Award Data

NASA is researching various concepts, procedures, standards, and technologies intended for NextGen Airspace. Complex, distributed airspace simulations that utilize experimental testbeds (e.g., Multi Aircraft Control System, or MACS) are vital research tools for these projects. However, managing the various complexities and coordination of agent-supported separation assurance can be challenging. Th ...

The operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the National Airspace System (NAS) is a growing area of research for NASA, but the need for substantial amounts of research on the UAV-in-NAS concept is overwhelming. Furthermore, the quantity and nature of research questions on UAV-in-NAS operations are somewhat unpredictable as this research progresses, thereby requiring NASA to have flexible r ...

Concept SEVEN (System Enhancement for Versatile Electronic Negotiation) is a new type of Traffic Management Initiative (TMI) that has been in research and development within the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) program for years. It allows for the electronic negotiation of routes based on user-submitted preferences when capacity is restricted in an area of the airspace. The first phase of SEV ...

Traffic Managers, Supervisors and Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) Specialists have a critical and significant responsibility in the ATM system to deal with widely varying contingencies and issues. Although many tools exist to support the Traffic Manager in fulfilling their duties, these tools generally focus on one specific type of traffic management initiative and the planning ...

Through extensive research conducted by Mosaic ATM in the area of Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC), we have identified the significant benefit of the use of Dynamic Density (DD) as the DAC objective function. The use of DD as the objective function allows the DAC algorithm to directly address critical aspects of sector design beyond simple balancing of the flight counts. These sector design co ...

In today's operations, acceptable levels of controller workload are maintained by assigning sector capacities based on simple aircraft count and a capacity threshold known as the monitor alert parameter (MAP). The MAP value of a sector is typically 5/3 of average sector flight time (or dwell time) measured in minutes, but may be adjusted up or down as necessary to account for other considerat ...

Mosaic ATM proposes to study a Relative Position Indicator (RPI) concept for managing mixed RNAV and traditionally vectored arrival traffic, to enable increased adoption of RNAV procedures in airspace or traffic environments that include mixed RNAV and non-RNAV aircraft. The most common reason controllers give for why RNAV procedures are not used at their airports is the difficulty handling mixed ...

Knowing atmospheric 13CO2/12CO2 ratios precisely is important to understanding biogenic and anthroprogenic sources and sinks for carbon. Currently available field deployable instrumentation have unfavourable attributes such as high power requirements, are extremely expensive, are too large, are not proven or designed to run continuously or unattended for extended periods, and/or are unable to pr ...

Aerosol particles affect the radiative balance of the earth directly, by scattering and absorbing solar and terrestrial radiation, and indirectly, by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. It is now recognized that the atmospheric loading of aerosols generated through human activities can exert an influence on the earth's radiation budget comparable in magnitude with greenhouse gases. However ...

A new technique is proposed for improved trace gas detection and measurement that combines the high absorption depths afforded by mid-infrared Integrated Cavity Output Spectroscopy (ICOS) with the added precision and sensitivity of Frequency Modulated Spectroscopy (FMS). To our knowledge, the two-tone FM technique described and prototyped in this proposal is the first demonstration of this combin ...