cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.zodtls
title: Towards Cis-Lunar Target Detection using the Deep Space Network and Open-Loop Tracking Measurements

description: No abstract available.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.npfrjl
title: LunarNav: Crater-based Localization for Long-range Autonomous Lunar Rover Navigation

description: The Artemis program requires robotic and crewedlunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, constructionand maintenance of facilities, and human exploration.These rovers must support navigation for 10s of kilometers(km) from base camps. A lunar science rover mission concept(“Endurance-A”) has been recommended by the new DecadalSurvey as the highest priority medium-class mission of theLunar Discovery and Exploration Program, and would be requiredto traverse approximately 2000 km in the South Pole-Aitkin (SPA) Basin, with individual drives of several kilometersbetween stops for downlink. These rover mission scenariosrequire functionality that provides onboard, autonomous, globalposition knowledge (“absolute localization”). However, planetaryrovers have no onboard global localization capability todate; they have only used relative localization, by integratingcombinations of wheel odometry, visual odometry, and inertialmeasurements during each drive to track position relative to thestart of each drive. At the end of each drive, a “ground-inthe-loop” (GITL) interaction is used to get an absolute positionupdate from human operators in a more global reference frame.As a result, autonomous rover drives are limited in distanceso that accumulated relative navigation error does not riskthe possibility of the rover driving into a “keep-out zone”; in
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.glptqn
title: The Emergence of Quantum Computing and Applications to the Aerospace Sector

description: No abstract available.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.sxoreh
title: Wideband Deployable VHF Crossed Dipole Antenna Development for DEBRIS Mission

description: This paper discusses the development of a wideband deployable VHF Crossed Dipole antenna for a research and development project called Distributed Element Beamformer Radar for Ice and Subsurface Sounding (DEBRIS) at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The antenna consists of wide-surface petals made out of gold plated Kapton sheets held together using a stainless steel ring forming the periphery of the dipole arms. This structure has the potential to be folded and restored easily, thus resulting in a wideband deployable dipole. The antenna has been designed, fabricated and measured along with the balanced to unbalanced (balun) feed network. The VHF band presents unique challenges in the fabrication and the measurements, owing to the large antenna size and long wavelengths which are discussed in the paper.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.wiarzf
title: NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR): Towards Observatory-level Integration and Testing

description: Abstract - The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), or NISAR, is an Earth-observing dual-band radar mission being jointly developed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). As a pathfinder for NASA’s Earth System Observatory (ESO), NISAR will make global measurements of land surface changes from its near-polar 12-day repeating orbit, for integration into Earth system models. NISAR measurements will provide scientists with a means of understanding globally, spatially- and temporally-complex solid-earth, cryosphere and ecosystem phenomena, and provide societally-relevant data that will enable investments to protect human life and property.The radar payload system, consisting of a NASA-developed L-band SAR, an ISRO-developed S-band SAR, a deployable 12m radar antenna and a high-capacity data handling and instrument control system, has been fully integrated as a flight system and has undergone extensive testing, from 2020 through 2022. This testing has included acoustic and sine-vibration dynamics and launch-configuration thermal vacuum tests, as well as the first Mission Scenario Tests (MST’s) of the payload flight hardware and software with flight-like commanding.Prior to the 2023 delivery of the radar payload to ISRO’s U. R. Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), the radar payload will undergo a science configuration (sans radar antenna) thermal vacuum test and a final round of MSTs focusing on joint operation of the two radars and instrument controller fault protection testing. Once at URSC, the radar payload will undergo system integration to the ISRO satellite mainframe bus, and observatory-level testing in Bangalore.Other major systems are also being readied for delivery by ISRO: the satellite bus, ground stations, science data processing systems and mission operations including Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark II launch from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) launch complex. Four planned NASA Ka-band ground stations required to downlink 37 Tb/day average daily NISAR data volume are on track to be operational by 2023, as well. NASA and ISRO have made significant refinements to the observatory integration & test plans, to address the special test needs of this very complex instrument system. A series of operational readiness tests have been planned to demonstrate the readiness of the joint mission systems to support operations.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.agr5qx
title: A Multi-Beam Ka-Band Deployable Mesh Reflector Antenna for the INCUS Mission

