News & Features 2023

Check out these fabulous projects—led by the NAS Division’s gifted scientists and engineering gurus— that are making things safer for Earthlings and future human and robotic space explorers! All were showcased at SC23, the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, in Denver, Colorado this past November, where attendees from around the world flocked to see science and engineering advances made possible by NASA high-performance computing.

Read year-end wrap on NAS Division science and engineering projects in 2023.

An international team of researchers led by Rafael Luque, of the University of Chicago, published a paper on the discovery of six planets that orbit their central star in a rhythmic beat, a rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep that could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution. The NAS Division supports this work by providing the high-performance computing resources required for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) science data pipeline.

Read more about the TESS discovery.

To comprehensively understand asteroid impact risks, scientists have relied on limited data sources, including all-sky video camera systems, scattered dashcams, and eyewitness accounts. Scientists at SETI, with partners at NASA, Sandia National Labs, and UC Berkeley developed a machine-learning algorithm to identify rare, large meteors in satellite data, and utilized systems at the NAS facility.

Read more about the role of NASA high-end computing machine learning and data analysis.

Airplane engines are loud—just ask anyone who lives near an airport. Using the Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, researchers have developed software that can model different engine configurations in a more timely and economic manner.

Read more about the role of NASA high-end computing in designing aircraft engines.

Through Artemis, NASA plans to explore more of the Moon than ever before with human and robotic missions on the lunar surface. Researchers at NASA Marshall ran simulations at the NASA facility to help mission planners better understand how future spacecraft engine plumes will interact with the Moon’s surface.

Read more.

Check out the NASA@SC23 website to see eye-catching images and videos, and learn about the exciting science and engineering achievements being highlighted this year at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, November 13–17 in Denver—all made possible by NASA high-end computing!

Visit the NASA at SC23 website.

While NASA has adjusted the scheduled first flight of its revolutionary X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft to 2024, the Quesst mission has made steady progress toward flight. Researchers in the NAS Division built a database of thousands of high-fidelity simulations to verify the supersonic performance of the X-59 during its design and to predict the performance of the vehicle during test flights. A video produced by our researchers is featured in the NAS Scientific Visualization Gallery.

Watch the video of X-59 low-boom flight demonstrator.

NASA management has announced that the Unsteady Pressure-Sensitive Paint (uPSP) Data Processing Software received an honorable mention in the 2023 NASA Software of the Year Award competition. Developed by several teams across NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley—including visualization and aerodynamics experts in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division—the uPSP software is a collection of applications that processes raw data from wind tunnel-based testing systems.

Read more about the honorable mention

NAS Division Computational Physics Branch Chief, Steve (Seokkwan) Yoon, discusses how computational tools are being used to support the design of advanced air mobility (AAM) vehicles. NASA work helps guide industry’s development of electric air taxis and drones and will assist the Federal Aviation Administration in safely integrating these vehicles into the national airspace.

Read more about the NAS 2023 summer intern projects.

Students from around the U.S. and Canada wrapped up a three-month NASA summer internship opportunity at NAS, where each student was matched with NAS Division mentors having expertise in their fields of study. Their projects contributed to NASA research in aeronautics, space exploration, heliophysics, and Earth science, as well as data analysis and visualization tools and technologies.

Read more about the NAS 2023 summer intern projects.

A NASA-led study showed that if global temperatures keep rising and reach 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, people worldwide could face multiple impacts of climate change simultaneously. Researchers at the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) relied on NASA High-End Computing resources, including the Pleiades supercomputer, for climate modeling and data distribution employed in the study.

Read more about the NASA climate study,

Researchers at Northwestern University ran simulations of the Sun and other stars on the Pleiades cluster at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility and made some discoveries that help answer questions about how magnetic fields develop and travel to the surface—leading to clues about how they influence the Sun’s atmosphere and Earth’s magnetic shield.

Read the story about discoveries made about the Sun using NASA High-End Computing resources.

NASA High-End Computing resources, including those at the NAS facility, enabled a modeling study of the Indonesian Throughflow, the only low-latitude gateway for export of large amounts of heat and freshwater from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. The Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) atmospheric model coupled with Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation (MITgcm) ocean model was run for 14 months at a horizontal resolution of ~6–7 kilometers (km) for the atmosphere and ~2–4 km for the ocean to better resolve the flow through these narrow passages.

