27 research outputs found
Civil Service Workforce Market Supply and the Effect on the Cost Estimating Relationships (CERs) that may effect the Productivity Factors for Future NASA Missions
The upcoming retirement of the Baby Boomers on the horizon will leave a performance gap between younger generation (the future NASA decision makers) and the gray beards. This paper will reflect on the average age of workforce across NASA Centers, the Aerospace Industry and other Government Agencies, like DoD. This papers will dig into Productivity and Realization Factors and how they get applied to bimonthly (payroll data) for true FTE calculations that could be used at each of the NASA Centers and other business systems that are on the forefront in being implemented. This paper offers some comparative costs solutions, from simple - full time equivalent (FTE) cost estimating relationships CERs, to complex - CERs for monthly time-phasing activities for small research projects that start and get completed within a government fiscal year. This paper will present the results of a parametric study investigating the cost-effectiveness of different alternatives performance based cost estimating relationships (CERs) and how they get applied into the Center s forward pricing rate proposals (FPRP). True CERs based on the relationship of a younger aged workforce will have some effects on labor rates used in both commercial cost models and internal home-grown cost models which may impact the productivity factors for future NASA missions
Detection of Earth-impacting asteroids with the next generation all-sky surveys
We have performed a simulation of a next generation sky survey's (Pan-STARRS
1) efficiency for detecting Earth-impacting asteroids. The steady-state
sky-plane distribution of the impactors long before impact is concentrated
towards small solar elongations (Chesley and Spahr, 2004) but we find that
there is interesting and potentially exploitable behavior in the sky-plane
distribution in the months leading up to impact. The next generation surveys
will find most of the dangerous impactors (>140m diameter) during their
decade-long survey missions though there is the potential to miss difficult
objects with long synodic periods appearing in the direction of the Sun, as
well as objects with long orbital periods that spend much of their time far
from the Sun and Earth. A space-based platform that can observe close to the
Sun may be needed to identify many of the potential impactors that spend much
of their time interior to the Earth's orbit. The next generation surveys have a
good chance of imaging a bolide like 2008TC3 before it enters the atmosphere
but the difficulty will lie in obtaining enough images in advance of impact to
allow an accurate pre-impact orbit to be computed.Comment: 47 pages, 16 figures, 2 table
Impact probability under aleatory and epistemic uncertainties
We present an approach to estimate an upper bound for the impact probability of a potentially hazardous asteroid when part of the force model depends on unknown parameters whose statistical distribution needs to be assumed. As case study, we consider Apophis' risk assessment for the 2036 and 2068 keyholes based on information available as of 2013. Within the framework of epistemic uncertainties, under the independence and non-correlation assumption, we assign parametric families of distributions to the physical properties of Apophis that define the Yarkovsky perturbation and in turn the future orbital evolution of the asteroid. We find IP ≤ 5 × 10 - 5 for the 2036 keyhole and IP ≤ 1.6 × 10 - 5 for the 2068 keyhole. These upper bounds are largely conservative choices due to the rather wide range of statistical distributions that we explored
NEOSurvey 1: Initial Results from the Warm Spitzer Exploration Science Survey of Near-Earth Object Properties
Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are small Solar System bodies whose orbits bring
them close to the Earth's orbit. We are carrying out a Warm Spitzer Cycle 11
Exploration Science program entitled NEOSurvey --- a fast and efficient
flux-limited survey of 597 known NEOs in which we derive diameter and albedo
for each target. The vast majority of our targets are too faint to be observed
by NEOWISE, though a small sample has been or will be observed by both
observatories, which allows for a cross-check of our mutual results. Our
primary goal is to create a large and uniform catalog of NEO properties. We
present here the first results from this new program: fluxes and derived
diameters and albedos for 80 NEOs, together with a description of the overall
program and approach, including several updates to our thermal model. The
largest source of error in our diameter and albedo solutions, which derive from
our single band thermal emission measurements, is uncertainty in eta, the
beaming parameter used in our thermal modeling; for albedos, improvements in
Solar System absolute magnitudes would also help significantly. All data and
derived diameters and albedos from this entire program are being posted on a
publicly accessible webpage at nearearthobjects.nau.edu .Comment: AJ in pres
The Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System
We describe the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), a modern
software package that produces automatic asteroid discoveries and
identifications from catalogs of transient detections from next-generation
astronomical survey telescopes. MOPS achieves > 99.5% efficiency in producing
orbits from a synthetic but realistic population of asteroids whose
measurements were simulated for a Pan-STARRS4-class telescope. Additionally,
using a non-physical grid population, we demonstrate that MOPS can detect
populations of currently unknown objects such as interstellar asteroids.
MOPS has been adapted successfully to the prototype Pan-STARRS1 telescope
despite differences in expected false detection rates, fill-factor loss and
relatively sparse observing cadence compared to a hypothetical Pan-STARRS4
telescope and survey. MOPS remains >99.5% efficient at detecting objects on a
single night but drops to 80% efficiency at producing orbits for objects
detected on multiple nights. This loss is primarily due to configurable MOPS
processing limits that are not yet tuned for the Pan-STARRS1 mission.
The core MOPS software package is the product of more than 15 person-years of
software development and incorporates countless additional years of effort in
third-party software to perform lower-level functions such as spatial searching
or orbit determination. We describe the high-level design of MOPS and essential
subcomponents, the suitability of MOPS for other survey programs, and suggest a
road map for future MOPS development.Comment: 57 Pages, 26 Figures, 13 Table
LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in
the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of
science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will
have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is
driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking
an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and
mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at
Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m
effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel
camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second
exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given
night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000
square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5
point-source depth in a single visit in will be (AB). The
project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations
by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg with
, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, ,
covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time
will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a
18,000 deg region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the
anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to . The
remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a
Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products,
including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion
objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures
available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie
LSST Science Book, Version 2.0
A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint
magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science
opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field
of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over
20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with
fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a
total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic
parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book
discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a
broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and
outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies,
the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local
Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the
properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then
turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to
z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and
baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to
constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo
Flatland: Rapid Prototyping of Distributed Internet Applications
Computer intra- and internets are widely used for clientserver application such as web browsers. With the exception of e-mail, however, the same networks are seldom used for distributed, client-client or client-serverclient applications. Such applications are difficult to develop and debug, and require a supporting infrastructure that is not readily available from existing systems. Flatland is a rapid prototyping environment that provides the underlying infrastructure and makes it easy to create and debug distributed internet application prototypes. In addition to the infrastructure needed for a distributed application, Flatland includes safe implementations of the most common sources of distributed application bugs – asynchronous operation and updating. Flatland also supports streaming audio-video and down-level clients