Ieee Sensors Journal Technical Paper Review Form: Fill & Download for Free

NASA publishes all manner of reports, papers, and documents to describe what they’re doing. A lot of it can be found here:NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) ProgramNASA engineers and scientists also publish papers in journals and present at conferences. For example the IEEE Aerospace Conference every spring in Big Sky, MT has a lot of recent work. The AGU and AIAA conferences are also ones where NASA work is published.Beyond things in “the literature” and distributed through STI, often times you can request information from NASA directly - You might have to do a bit of digging to figure out what to request from who, but by and large, pretty much everything NASA does is available to the public in some form.Most, if not all, of the NASA centers have technology transfer organizations that work with companies that want to commercialize technology developed by NASA. NASA, by law, cannot compete with industry, so a lot of times we develop something and build the first one, but if people want more of them, industry needs to step up and produce it. A ubiquitous example is the CMOS camera in your cellphone, which is based on the Active Pixel Sensor developed at NASA/JPL.There are a few potential hiccups:Some things that NASA does are subject to export controls. So you might have to establish that you’re a legal recipient of the information (a US person) and promise not to transfer it to anyone who isn’t a US person.NASA does work with proprietary information from vendors, and that’s not generally releasable. For example, we may buy a complete widget from industry for a spacecraft. NASA might get documentation on things like the internal parts list for the widget, so we can assess its reliability, but we wouldn’t be able to distribute the parts list - because that’s part of the vendor’s internal information.NASA generates an enormous amount of information and documents just in the course of doing our jobs. In general, that information is not organized in any way for public distribution - so it’s not just dumped out on a website. For instance, while doing some sort of analysis, I might make notes on my whiteboard or on a piece of paper or try some things in a Jupyter notebook - if you were to ask for the information, we don’t have a budget or people to turn them into a “readable by anyone” form.At the end of a project we have boxes and boxes of documents and emails that we send off to storage, “just in case”. One of the things that’s unique about what NASA does is that things last forever (Voyager is still going, more than 40 years after launch) - so if some anomaly occurs 20 years after launch, someone might drag all those boxes out of storage and go through them looking for relevant information. But we have no idea *which* piece of information might be useful, so we don’t necessarily try to index it in detail. You might just say “3 boxes of documentation on assembly AE-35” and ship it away. I’ve done the “pull the boxes from storage and look” twice in the last 20 years I’ve worked at JPL, and it worked fairly well.If a member of the public were to request those documents, someone would have to go through them all, remove the duplicates, make sure there’s no proprietary information in them, review it for export controls, etc., and then package it up for distribution. That’s not a trivial process nor is it speedy. JPL, at least, does get these kinds of requests a few times a year for various things, and we do our best to respond.