NASA Infrared Detector Technical Interchange

When/Where

August 27-28, 2024
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA

Who may attend?

Invited participants from the NASA Centers, NASA HQ, and the broader community of IR technology developers and stakeholders. All participants must be U.S. Persons – the meeting will be held at the CUI level and presentations may contain ITAR material.

Registration will be available, soon!

Purpose

The purpose of the TIM is to openly discuss and review the current state of IR technology in the 2-1000 µm wavelength range. This workshop is intended to evaluate existing relevant NASA-needed technologies and developments, identify opportunities for investments and collaboration, and formulate agency-level strategies to meet its near- and far- term needs for science and exploration missions. The presentations and contact information list will be captured in a proceedings package that will be available to all attendees and NASA stakeholders.

Background

IR detector technology is critical for NASA’s future missions, many of which require state-of-the-art infrared payloads in support Science Mission Directorate (SMD), Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), and Exploration Mission Directorate (EOMD). IR sensors utilized in infrared missions span a wide gamut, including multispectral, polarimetric imaging, point-source detection, scanning dispersive hyperspectral imaging, staring interferometric hyperspectral imaging, and astronomical imaging. Space-qualified IR detectors are a leading item on NASA’s critical technology lists as they are  key enablers for many science missions. The objectives and IR sensor needs for future NASA missions are described in the most recent decadal surveys for Earth Science, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, and Astronomy and Astrophysics:

• Thriving on Our Changing Planet: A Decadal Strategy for Earth Observation from Space
• Origins, Worlds, and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology 2023-2032
• Solar and Space Physics: A Science for a Technological Society
• Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s

To promote knowledge sharing among science and engineering practitioners external- and internal-to NASA, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Sensors & Instrumentation Technical Discipline Team (S&I TDT) recently established an IR Detector Community of Practice (IR CoP).

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Daniel Hoffpauir

Jake Cupani: Increasing Visibility in Data Science

Jake Cupani, a data science specialist, focuses on the intersection between data visualization and user experience — UX — design.

Name: Jake Cupani
Title: Financial analytics support specialist
Organization: Financial Analytics and Systems Office, Office of the Chief Financial Officer (Code 156)

What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard?

I create data visualizations and dashboards to help visualize some of the key metrics including demographics, budgeting, and forecasting. I enjoy helping our office modernize and automate their processes.

What is your educational background?

In 2020, I got a B.S. in information science with a minor in astronomy from the University of Maryland. In 2022, I got a master’s in information management and data analytics also from the University of Maryland.

How did you come to Goddard?

After graduating, I did some consulting. I came to Goddard in 2023, but I had interned for Goddard throughout my academic career. My office knew about my work and recruited me.

You describe yourself as a data science specialist. What do you mean?

Data science encompasses everything from data visualization to analysis and specifics as well as data preparation. Data visualization focuses on taking any sort of data, be it spreadsheets or tables, and creating graphs and interactive charts to explain the data and gather insights on the data.

What is most important to you as a data science specialist?

What I think is important is the intersection between the visualization and the user experience. You have to make it easy for people to digest the analytics so that they can understand the ideas you are trying to get across and the overall trends.

As a person fairly new to Goddard, what are your initial impressions?

What is great about Goddard is that everyone seems really open to helping. Everyone works collaboratively. You can always ask questions. Goddard has a collegial environment.

It is very refreshing to be in an environment that is so open and welcoming. People from all different walks of life work at Goddard and this diversity enables us to accomplish all the things that we do. People are willing to listen to other people’s ideas.

Who is your mentor and what have you learned?

My mentor is my boss, John Brady. I thank him for being such a good leader and listener. He taught me about Goddard’s culture and how decisions are made.

What is your involvement with the LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group?

Although not in a leadership role, I attend the monthly meetings where we get together and have lunch. Sometimes we have speakers, other times we just talk. These lunches help me engage with the LGBTQ+ community.

What one thing you would tell somebody just starting their career at Goddard? 

I would tell them that working at Goddard is an amazing opportunity that will allow them to meet a lot of really smart people who also very welcoming. I would tell them not to be shy and to talk to as many people as they can.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

In five years, I want to still work in data visualization and continue to learn as much as I can to grow my expertise. Beyond that, I don’t know what is in the future for me.

What do you do for fun?

I like baking cookies, brownies, and cakes. I am also a big fan of playing video games, especially Pokémon.

By Elizabeth M. Jarrell
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Conversations With Goddard is a collection of Q&A profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage.

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Madison Olson

NASA-IBM Collaboration Develops INDUS Large Language Models for Advanced Science Research

By Derek Koehl

Collaborations with private, non-federal partners through Space Act Agreements are a key component in the work done by NASA’s Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT). A collaboration with International Business Machines (IBM) has produced INDUS, a comprehensive suite of large language models (LLMs) tailored for the domains of Earth science, biological and physical sciences, heliophysics, planetary sciences, and astrophysics and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources.

INDUS contains two types of models; encoders and sentence transformers. Encoders convert natural language text into numeric coding that can be processed by the LLM. The INDUS encoders were trained on a corpus of 60 billion tokens encompassing astrophysics, planetary science, Earth science, heliophysics, biological, and physical sciences data. Its custom tokenizer developed by the IMPACT-IBM collaborative team improves on generic tokenizers by recognizing scientific terms like biomarkers and phosphorylated. Over half of the 50,000-word vocabulary contained in INDUS is unique to the specific scientific domains used for its training. The INDUS encoder models were used to fine tune the sentence transformer models on approximately 268 million text pairs, including titles/abstracts and questions/answers.