description: This paper presents a multi-beam Ka-band deployable mesh reflector antenna and the corresponding feed assembly currently considered for a new NASA Earth science mission. The mission objective is to better observe the behavior of tropical convective storms and thunderstorms. This paper focuses on the design of the antenna system operating at Ka-band and on the general system architecture. The antenna system is comprised of a deployable mesh reflector illuminated by seven offset feed horns to achieve seven independent and partially superimposed ground tracks.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.r7rec4
title: Modeling Process, Structure, Assumptions for Rapid Spacecraft Design and Feasibility Analysis

description: In the early pre-project stages of space mission concept formulation, a concept team faces a complex tradespace with interwoven choices that often have cascading effects. Each option will have an estimated cost associated with it as well as potentially unique technical requirements – such as power, mounting, thermal, data, pointing, etc. – that will cascade to all aspects of a spacecraft design. To add to this already monumental challenge, early formulation can also face a high risk of a mission never making it beyond the concept level, adding a great deal of uncertainty to the outcome of invested resources. The Innovation Foundry at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) uses discretized levels for formulation called Concept Maturity Levels (CML). As a concept matures, there is often an iterative process between initial feasibility, tradespace exploration, and point designs or CML 2, 3, and 4 respectively. The Innovation Foundry has developed tooling which enables rapid design and tradespace evaluation while remaining within feasible bounds. Over the last few years, a systems engineering team at the Innovation Foundry have streamlined the Tool for Architectural Tradespace Exploration and Refinement (TATER) to improve efficiency of early spacecraft design and feasibility analysis at the spacecraft element level. TATER’s new architecture and user experience enable a more expansive and in-depth exploration of a mission concept tradespace while requiring fewer resources over a shorter period. To accomplish this, the systems engineering team combined several improved approaches compared to prior versions of the tool spanning across process, structure, and default assumptions. First, the team created a brief questionnaire for scientists or project teams looking to iterate through an option tradespace. Next, the team implemented a more intuitive and natural workflow to guide a user through the design process. Finally, the team pre-populated TATER with default assumptions and suggestions while still maintaining a highly customizable set of overrides available to a designer for when design details (i.e. type of avionics or telecom band) are available. The end product of these improvements is a tool that can produce an element-level spacecraft mass and feasibility analysis by one systems engineer in only a few short hours. The team conducted a validation exercise both before and after these improvements and verified no significant reduction in the accuracy of TATER. Early space mission concept formulation can benefit from the lessons learned by the systems engineers during this streamlining exercise. A concept formulation team can more efficiently iterate through a larger tradespace with fewer resources invested by refining the data exchange and modeling process, structure and user interaction with a tool, and identifying appropriate default assumptions as a starting point.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.vryc4d
title: Performance and Early Results from the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) Imaging Spectroscopy Mission

description: The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) acquires new observations of the Earth from a state-of-the-art optically fast F/1.8 visible to short wavelength infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectrometer with high signal-to-noise ratio and excellent spectroscopic uniformity. EMIT was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on the 14th of July 2022 local time. The EMIT instrument is the latest in a series of more than 30 imaging spectrometers and testbeds developed at JPL, beginning with the Airborne Imaging Spectrometer (AIS) that first flew in 1982. EMIT’s science objectives use the spectral signatures of minerals observed across the Earth’s arid and semi-arid lands containing dust sources to update the soil composition of advanced Earth System Models (ESM) to understand and reduce uncertainties in mineral dust aerosol radiative forcing at the local, regional, and global scale, now and in the future. EMIT has begun to collect and deliver high-quality mineral composition determinations for the arid land regions of our planet. Over one billion high quality mineral determinations are expected over the course of the one-year nominal science mission. Currently, detailed knowledge of the composition of the Earth’s mineral dust source regions is uncertain and traced to less than 5000 surface sample mineralogical analyses. The development of the EMIT imaging spectrometer instrumentation was completed successfully despite the severe impacts of the COVID pandemic. The EMIT Science Data System is complete and running with the full set of algorithms required. These tested algorithms are open source and will be made available to the broader community. These include: calibration to measured radiance, atmospheric correction to surface reflectance, mineral composition determination, aggregation to ESM resolution, and ESM runs to address the science objectives. In this paper, the instrument characteristics, ground calibration, in-orbit performance, and early science results are reported.
DOI: 10.5519/qd.nu1i1k6q
title: Query on the Natural History Museum Data Portal (data.nhm.ac.uk) (50698 records)
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.p82oii
title: A microwave photonic receiver for high performance radars

