ALBERT

Description: A compact, low-cost laser communications transceiver was prototyped for downlinking data at 10 Gb/s from Earth-orbiting spacecraft. The design can be implemented using flight-grade parts. With emphasis on simplicity, compactness, and light weight of the flight transceiver, the reduced-complexity design and development approach involves: 1. A high-bandwidth coarse wavelength division multiplexed (CWDM) (4 2.5 or 10-Gb/s data-rate) downlink transmitter. To simplify the system, emphasis is on the downlink. Optical uplink data rate is modest (due to existing and adequate RF uplink capability). 2. Highly simplified and compact 5-cm diameter clear aperture optics assembly is configured to single transmit and receive aperture laser signals. About 2 W of 4-channel multiplexed (1,540 to 1,555 nm) optically amplified laser power is coupled to the optical assembly through a fiber optic cable. It contains a highly compact, precision-pointing capability two-axis gimbal assembly to coarse point the optics assembly. A fast steering mirror, built into the optical path of the optical assembly, is used to remove residual pointing disturbances from the gimbal. Acquisition, pointing, and tracking are assisted by a beacon laser transmitted from the ground and received by the optical assembly, which will allow transmission of a laser beam. 3. Shifting the link burden to the ground by relying on direct detection optical receivers retrofitted to 1-m-diameter ground telescopes. 4. Favored mass and volume reduction over power-consumption reduction. The two major variables that are available include laser transmit power at either end of the link, and telescope aperture diameter at each end of the link. Increased laser power is traded for smaller-aperture diameters. 5. Use of commercially available spacequalified or qualifiable components with traceability to flight qualification (i.e., a flight-qualified version is commercially available). An example is use of Telecordia-qualified fiber optic communication components including active components (lasers, amplifiers, photodetectors) that, except for vacuum and radiation, meet most of the qualifications required for space. 6. Use of CWDM technique at the flight transmitter for operation at four channels (each at 2.5 Gb/s or a total of 10 Gb/s data rate). Applying this technique allows utilization of larger active area photodetectors at the ground station. This minimizes atmospheric scintillation/turbulence induced losses on the received beam at the ground terminal. 7. Use of forward-error-correction and deep-interleaver codes to minimize atmospheric turbulence effects on the downlink beam. Target mass and power consumption for the flight data transmitter system is less than 10 kg and approximately 60 W for the 400-km orbit (900-km slant range), and 12 kg and 120 W for the 2,000-km orbit (6,000-km slant range). The higher mass and power for the latter are the result of employing a higher-power laser only.

Description: An optical link from Earth to an aircraft demonstrates the ability to establish a link from a ground platform to a transceiver moving overhead. An airplane has a challenging disturbance environment including airframe vibrations and occasional abrupt changes in attitude during flight. These disturbances make it difficult to maintain pointing lock in an optical transceiver in an airplane. Acquisition can also be challenging. In the case of the aircraft link, the ground station initially has no precise knowledge of the aircraft s location. An airborne pointing system has been designed, built, and demonstrated using direct-drive brushless DC motors for passive isolation of pointing disturbances and for high-bandwidth control feedback. The airborne transceiver uses a GPS-INS system to determine the aircraft s position and attitude, and to then illuminate the ground station initially for acquisition. The ground transceiver participates in link-pointing acquisition by first using a wide-field camera to detect initial illumination from the airborne beacon, and to perform coarse pointing. It then transfers control to a high-precision pointing detector. Using this scheme, live video was successfully streamed from the ground to the aircraft at 270 Mb/s while simultaneously downlinking a 50 kb/s data stream from the aircraft to the ground.

Description: This article describes methods for online model-based diagnosis of subsystems of the advanced life support system (ALS). The diagnosis methodology is tailored to detect, isolate, and identify faults in components of the system quickly so that fault-adaptive control techniques can be applied to maintain system operation without interruption. We describe the components of our hybrid modeling scheme and the diagnosis methodology, and then demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology by building a detailed model of the reverse osmosis (RO) system of the water recovery system (WRS) of the ALS. This model is validated with real data collected from an experimental testbed at NASA JSC. A number of diagnosis experiments run on simulated faulty data are presented and the results are discussed.

Description: An innovation reported in Two-Camera Acquisition and Tracking of a Flying Target, NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 32, No. 8 (August 2008), p. 20, used a commercial fish-eye lens and an electronic imaging camera for initially locating objects with subsequent handover to an actuated narrow-field camera. But this operated against a dark-sky background. An improved solution involves an optical design based on custom optical components for the wide-field optical system that directly addresses the key limitations in acquiring a laser signal from a moving source such as an aircraft or a spacecraft. The first challenge was to increase the light collection entrance aperture diameter, which was approximately 1 mm in the first prototype. The new design presented here increases this entrance aperture diameter to 4.2 mm, which is equivalent to a more than 16 times larger collection area. One of the trades made in realizing this improvement was to restrict the field-of-view to +80 deg. elevation and 360 azimuth. This trade stems from practical considerations where laser beam propagation over the excessively high air mass, which is in the line of sight (LOS) at low elevation angles, results in vulnerability to severe atmospheric turbulence and attenuation. An additional benefit of the new design is that the large entrance aperture is maintained even at large off-axis angles when the optic is pointed at zenith. The second critical limitation for implementing spectral filtering in the design was tackled by collimating the light prior to focusing it onto the focal plane. This allows the placement of the narrow spectral filter in the collimated portion of the beam. For the narrow band spectral filter to function properly, it is necessary to adequately control the range of incident angles at which received light intercepts the filter. When this angle is restricted via collimation, narrower spectral filtering can be implemented. The collimated beam (and the filter) must be relatively large to reduce the incident angle down to only a few degrees. In the presented embodiment, the filter diameter is more than ten times larger than the entrance aperture. Specifically, the filter has a clear aperture of about 51 mm. The optical design is refractive, and is comprised of nine custom refractive elements and an interference filter. The restricted maximum angle through the narrow-band filter ensures the efficient use of a 2-nm noise equivalent bandwidth spectral width optical filter at low elevation angles (where the range is longest), at the expense of less efficiency for high elevations, which can be tolerated because the range at high elevation angles is shorter. The image circle is 12 mm in diameter, mapped to 80 x 360 of sky, centered on the zenith.