NASA's Science Program Research Articles

FUNDING SCIENCE AT NASA

THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS & Space Administration has a lot on its plate right now. It's being asked to get the space shuttle fleet frying again, finish the International Space Station, develop new spacecraft to replace the aging shuttles, prepare for lunar missions, and maintain its vigorous science programs. It is to do all this on a budget that's expected to grow by only 3.2% in 2007 to $16.8 billion. A report from the National Academies, however, finds that NASA is being asked to do too much with too little; that is, the agency lacks the resources to achieve its set goals. The congressionally mandated report, An Assessment of Balance in NASA's Science Programs, was released on May 4 and concludes that the agency's science programs are being cannibalized to fund the exploration goals set by the President's Vision for Space Exploration, which was rolled out in January 2004 and targets ...

NASA science programs lack money and balance

NASA should restore funding for smaller science missions, research and analysis (R & A) programs, and technology for future missions, according to a report released on 4 May by the U.S. National Academies' National Research Council.

Space studies board issues study on NASA's Research and Data Analysis Programs

Critical science questions must form the basis of research and data analysis (R&DA) programs at NASA, a recently published report by the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council (NRC) emphasizes. The report also warns that NASA is expecting more from its programs without assurances of adequate funding.Called “Supporting Research and Data Analysis in NASA's Science Programs: Engines for Innovation and Synthesis,” the report makes a number of recommendations, including the suggestion that NASA's science offices improve the link between R&DA programs and strategic plans. For example, it says the agency should link NASA Research Announcements (NRAs) to science questions in the plans and evaluate the balance between the programs' common subelements. These subelements include theoretical investigations, new instrument development, groundbased research, and data management.

NASA seeks comment

NASA is seeking public comment on a new science policy guide that will become the agency's major instrument for communication about its conduct of science. Called “Science in Air and Space: NASA's Science Policy Guide,” the document will publish the framework for pursuing the agency's science goals.“One of the most far‐reaching discussions in the guide is how partnership—diverse representations of individuals, groups, and institutions—and contributions by the international scientific community are important to enhance the quality and vitality of NASA's science programs,” said NASA's Chief Scientist, France Cordova.

AGU adopts, reconfirms positions: Space station

The following is AGU's position statement on the Space Station and creationism, adopted and reaffirmed by the Council on May 26, 1994.A healthy and effective space program is of critical importance to many fields of geophysics. The Space Station defined in the President's fiscal year 1995 budget is designed to maintain human presence in space and to allow microgravity and life sciences studies. Although this version of the station is supposed to be less costly than the original Space Station Freedom, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) remains deeply concerned that the high cost of implementing the current station design will detrimentally affect NASA's science programs: Mission to Planet Earth, those in the space sciences, and others. The impact within NASA is already evident in that there are no resources identified for new space science missions in the projected budgets for future years. The situation threatens the viability of a balanced national space program. AGU is also concerned that the high costs of the station may detrimentally impact geophysical science programs of other agencies.

An adaptive technique to maximize lossless image data compression of satellite images

Data compression will play an increasingly important role in the storage and transmission of image data within the NASA science programs as the Earth Observing System comes into operation. It is important that the science data be preserved at the fidelity the instrument and satellite communication systems were designed to produce. Lossless compression must therefore be applied, at least to archive the processed instrument data. In this paper, we present an analysis of the performance of lossless compression techniques and develop an adaptive approach that applies image remapping, feature-based image segmentation to determine regions of similar entropy, as well as high-order arithmetic coding, to obtain significant improvements over the use of conventional compression techniques alone. Image remapping is used to transform the original image into a lower entropy state. Several techniques were tested on satellite images including differential pulse code modulation, bi-linear interpolation, and block-based linear predictive coding. The results of these experiments are discussed, and trade-offs between computation requirements and entropy reductions are used to identify the optimum approach for a variety of satellite images. Further entropy reduction can be achieved by segmenting the image based on local entropy properties and then applying a coding technique that maximizes compression for the region. Experimental results are presented showing the effect of different coding techniques for regions of different entropy. A rule-base is developed through which the technique giving the best compression is selected. The paper concludes that maximum compression can be achieved cost effectively and at acceptable performance rates with a combination of techniques that are selected based on image contextual information.