ALBERT

Description: An animal feeder for use in a metabolic cage is introduced. The feeder includes a confined passageway and an adjustable notched gate proceeding a food cup. The gate is adjusted so that the entry area to the food cup approximates the cross sectional head area of the animal. Food ejected from the food cup by a caged animal is dropped through a grate into a spill tray.

Description: A specialized paste diet feeder was developed in support of a hypergravity (2G) centrifuge study. The centrifuge study was to be compared to a previously flown Russian Cosmos spaceflight so experimental parameters of the 14 day spaceflight had to be duplicated. In order to duplicate at hyper G an experiment that took place in weightlessness, all other conditions must be as identical as possible. Stopping the centrifuge to provide maintenance for the animals causes unacceptable changes in experimental research results. Thus the experimental protocol required the delivery of a designated amount of paste diet at regular intervals for a two week period without stopping the centrifuge. A centrifuge and a stationary control cage, each containing 10 laboratory rats, were fitted with feeders that were calibrated to provide 140 plus or minus 2g of paste diet every 6 hours. This paper describes development of the feeder design and results of its operation over the two week experiment. The design philosophy and details of the feeder system are provided with recommendations for future such devices.

Description: A versatile mechanical device provides support for a user engaged in any of a variety of resistive exercises in a substantially horizontal orientation. The unique features and versatility of the device promise to be useful in bedrest studies, rehabilitation, and specialized strength training. The device affords a capability for selectively loading and unloading of portions of the user s body through its support mechanisms, so that specific parts of the body can be trained with little or no effect on other parts that may be disabled or in the process of recovery from injury. Thus, the device is ideal for rehabilitation exercise programs prescribed by physicians and physical therapists. The capability for selective loading and support also offers potential benefits to strength and conditioning trainers and athletes who wish to selectively strengthen selected parts. The principal innovative aspect of the device is that it supports the subject s weight while enabling the subject, lying substantially horizontally, to perform an exercise that closely approximates a full standing squat. The device includes mechanisms that support the subject in such a way that the hips are free to translate both horizontally and vertically and are free to rotate about the line connecting the hips. At the same time, the shoulders are free to translate horizontally while the upper back is free to rotate about the line connecting the shoulders. Among the mechanisms for hip motion and support is a counterbalance that offsets the weight of the subject as the subject s pelvis translates horizontally and vertically and rotates the pelvis about the line connecting the hips. The counterbalance is connected to a pelvic support system that allows these pelvic movements. The subject is also supported at the shoulder by a mechanism that can tilt to provide continuous support of the upper back while allowing the rotation required for arching the back as the pelvis is displaced. The shoulder support also affords a capability for horizontal motion, and acts as the point of attachment of a load that is provided for squat and heel-raise exercises. The device is compatible with any resistive-exercise machine that provides bilateral loading via a moving cable or other mechanical linkage. The hip-translation and shoulder-translation and -rotation degrees of freedom of the supports can be locked individually or in combination in order to support the subject as necessary for exercises other than the standing squat. If necessary, for such exercises, the load can be applied directly to the subject by use of various attachments. In addition to the aforementioned heel raise, such exercises include the upright row, leg press, curls, extension of the triceps, front raise, lateral raise, and rear raise.

Description: The NASA Ames hyperwall is a display system designed to facilitate the visualization of sets of multivariate and multidimensional data like those generated in complex engineering and scientific computations. The hyperwall includes a 77 matrix of computer-driven flat-panel video display units, each presenting an image of 1,280 1,024 pixels. The term hyperwall reflects the fact that this system is a more capable successor to prior computer-driven multiple-flat-panel display systems known by names that include the generic term powerwall and the trade names PowerWall and Powerwall. Each of the 49 flat-panel displays is driven by a rack-mounted, dual-central-processing- unit, workstation-class personal computer equipped with a hig-hperformance graphical-display circuit card and with a hard-disk drive having a storage capacity of 100 GB. Each such computer is a slave node in a master/ slave computing/data-communication system (see Figure 1). The computer that acts as the master node is similar to the slave-node computers, except that it runs the master portion of the system software and is equipped with a keyboard and mouse for control by a human operator. The system utilizes commercially available master/slave software along with custom software that enables the human controller to interact simultaneously with any number of selected slave nodes. In a powerwall, a single rendering task is spread across multiple processors and then the multiple outputs are tiled into one seamless super-display. It must be noted that the hyperwall concept subsumes the powerwall concept in that a single scene could be rendered as a mosaic image on the hyperwall. However, the hyperwall offers a wider set of capabilities to serve a different purpose: The hyperwall concept is one of (1) simultaneously displaying multiple different but related images, and (2) providing means for composing and controlling such sets of images. In place of elaborate software or hardware crossbar switches, the hyperwall concept substitutes reliance on the human visual system for integration, synthesis, and discrimination of patterns in complex and high-dimensional data spaces represented by the multiple displayed images. The variety of multidimensional data sets that can be displayed on the hyperwall is practically unlimited. For example, Figure 2 shows a hyperwall display of surface pressures and streamlines from a computational simulation of airflow about an aerospacecraft at various Mach numbers and angles of attack. In this display, Mach numbers increase from left to right and angles of attack increase from bottom to top. That is, all images in the same column represent simulations at the same Mach number, while all images in the same row represent simulations at the same angle of attack. The same viewing transformations and the same mapping from surface pressure to colors were used in generating all the images.

Description: Astronauts experience many physiological changes during spaceflight and exposure to microgravity. There is a headwardshift of fluids, muscles atrophy, and changes occur in the body's bone structure and hormone levels. This paper describes a unique metabolic cage that was developed to evaluate ground simulation of these effects. Hindlimb or tail suspension in rats has been studied as a model to create the effects of microgravity in order to study how to counteract them. This suspension model, developed by Holton, accurately simulates the effects of weightlessness during spaceflight by unloading the hindlimbs and producing a head-ward shift of fluids. However, obtaining quantitative data on the nutritional state, the gastrointestinal and renal function of these animals has not been possible, until now. Using Holton's tail suspension model, the new metabolic suspension cage effectively separates urine and feces samples for analysis allowing investigators to examine the effects of microgravity in many complex body systems. A description of the cage system, its design, and results of its use is provided along with pictures and details for replication of the cages.

Description: An apparatus and method for exercising whereby the user is supported by various mechanisms in such as way that the user's shoulder area is free to translate and rotate; the user's pelvic area is free to translate and rotate; or in any combination.

Description: This paper describes and provides exa.mples of a technique called Design-by-Prototype used in the development of research hardware at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Ames Research Center. This is not a new idea. Artisans and great masters have used prototyping as a design technique for centuries. They created prototypes to try out their ideas before making the primary artifact they were planning. This abstract is itself a prototype for others to use in determining the value of the paper it describes. At the Ames Research Center Design-by-Prototype is used for developing unique, one-of-a-kind hardware for small, high-risk projects. The need tor this new/old process is the proliferation of computer "design tools" that can result in both excessive time expended in design, and a lack of imbedded reality in the final product. Despite creating beautiful three-dimensional models and detailed computer drawings that can consume hundreds of engineering hours, the resulting designs can be extremely difficult to make, requiring many changes that add to the cost and schedule. Much design time can be saved and expensive rework eliminated using Design-by-Prototype.