Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor SYSTEMS

NASA launches new space tech research institutes to advance electric propulsion, entry systems

Technology drives exploration, and as NASA eyes deep-space human exploration, technology is at the forefront of its plans. Preparing for these missions requires technology development within the agency and research by external experts in various fields.

As part of this effort, NASA will establish two new university-led Space Technology Research Institutes (STRIs), which will join four already active institutes. The new STRIs will bring together researchers from different disciplines and organizations to tackle challenges associated with electric propulsion ground testing and atmospheric entry systems modeling. The new STRIs aim to advance these game-changing technologies for exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

“We started the STRI opportunity as a novel approach to technology research and development,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). “The selected institutes bring together premier researchers from their respective fields to focus on challenges facing future missions. The advancements these new STRI’s make will help NASA to venture farther into space.”

Each STRI will receive as much as $15 million over five years. The selected institutes are:

Joint Advanced Propulsion Institute (JANUS)

NASA is exploring high-power electric propulsion systems for human exploration of the solar system. The JANUS institute will develop strategies and specific methodologies to surmount limitations in ground testing of high-power electric propulsion systems and to improve characterization of the wear and performance of these devices representative of in-space operation. Solar electric propulsion Hall thruster prototype. Credits: NASA

Establishing a sufficient space-like environment is crucial for evaluating and predicting high-power propulsion system behavior and ensuring mission success. JANUS will utilize physics-based modeling, high-power thruster testing, novel diagnostic development, and fundamental experiments to advance mitigation strategies to overcome the limits of current ground testing capabilities. 

Mitchell Walker of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta is the principal investigator and will lead the JANUS team. Partnering universities include the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Colorado State University in Fort Collins; Pennsylvania State University in State College; Stanford University in Stanford, California; University of Colorado Boulder; Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo; Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta; and Chicago State University and City Colleges of Chicago, both in Chicago. Other partners include The Aerospace Corporation, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Busek.

Advanced Computational Center for Entry System Simulation (ACCESS)

Entry, descent, and landing technologies must continue to improve to meet the challenges of placing large payloads on other worlds, such as Mars. Accurate modeling and simulation of atmospheric entry systems are critical for the design and planning of these missions. The Arc Jet Complex at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley conducts heat simulation testing on a conceptual heat shield prototype. Credits: NASA

The ACCESS institute will advance the analysis and design of NASA entry systems by developing a fully integrated, interdisciplinary simulation capability. ACCESS will focus on thermal protection systems, which protect spacecraft from aerodynamic heating, as well as prediction of the extreme environments experienced during entry. It will develop game-changing capabilities through the use of high-fidelity, validated physics models. This advancement will be enabled by innovative numerical algorithms, high-performance computing, and uncertainty quantification methods, with the goal of enabling computational entry system reliability assessments. 

Iain Boyd of the University of Colorado Boulder will serve as the principal investigator and lead the ACCESS team. The institute will be implemented in partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Active STRIs at Work

In 2017, NASA selected the first-ever STRIs. The Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space, or CUBES, furthers biomanufacturing technologies that are needed to sustain astronauts on another planet. The institute has successfully grown medicine using lettuce and developed optimized lighting techniques for future extra-terrestrial greenhouses. The Institute for Ultra-Strong Composites by Computational Design, or US-COMP,  matures transformative carbon nanotube composite materials by using modeling and simulation to support their manufacturing and design. The institute has produced samples with more than twice the tensile strength of existing composite materials.

In 2019, NASA funded two more STRIs focused on technologies to enable “smart” habitats. Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration, or HOME, is advancing early-stage technologies related to autonomous systems, human-robot teams, data science, machine learning, onboard manufacturing, and more. The Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats institute, or RETHi, is designing a deep-space habitat concept that can adapt, absorb, and rapidly recover from expected and unexpected disruptions. The habitat would operate and thrive in both crewed and uncrewed configurations.

STMD’s Space Technology Research Grants program hosts and funds each STRI. STMD develops the pioneering technologies and capabilities NASA needs to achieve its current and future missions.

For more information about NASA space tech, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech

UC chemists use quantum simulations to understand a solvent that holds promise for green energy

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor SYSTEMS

To understand the fundamental properties of an industrial solvent, chemists with the University of Cincinnati turned to a supercomputer.

UC chemistry professor and department head Thomas Beck and UC graduate student Andrew Eisenhart ran quantum simulations to understand glycerol carbonate, a compound used in biodiesel and as a common solvent.

