That asteroid/comet rendezvous mission demonstrated the performance and long-term durability of the solar array design and laid the foundation for further improvements. Collaborative work among NASA, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, and Entech continued through the 1990s, culminating in a lens array that was used on NASA's New Millennium Deep Space 1 mission (1998-2001). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Entech Solar (then Entech, Inc.) developed a solar power concentrator for terrestrial applications that was spun into a concentrator for use in space in the late 1980s.
"It was NASA's need for a smaller, lighter weight, inexpensive technology that drove the work and pushed the envelope to achieve these extraordinary results." "The story of this technology is absolutely about the Entech-NASA partnership," said Roshanak Hakimzadeh, Deputy Chief Technologist at Glenn. The stretched lens array, which won a 2012 FLC Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer, achieves both goals. In space, the primary need is to minimize mass, while the focus on the ground is to reduce cost. Although the materials used for space and on the ground are different, the fundamental design is similar. A spinoff of the space technology is now being used back on the ground in an advanced solar panel that the commercial partner, Entech Solar of Fort Worth, Texas, plans to commercialize in 2012. The stretched lens array was developed for use on the ground, then redesigned for use in space. The technology significantly reduces the weight of the solar arrays that power spacecraft and space stations, and makes solar power on the ground much more affordable.
The product of that collaboration, the stretched lens array, uses a thin film lens to concentrate sunlight on a small area of high-efficiency photovoltaic solar cells. In addition, the surface can be reused following treatment.Ī remarkable 30-year partnership between NASA's Glenn Research Center and a solar panel developer has led to a technology that has transformed solar energy collection in space, and on Earth. This technology can be applied without removing the paint or dismantling the painted structure. The extracted PCBs react with the microscale activated metal and are degraded into benign by-products. The solution then extracts the PCBs from the paint. This innovative technology consists of a solvent solution (e.g., ethanol, d-limonene) that contains an activated zero-valent metal.ĪMTS is first applied to the painted surface either using spray-on techniques or wipe-on techniques. To address limitations with traditional abatement methods for PCBs in paints, researchers at NASAs Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the University of Central Florida have developed the Activated Metal Treatment System (AMTS) for Paints. Other methods, like incineration, can destroy the PCBs but destroy the painted structure as well, preventing reuse. Some treatment methods (e.g., use of solvents, physical removal via scraping) are capable of removing PCBs from surfaces, but these technologies create a new waste stream that must be treated. The presence of PCBs in paints adds complexity and expense for disposal. Although the production of PCBs in the United States has been banned since the late 1970s, many surfaces are still coated with PCB-laden paints. PCBs have been shown to cause cancer in animals and to have other adverse effects on immune, reproductive, nervous, and endocrine systems. For most of SHAI's commercial sales, the company obtains a service contract to customize AMP to a specific domain and then issues the customer a user license. AMP can benefit vehicle assembly plants, batch processing plants, semiconductor manufacturing, printing and textiles, surface and underground mining operations, and maintenance shops. AMP is adaptable to assist with a variety of complex scheduling problems in manufacturing, transportation, business, architecture, and construction. It provides a constraint authoring system for adding other constraints to the scheduling process as needed. Using information entered into the system by expert planners, the system automatically makes scheduling decisions based upon resource limitations and other constraints. The system creates optimal schedules while reducing manpower costs. Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.(SHAI), is marketing its automatic scheduling system, the Automated Manifest Planner (AMP), to industries that must plan and project changes many different times before the tasks are executed.
#KENNEDY SPACE CENTER SOFTWARE#
A software system that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help with complex Space Shuttle scheduling at Kennedy Space Center is commercially available.
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