing program, known as the Measurement of Air Pollution from Satellites (MAPS) experiment, are: (1) data acquisition, (2) data processing, analysis, and interpretation algorithms, (3) data display techniques, and (4) information processing

The Use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in Small Satellite Communication Systems

This paper will describe the use of digital Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) to contribute to advancing the state-of-the-art in software defined radio (SDR) transponder design for the emerging SmallSat and CubeSat industry and to provide advances for NASA as described in the TAO5 Communication and Navigation Roadmap (Ref 4). The use of software defined radios (SDR) has been around for a long time. A typical implementation of the SDR is to use a processor and write software to implement all the functions of filtering, carrier recovery, error correction, framing etc. Even with modern high speed and low power digital signal processors, high speed memories, and efficient coding, the compute intensive nature of digital filters, error correcting and other algorithms is too much for modern processors to get efficient use of the available bandwidth to the ground. By using FPGAs, these compute intensive tasks can be done in parallel, pipelined fashion and more efficiently use every clock cycle to significantly increase throughput while maintaining low power. These methods will implement digital radios with significant data rates in the X and Ka bands. Using these state-of-the-art technologies, unprecedented uplink and downlink capabilities can be achieved in a 1/2 U sized telemetry system. Additionally, modern FPGAs have embedded processing systems, such as ARM cores, integrated inside the FPGA allowing mundane tasks such as parameter commanding to occur easily and flexibly. Potential partners include other NASA centers, industry and the DOD. These assets are associated with small satellite demonstration flights, LEO and deep space applications. MSFC currently has an SDR transponder test-bed using Hardware-in-the-Loop techniques to evaluate and improve SDR technologies

Arctic Region Communications Small Satellites (ARC-Sat)

No abstract availabl

Reservoir of Bacterial Exotoxin Genes in the Environment

This is the first report of an environmental reservoir of a bacterial exotoxin gene harbored in an atypical host in the environment. Screening bacterial isolates from the environment via sea-specific PCR identified an isolate with a DNA sequence >95% identical to the Staphylococcus aureus enterotoxin A gene (_sea_). 16S DNA sequence comparisons identified the environmental isolate as a Pseusodomonad. Laboratory studies confirmed that this Pseudomonad is psychrophilic. The results indicate that the _sea_ gene is present in an alternative bacterial host, providing the first evidence for an environmental reservoir of exotoxin genes in bacteria. Transfer of these genes between phage and alternative bacterial hosts may promote the evolution of novel human diseases

Small Lean Science, Technology and Exploration Missions and Access to Space

No abstract availabl

Motivating through Managing by Walking Around

In this paper, we analyze the motivational effects of managing by walking around (MBWA), a management style that emphasizes managers’ unstructured visits to the rank and file of the company. We do so by conducting a field experiment in the retail division of a medium-sized bank located in Latin America. We find that branches increase their sales productivity by a significant ten percent in the window following the management visit, an effect that persists for at least a month after the event. Contrary to our expectations, we do not find that the incentive effect of the visit is stronger for those branches located further away from the bank’s headquarters

Lean Small Satellite Missions Require Lean Access to Space

No abstract availabl