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The current status of III-V semiconductor diode lasers emitting between 1 -5 μm wavelengths to be used as light sources for absorption spectroscopy is reviewed. The emission wavelength of the laser is chosen to coincide with the primary absorption line of a molecule or one of its many overtones. The lasers, with a single longitudinal mode emission, are wavelength tuned over several angstroms by modulating the drive current of the device. This sweeping of the wavelength leads to the nomenclature tunable diode laser or TDL. Single mode distributed feedback (DFB) strained layer InGaAs(P) lasers grown on InP substrates with emission wavelengths from 1.2 to 2.06 μm have been developed at JPL, and several devices will be used for planetary atmospheric studies for the first time.

In recent years, several different technologies have been considered for use in environmental monitoring and control of spacecraft habitat. These technologies have included monitoring for both water and air. This paper will discuss construction of a trade space for environmental monitoring technologies. Previous trade space metric approaches are reviewed and a new approach is outlined. Trade space considerations include the usual mass, power and volume, along with sensitivity, accuracy, speed of response, frequency of measurement and ease of use. These considerations will be discussed in the context of Constellation program vehicles. In addition to a new approach for trade space construction, this paper will briefly discuss the application of this trade space to a selection of technologies taken from NASA programs, ESA programs, COTS technologies and DoD programs.

The exploration of Mars is a major thrust of NASA. Some of the important goals of this exploration are the search for life; understanding the planet's evolution by in-situ and remote scientific measurements; developing an inventory of useful resources, including accessible water; and sample return as a precursor to human exploration. One of the key challenges of Mars's exploration hard-ware--- rovers, landers, probes, and science instruments -- is to be able to survive the planet's harsh environment on and below surface. This paper discusses the thermal challenges posed by relatively large temperature variations, analyses and experimental work done at JPL to address these challenges.

ChemCam is one of the 10 instrument suites on the Mars Science Laboratory, a martian rover being built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for the next NASA mission to Mars (MSL 2009). ChemCam is an instrument package consisting of two remote sensing instruments: a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) and a Remote Micro-Imager (RMI). LIBS provides elemental compositions of rocks and soils, while the RMI places the LIBS analyses in their geomorphologic context. Both instruments rely on an autofocus capability to precisely focus on the chosen target, located at distances from the rover comprised between 1 and 9 m for LIBS, and 2 m and infinity for RMI. ChemCam will help determine which samples, within the vicinity of the MSL rover, are of sufficient interest to use the contact and in-situ instruments for further characterization.

A microhygrometer has been developed at JPL's Microdevices Laboratory based on the principle of dewpoint/frostpoint detection. The surface acoustic wave device used in this instrument is approximately two orders of magnitude more sensitive to condensation than the optical sensor used in chilled-mirror hygrometers. In tests in the laboratory and on the NASA DC8, the SAW hygrometer has demonstrated more than an order of magnitude faster response than commercial chilled-mirror hygrometers, while showing comparable accuracy under steady-state conditions. Current development efforts are directed toward miniaturization and optimization of the microhygrometer electronics for flight validation experiments on a small radiosonde balloon.

The Viking project is managed by the Viking project office at Langley Research Center for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Two Viking spacecraft will be individually launched on a new Titan IIIE/Centaur D-1T launch vehicle in August 1975. The method for the establishment of spacecraft sine vibration test levels prior to availability of any Titan IIIE/Centaur D-1T flight data by use of both computer simulations and data from previous Titan and Atlas Centaur vehicles is described. The specification level is compared with actual flight data obtained from a proof flight launch of the Titan IIIE/Centaur D-1T and a Viking dynamic simulator in January 1974. An objective of the proof flight launch was to obtain estimates of the flight loads and environments. The criteria used to minimize the structural weight that would result from an unmodified application of a sine test environment are described.