By providing INDUS with domain-specific vocabulary, the IMPACT-IBM team achieved superior performance over open, non-domain specific LLMs on a benchmark for biomedical tasks, a scientific question-answering benchmark, and Earth science entity recognition tests. By designing for diverse linguistic tasks and retrieval augmented generation, INDUS is able to process researcher questions, retrieve relevant documents, and generate answers to the questions. For latency sensitive applications, the team developed smaller, faster versions of both the encoder and sentence transformer models.

Validation tests demonstrate that INDUS excels in retrieving relevant passages from the science corpora in response to a NASA-curated test set of about 400 questions. IBM researcher Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee commented on the overall approach: “We achieved superior performance by not only having a custom vocabulary but also a large specialized corpus for training the encoder model and a good training strategy. For the smaller, faster versions, we used neural architecture search to obtain a model architecture and knowledge distillation to train it with supervision of the larger model.”

INDUS was also evaluated using data from NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division. Dr. Sylvain Costes, the NASA BPS project manager for Open Science, discussed the benefits of incorporating INDUS: “Integrating INDUS with the Open Science Data Repository  (OSDR) Application Programming Interface (API) enabled us to develop and trial a chatbot that offers more intuitive search capabilities for navigating individual datasets. We are currently exploring ways to improve OSDR’s internal curation data system by leveraging INDUS to enhance our curation team’s productivity and reduce the manual effort required daily.”

At the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC), the INDUS model was fine-tuned using labeled data from domain experts to categorize publications specifically citing GES-DISC data into applied research areas. According to NASA principal data scientist Dr. Armin Mehrabian, this fine-tuning “significantly improves the identification and retrieval of publications that reference GES-DISC datasets, which aims to improve the user journey in finding their required datasets.” Furthermore, the INDUS encoder models are integrated into the GES-DISC knowledge graph, supporting a variety of other projects, including the dataset recommendation system and GES-DISC GraphRAG.

Kaylin Bugbee, team lead of NASA’s Science Discovery Engine (SDE), spoke to the benefit INDUS offers to existing applications: “Large language models are rapidly changing the search experience. The Science Discovery Engine, a unified, insightful search interface for all of NASA’s open science data and information, has prototyped integrating INDUS into its search engine. Initial results have shown that INDUS improved the accuracy and relevancy of the returned results.”

INDUS enhances scientific research by providing researchers with improved access to vast amounts of specialized knowledge. INDUS can understand complex scientific concepts and reveal new research directions based on existing data. It also enables researchers to extract relevant information from a wide array of sources, improving efficiency. Aligned with NASA and IBM’s commitment to open and transparent artificial intelligence, the INDUS models are openly available on Hugging Face. For the benefit of the scientific community, the team has released the developed models and will release the benchmark datasets that span named entity recognition for climate change, extractive QA for Earth science, and information retrieval for multiple domains. The INDUS encoder models are adaptable for science domain applications, and the INDUS retriever models support information retrieval in RAG applications.

A paper on INDUS, “INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications,” is available on arxiv.org.

Learn more about the Science Discovery Engine here.

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Gateway: Up Close in Stunning Detail

NASA and its international partners will explore the scientific mysteries of deep space with Gateway, humanity’s first space station to orbit the Moon. Starting with the Artemis IV mission in 2028, the international teams of astronauts living, conducting science, and preparing for missions to the lunar South Pole region on Gateway will be the first humans to make their home in deep space.

This artist’s computer-generated animation presents an exterior tour of Gateway in stunning detail. Depicted Gateway elements are the:

• Power and Propulsion Element that will make Gateway the most powerful solar electric spacecraft ever flown. The module will use the Sun’s energy to power the space station’s subsystems and ionize xenon gas to produce the thrust that will maintain Gateway’s unique polar orbit around the Moon.
• HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), Gateway’s command and control nexus providing communications between Earth and the lunar surface with the Lunar Link system provided by ESA (European Space Agency). HALO will house life support systems, including exercise equipment, and science payload banks.
• Lunar I-Hab, provided by ESA with hardware contributions from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), will host environmental control and life support systems, sleeping quarters, and a galley, among other features.
• Lunar View, provided by ESA, will have refueling capabilities for the Power and Propulsion Element, cargo storage, and large windows.
• Crew and Science Airlock, provided by the Mohammad Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates, for crew and hardware transfer from Gateway’s interior to the vacuum of space.
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• Deep Space Logistics spacecraft that will transport cargo to Gateway to support Artemis missions.
• Initial Gateway science payloads that will study solar and cosmic radiation, a little-understood phenomenon that is a chief concern for people and hardware traveling through deep space, including Mars. The payloads visible in this video are ERSA (European Radiation Sensors Array), provided by ESA, attached to the Power and Propulsion Element, and the NASA-led HERMES (Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite) is attached to HALO. A third radiation science payload, IDA (Internal Dosimeter Array), provided by ESA and JAXA, will be inside of HALO.

This video also depicts:

• The Orion spacecraft docked to the Crew and Science Airlock. Orion will transport international teams of astronauts and three modules (Lunar I-Hab, Lunar View and the Crew and Science Airlock) to the Gateway space station.
• Government-reference Human Landing System (HLS) that will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar South Pole region. SpaceX and Blue Origin are on contract to provide the Starship HLS and Blue Moon HLS, respectively.

Gateway is part of the Artemis architecture to return humans to the lunar surface for scientific discovery and chart a path for human exploration further into the solar system, such as to Mars and beyond.

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Dylan Connell