They found that the simulation provided detail about hydrogen bonding in determining the structural and dynamic properties of the liquid that was missing from classical models. The study was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

Glycerol carbonate could be a more environmentally friendly chemical solvent for things like batteries. But chemists have to know more about what's going on in these solutions. They studied the compounds potassium fluoride and potassium chloride.

"The study we did gives us a fundamental understanding of how small changes to a molecular structure can have larger consequences for the solvent as a whole," Eisenhart said. "And how these small changes make its interactions with very important things like ions and can have an effect on things like battery performance."

Water is a seemingly simple solvent, as anyone who has stirred the sugar in their coffee can attest.

"People have studied water for hundreds of years -- Galileo studied the origin of flotation in water. Even with all that research, we don't have a complete understanding of the interactions in water," Beck said. "It's amazing because it's a simple molecule but the behavior is complex."

For the quantum simulation, the chemists turned to UC's Advanced Research Computing Center and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Quantum simulations provide a tool to help chemists better understand interactions on an atomic scale. UC chemistry professor Thomas Beck, left, and graduate student Andrew Eisenhart used quantum simulations to understand the solvent glycerol carbonate. CREDIT Colleen Kelley/UC Creative

"Quantum simulations have been around for quite a while," Eisenhart said. "But the hardware that's been evolving recently -- things like graphics processing units and their acceleration when applied to these problems -- creates the ability to study larger systems than we could in the past."

"How do ions dissolve in this liquid compared to water? First, we had to understand what the basic structure was of the liquid," Beck said.

The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. 

Every lithium-ion battery contains a solvent. Finding a better one could improve energy storage and efficiency.

"The world is moving in a sustainable direction. It's pretty clear that wind and solar will be two major contributors along with other green energy," Beck said. "But the energy generated is intermittent. So you need methods for large-scale energy storage so that if it's cloudy for two days, a city can stay running."

American astronomers find secrets of Japanese Universes

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor SYSTEMS

Astronomers have played a game of guess-the-numbers with cosmological implications. Working from a mock catalog of galaxies prepared by a Japanese team, two American teams correctly guessed the cosmological parameters used to generate the catalog to within 1% accuracy. This gives us confidence that their methods will be able to determine the correct parameters of the real Universe when applied to observational data.

The basic equations governing the evolution of the Universe can be derived from theoretical calculations, but some of the numbers in those equations, the cosmological parameters, can only be derived through observations. Cosmological parameters tied to the unobservable parts of the Universe, like the amount of dark matter or the expansion of the Universe driven by dark energy, must be inferred by looking at their effects on the distribution of visible galaxies. There is always uncertainty when working with the dark part of the Universe, and it is hard to be sure that the models and data analysis are accurate. The volume of the challenge data prepared by the Japanese team (center), compared to the total volume of the real Universe observable by light (left), and the volume of one of the largest galaxy survey catalogs, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (right). From left to right, the volumes would be equivalent to cubes with edges of 75 billion light-years, 40 billion light-year, and 9 billion light-years. The marbling in the simulation shows areas of high (red) and low (blue) density. (Credit: Takahiro Nishimichi)

To test the data analysis, a Japanese team led by Takahiro Nishimichi at Kyoto University and the Kavli IPMU, The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, at the University of Tokyo used the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan to create 10 mock universes with a total volume 100 times greater than even the most extensive galaxy surveys so far. The large volume, large dynamical range, and high resolution achievable only with the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to astronomy were needed to separate systematic errors in the analysis models from random errors due to meaningless coincidences in the data. The cosmological parameters used to evolve these mock universes were chosen randomly from the range of reasonably expected values. The Japanese team prepared a catalog listing the positions of the galaxies in the simulation similar to the catalogs produced by real telescopes observing the heavens. The Japanese team then challenged other astronomers to guess the numbers used to generate the catalog.

Two American teams accepted the challenge. Working independently and using different methods, both teams analyzed the Japanese data with tools used for real astronomy surveys. Each team had only one chance to guess the numbers, and both teams produced answers within 1% of the real values. This shows that these methods should give correct results when applied to real observational data.

So what were the correct numbers? They’re still secret so that more teams can play guess-the-numbers. In this way, the challenge data will continue to support the development and testing of cosmic analysis techniques.

These results appeared as Nishimichi et al. “Blinded challenge for precision cosmology with large-scale structure: results from effective field theory for the redshift-space galaxy power spectrum” in Physical Review D on December 28, 2020.