One startling realization that's come from NASA's explorations of the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn is that the so-called “habitable zone” around our Sun may not be restricted to Earth's vicinity. The Galileo mission found conditions that might support life on two Jovian moons-Europa & Callisto. This raises the possibility of habitable zones elsewhere near the outer planets. Consideration of human missions beyond Mars, likely to occur sometime beyond the year 2040, exceeds the horizon of even the most advanced planning activities within NASA. During the next 25 to 30 years, robotic spacecraft are envisioned to explore several moons of outer planets, especially Europa and Titan. Since Callisto lies well outside Jupiter's radiation belt, and there is evidence of water ice there is a compelling rationale to send human explorers to that Jovian moon.

Although important efforts are actually devoted to improve Si-Ge materials, their thermoelectric energy conversion efficiency remains relatively low and the adimensional ZT value does not exceed 1. Higher values can be obtained by investigating new materials. A search for new high temperature thermoelectric materials identified a certain number of compounds between transition metals and bismuth, antimony and germanium as potential candidates. Results of the preliminary synthesis of samples by a variety of techniques (Bridgman, mechanical alloying…) are presented as well as some electrical measurements. Some compounds showed interesting properties and need to be investigated in more details.

A simple Loop Heat Pipe (LHP) with a single evaporator and condenser was tested and modeled with two different working fluids: ammonia and propylene. While ammonia exhibits many desirable heat transfer characteristics, its freezing point is too high to prevent freezing in the condenser lines during a safing mode on a satellite platform. Consequently, propylene makes a good compromise since it has a lower freezing point and relatively good heat transfer properties. The performance of the LHP with ammonia was characterized by a series of tests with heat loads of 20 to 800 watts placed on the evaporator. With the LHP filled with propylene, it was tested with heat loads of 20 to 200 watts to the evaporator. The sink temperatures on the condenser ranged from −10°C to 20°C. The constant conductance performance of the LHP was 170 W/K with ammonia and 44 W/K with propylene. Steady state performance data of the LHP was used to validate a nodal network model of the device.

An Electronic Nose is being developed at JPL and Caltech for use in environmental monitoring in the International Space Station. The Electronic Nose (ENose) is an array of 32 polymer film conductometric sensors; the pattern of response may be deconvoluted to identify contaminants in the environment. An engineering test model of the ENose was used to monitor the air of the Early Human Test experiment at Johnson Space Center for 49 days. Examination of the data recorded by the ENose shows that major excursions in the resistance recorded in the sensor array may be correlated with events recorded in the Test Logs of the Test Chamber.

A miniature quadrupole mass spectrometer array has been designed and tested. It consists of 16 rods in a 4 x 4 array. The ionizer is of a miniature Nier-type, and the detector is a channel-type multiplier. The demonstrated mass range is 1-300 u, and the resolution of the system is 0.1 -0.5 u (FWHM), or m/Δm = 600. The present sensitivity is measured and calculated to be approximately 1 x 1012 counts/torr-sec. Applications to NASA missions will be outlined, along with military and commercial uses.

The Mars Pathfinder (MPF) Spacecraft, scheduled for a December 1996 launch to Mars, uses a mechanically pumped loop to transfer dissipated heat from the insulated lander electronics to an external radiator. This paper discusses the tradeoffs performed before choosing a mechanical pumped loop as the thermal control system for MPF. It describes the analysis, tradeoffs, design, and predicted performance of this system. The various development tests performed are discussed, along with the current status of this cooling system. Finally, some thoughts on the development of mechanically pumped loops for future spacecraft are presented.

Rovers will play a vital role in upcoming Mars missions by enabling science activities at a wide variety of locations even kilometers away from the landing site. On-going technology development efforts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory include the Long Range Science Rover Task which is prototyping and demonstrating rover technology capable of traversing several kilometers over the Martian surface carrying out a wide variety of science activities. This paper discusses the operational requirements for Mars science rovers and a current prototype Mars rover called Rocky 7.

The effects of both the cosmic ray heavy ion exposures and the intense trapped electron exposures are examined with respect to impact on cellular system survival on exterior spacecraft surfaces as well as at interior (shielded) locations for a sample mission to Jupiter’s moons. Radiation transport through shield materials and subsequent exposures are calculated with the established Langley heavy ion and electron deterministic codes. In addition to assessing fractional DNA single and double strand breaks, a variety of cell types are examined that have greatly differing radio-sensitivities. Finally, implications as to shield requirements for controlled biological experiments are discussed.