Read more about the NASA study of the Indonesian Throughflow,

Scientists in NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office used the Aitken supercomputer to run their 2023 Hazardous Spring Forecast Experiment, which evaluates different ways to model severe weather over the continental U.S. Application optimization experts in the NAS Division provided extensive, customized “concierge service” throughout the three-month project to ensure its success.

See the story about this HECC user success.

Mark your calendar to hear NAS Division Research Scientist Jon Jenkins present, “Chasing Shadows in the Night: How NASA’s Kepler and TESS Missions Are Revolutionizing Exoplanet Science” on July 25 at 11 a.m. Pacific Time. During his talk, Jenkins will describe how we detect weak transit signatures in noisy transit survey data sets and present some of the most compelling discoveries made so far by Kepler and TESS.

Ames Summer Series.

Mark your calendar! NAS Division Aerodynamics Engineer Derek Dalle will present, “NASA’s Use of Supercomputing in the Artemis Program,” on July 13 at 11 a.m. Pacific Time, as part of the 2023 NASA Summer Series. Dalle will share some ways that NASA groups use computational modeling to support space exploration. The aerodynamics, heating, and acoustics of the ascent and descent phases are the primary focus of Artemis-related supercomputing efforts.

Ames Summer Series.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have been used in the aerospace industry for decades to create lightweight designs, improve aerodynamics, reduce friction during high velocity scenarios like reentry and much more. NASA and its partners are using CFD for bleeding-edge aerospace research, including CFD studies for missions to go back to the Moon, with Space Launch System simulations run on supercomputers at the NAS facility.

Read more about the CFD study run on the Pleiades and Electra supercomputers.

While we often take the enormous amount of computing power at our fingertips for granted, it was the predecessors to our ubiquitous machines that first changed the world, quickly making things once thought impossible commonplace. One of the places where those enormous changes were done was at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, home today to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division.

Video of The History Guy about NASA Supercomputing

This Earth Day, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley asked researchers studying our planet to share what excites them about Earth science and explain how they’re working to better understand, predict, and protect Earth’s life-sustaining water systems. Nina McCurdy, Data Visualization Scientist in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division highlights how supercomputers and complex visualization are helping an international group of scientists run complex ocean and atmospheric circulation models.

Read more about the ECCO visualization work.

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report that extremely intense days of rain or snow will be more frequent by the end of this century than previously thought. The NASA High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project provided resources supporting this work through the NAS Division, NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), and the Earth Science Division.

News from Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

In support of NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) Program Office, a team of NAS Division scientists working on the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project presented a hypothetical asteroid impact scenario at the 8th Planetary Defence Conference in Vienna, Austria this week. Science.com's Robert Lea captured their efforts to better calculate the size of the asteroid and build an asteroid impact risk assessment model that considers many factors, from limited observational data.

Video of Lorien Wheeler's presentation at the 8th Planetary Defence Conference

NASA high-performance computing experts, in collaboration with counterparts from the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), held a NASA/DOE-ECP hybrid meeting at NASA’s Ames Research Center on April 11, 2023. Click below for more information on the ECP.

Department of Energy Exascale Computing Program (ECP) banner image.

No, it’s not hypermodern art. This image from a simulation generated by NASA’s high-performance computers, shows a Transonic Truss Braced Wing (TTBW) aircraft concept, which could consume up to 10% less jet fuel than a standard airliner. Researchers in the NAS Division are simulating the TTBW’s Mach 0.8 cruise configuration to validate and develop their scale-resolving CFD models.

Image from a simulation of the Transonic Truss-Braced Wing aircraft .

Did you know that solar flares produce sunquakes that are similar to earthquakes? Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology came up with some interesting findings about the impact of flares on the Sun. Take a look at the related video produced by NAS visualization experts, featured in the NAS Scientific Visualization Gallery.

Watch the video of solar flare heating and waves.

Over the last ten years, NASA high-perfomance computing resources have been used to improve prediction of rotorcraft hover performance. Animations created by NAS Division visualization experts play a crucial role in understanding the physics of rotorcraft flows—including the discovery of a previously unknown phenomenon called turbulent “worms.” Take a look at the cool video of a V22 Osprey rotor and the spinning worms—along with other fascinating images and movies in the NAS Scientific Visualization Gallery.

Watch the video of rotorcraft flow on a V22 Osprey rotor during hover.