description: A resonant photonic receiver is designed to efficiently upconvert a weak microwave signal, such as a return signal of a millimeter-wave radar, to optical frequency domain and then transfer this signal to an intermediate microwave frequency, convenient for further processing. Such a process is far less demanding in terms of the instrument size, weight and power than the direct high frequency microwave detection and down conversion. The resonant photonic receiver facilitates an amplification of the signal power with low noise temperature which improved the instrument sensitivity relative to the stateof-the-art. A combination of these factors will enable a new generation of ultra-compact radars suitable for Smallsat and Cubesat applications. We report the theoretical analysis and numeric simulations justifying the photonic approach to millimeter-wave detection based on high-quality nonlinear optical resonators, as well as the preliminary tests results.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.lwfsun
title: On the Orbit Constellation Assessment for the Next-Generation Mars Telecommunications Orbiters

description: The Next-Generation Mars Telecommunications Orbiters, a.k.a. Mars ComBirds, (MCB), are intended to serve as a deep-space relay hub that provides high-performance links to Earth at extreme data rates and to increase data return from a variety of Mars rovers, landers, aerobots, and science orbiters. As the current science orbiters used for relay are aging, the needs for these MCBs are becoming realistic, justified, and increasingly urgent. The message is further echoed when demands for Earth return data for next-decade missions to Mars, such as ExoMars, Mars Ice Mapper, Mars Sample Return, and future human exploration missions to the Red Planet, continue to increase. In addition, by communicating directly to these MCBs instead of Earth, communications systems for future science missions can be reduced. Thus, the costs can be lowered, or more science equipment can be added. Furthermore, MCBs' fields of view with Earth are much longer; therefore, an appropriate choice of orbits, a network of MCBs with cross-link capability can connect any users at Mars with Earth almost continuously. In this paper, we primarily provide a trade study on the design of the MCB orbits, which include the number of orbits, sizes, shapes, and orientations. Special attention is also given to a class of orbits that provides daily repeating ground tracks. These orbits can facilitate surface operations because they rise and set daily over a specific area at constant revisiting times. In addition, there is another class of orbits where a spacecraft would tug a science orbiter to a sun-sync Mars orbit and then raise its altitude and serve as a relay orbiter. More particularly, we will consider different orbit types such as (1) circular equatorial, (2) circular sun-sync, (3) Apoapsis at Constant time-of-day Critically Inclined (ACCI), (4) Apoapsis at Constant time-of-day Equatorial (ACE), and (5) SEP-Tugs. Mars surface users are assumed to be global and of any longitude and latitude. For users in orbit, we assume their orbital parameters similar to the typical low-Mars sun-sync orbits such as Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance orbiters. JPL-developed Telecom Orbit Analysis and Simulation Tool (TOAST) software is used to compute the contacts between the orbiters and users. The performance of these orbit constellations can be assessed through several metrics of interest, which include the maximum latitude, number of contacts per sol, contact duration, total contact time per sol, and maximum communication gap. Recommendations for the optimal orbital constellation choices (3-planar and coplanar variations) will be provided based on comparing the weighted means of each metric calculated at latitude-longitude coordinates during a simulation duration of 1 sol. The chosen orbits will then be further investigated in greater depth to weigh the pros and cons regarding a satellite’s operational capabilities and limitations at that orbit.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.uuqdir
title: Self-supervised Distillation for Computer Vision Onboard Planetary Robots

description: In situ exploration of planets beyond Mars will largely depend on autonomous robotic agents for the foreseeable future. These autonomous planetary explorers need to perceive and understand their surroundings in order to make decisions that maximize science return and minimize risk. Deep learning, with its demonstrated performance on a diverse range of computer vision and image processing tasks, has become the de facto approach powering many terrestrial autonomy applications from robotic vacuum cleaners to self-driving cars. However, robotic space missions present several challenges that need to be overcome before onboard deep learning-based perception can be widely adopted, one of which is the limited computational budget on such missions. Due to power constraints and extensive flight qualification requirements (e.g., radiation tolerance), current space-qualified hardware heavily relies on legacy technologies, resulting in computational limitations that preclude the use of deep learning models for real-time robotic perception tasks such as obstacle detection and terrain segmentation. Recent research in computer vision demonstrated the benefits of network distillation in developing smaller, "mobile-oriented" versions of large, state-of-the-art vision models. This paper leverages self-supervised distillation to alleviate the impact of decreasing model size on a model's performance across two Mars image benchmarks, one on surface image classification and the other on surface terrain segmentation. Using a set of 100,000 unlabeled images taken by Curiosity and large self-supervised vision models, we distill a variety of small model architectures and evaluate their performance on the published test sets. Experimental results show that on the MSL v2.1 classification task, the best-performing student ResNet-18 model is able to achieve a model compression ratio of 3.8 while even outperforming its teacher model by 1.5%. In addition, we show that using in-domain images for distillation and increasing the dataset size for distillation has a positive effect on downstream vision tasks. Overall, results indicate that self-supervised distillation enables small models to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets, supporting the feasibility of performing real-time inference using these small distilled models on next-generation flight hardware such as the High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC).
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.a4ymna
title: VISTA: Venus in Situ Transfer and Analysis Mission Concept