The Mars Pathfinder spacecraft which will be launched in December 1996 features an active cooling system for controlling the temperature of the spacecraft. This will be the first time that such a mechanical pump cooling system is used on an interplanetary or long duration flight (over two weeks) in space. The major element of the cooling system is the Integrated Pump Assembly (IPA). It uses centrifugal pumps to circulate liquid freon to transfer heat from spacecraft electronics to an external radiator. The IPA consists of redundant pumps, motor control electronics, thermal control valves, check valves, and an accumulator. The design and flight implementation of this pump assembly were accomplished in less than two years. This paper describes the design, fabrication, assembly, and testing of the IPA.

The effect of changes in the carrier concentration and mobility for heavily doped n-type SiGe on the electrical power factor has been investigated. It has been shown that power factors of 37-40 μV/cm-K2 can be achieved with carrier concentrations of 2.0 - 2.5 × 1020 cm-3 and mobilities of 38-40 cm2/V-sec. Many samples with suitable carrier concentration do not have high mobilities and some rationale for this behavior is presented. Initial results are presented on fabrication of n-type samples from ultra-fine powders. The emphasis in this work is to achieve thermal conductivity reductions by adding inert particles to scatter mid-frequency phonons.

A novel direct acoustic test was performed on the Quik- SCAT spacecraft at Ball Aerospace Technology Corporation (BATC) in Boulder, Colorado, in October 1998. The QuikSCAT spacecraft was designed and built by BATC in an accelerated, one-year, program managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The spacecraft carries the SeaWinds scatterometer developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to measure the near-surface wind speed over Earth’s oceans. Instead of conducting the acoustic test with the spacecraft in a reverberant room, as is the usual practice, the test was conducted with the spacecraft mounted on a shaker slip-table in a nearly anechoic, vibration test cell. The spacecraft was surrounded with a three-meter high ring of large, electro-dynamic speakers, spaced approximately 1.3 meters away from the two-meter diameter, 900 kg. spacecraft. The thirty-one speaker cabinets were driven with 40,000 rms watts of audio amplifier power.

There is a need to develop improved film capacitors for high temperature, high energy density and high reliability applications. The work reported here has resulted in self-healing capacitor technology applicable to a wide variety of polymer film substrates that prevents catastrophic failures and provides safe, reliable operation in power electronic circuits. This paper describes the performance of 500-2000 Volt metalized film capacitors operating at up to 160°C under a variety of duty conditions. Data on equivalent series resistance (ESR) and power dissipation (DF), peak and Root Means Square (RMS) current ratings, and other critical performance parameters are presented. The features and benefits of both dry wrap-and-fill and liquid-impregnated hermetically sealed constructions are discussed. This work was sponsored by the US Army Research Laboratory.

“Today's electronic components rely on principles of physics and science with no manufacturing precedence and little data on long term stability and reliability.” [1] Yet many are counting on their reliable performance years if not decades into the future, sometimes after being literally abandoned in barns or stored neatly in tightly sealed bags. What makes sense? To toss everything away, or use it as is and hope for the best? Surely there must be a middle ground! With an unprecedented number of missions in its future and an ever-tightening budget, NASA faces the daunting task of doing more with less. One proven way for a project to save money is to use already screened and qualified devices from the spares of its predecessors. But what is the risk in doing so? How can a project reliably count on the value of spare devices if the risk of using them is not, in itself, defined?

This paper entails the design and development of a NASA testing system used to simulate wheel operation in a lunar environment under different loading conditions. The test system was developed to test the design of advanced nonpneumatic wheels to be used on the NASA All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE). The ATHLETE, allowing for easy maneuverability around the lunar surface, provides the capability for many research and exploration opportunities on the lunar surface that were not previously possible. Each leg, having six degrees of freedom, allows the ATHLETE to accomplish many tasks not available on other extra-terrestrial exploration platforms. The robotic vehicle is expected to last longer than previous lunar rovers.