description: No abstract available.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.qzk30b
title: These Wheels Are Made for Arc-ing: Two New Mobility Commands to Improve Wheel Wear Outcomes

description: The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover has driven over 29 kilometers since landing on Mars in August 2012, as of sol 3600 (September 2022). MSL Rover Planners use a variety of different driving commands and sequencing strategies to reach science targets of interest in diverse terrain. However, 490 Martian solar days (sols) and 4600 meters into the mission, the wheels began to exhibit significant wear, manifesting as cracks and breaks in their aluminum-alloy construction. Hardware mitigation was not possible due to the location of the vehicle; instead, engineers applied software techniques to extend the lifetime of the wheels. This initially led to the development of new Terrain-adaptive Wheel Speed Control software for the rover, which has proven helpful and now has been in use continuously since sol 1646 (April 2017).But some inefficiencies remained. When performing a precision approach to a goal location, the standard driving strategy alternates arcs (specified using a small number of fixed, preselected curvatures, running in open-loop motion) with closed-loop turns in place. Each turn in place makes substantial use of the steering motors, which can lead to faster wheel wear rates in some terrains. So when a new flight software (FSW) release called R13 became possible, the project decided to implement two new commands that will help reduce unnecessary rover motion. These new mobility commands are now part of MSL's next major FSW release and offer new commanding strategies that should reduce unnecessary wheel wear and allow rover planners to generate more flexible drive paths.While similar in name to existing arcing commands, these two commands have completely new behaviors that allow the rover to maneuver in ways never possible before, dynamically choosing the precise arc curvature appropriate for the precision goal location. This update removes the prior restrictions on which specific curvatures can be used, letting the rover choose whatever is appropriate given its current pose relative to the current goal. These two commands can potentially replace the turn-in-place maneuvers currently used to reach a specific goal, a known heavy contributor to wheel damage in terrains with embedded rocks.The new commands were exercised during algorithm development both in simulation and also on MSL's Vehicle Systems Testbed (VSTB), an engineering model of Curiosity typically deployed in JPL's Mars Yard, an outdoor test area with a variety of terrains and slopes. Once development was complete, the VSTB was also used to conduct a formal Verification and Validation (V\&V) test campaign over 5 days in the Mars Yard, testing the commands to their limits to ensure readiness for Mars. During this test campaign, the expected behavior of the commands was confirmed which led to approval for inclusion in the R13 FSW update after a review of the V\&V results by a board of Mission Subject Matter Experts. We anticipate these commands will be deployed on Curiosity as part of the R13 expected in early 2023.
DOI: 10.48577/jpl.wt6qyg
title: Six Years and 184 Tickets: The Vast Scope of the Mars Science Laboratory's Ultimate Flight Software Release

description: The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover has seen five full flight software upgrades since landing on Mars in August 2012. Software transitions for MSL add or replace functionality, fix bugs, and prepare for future capabilities. The penultimate full software release, R12, was installed on Curiosity in 2015, and was followed by several hot patches and one cold patch as engineers worked to address new constraints. Because each added patch increased the complexity of operating the rover, a new flight software update called R13 was proposed, which aimed to make operations more straightforward by combining the patches into a single monolithic image, and improve upon or add several capabilities to the rover's flight software. The R13 development effort kicked off in early 2017. Over the subsequent six years, the scope of R13 was expanded to include many desired capabilities and bug fixes since the last upgrade -- some of which were proposed even earlier than 2015 but were unable to be implemented in R12. Overall, the MSL Change Control Board approved 56 bug fixes and 53 new features for R13 development. Twenty-seven developers implemented these changes over a 3.5 year period. Following a 2.25 year testing campaign, R13 was approved for use in flight onboard Curiosity. In this paper, we detail the path of the R13 flight software release from its proposal in April 2016 to its approval for use in flight in September 2022.