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1. No end to endemism – contributions to the difficult Nasa Weigend Series Alatae (Loasaceae). A new species from Peru and the rehabilitation of “ Loasa” calycina Benth.

   https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.252.141635  

   Henning, Tilo; Allen, Joshua P; Montesinos-Tubeé, Daniel; Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Eric F; Peña, José_Luis Marcelo; Acuña-Castillo, Rafael (February 2025, PhytoKeys)

   A new species of Nasa ser. Alatae (Urban & Gilg) Weigend from Northern Peru is described and illustrated.Nasa katjaesp. nov.was at first encountered by an observation on iNaturalist and subsequently collected in the humid Andean forests near Colasay in the province of Jaén (Cajamarca, Peru). Whilst comparing the new species with closely relatedNasa loxensis(Kunth) Weigend, a taxon widespread in Southern Ecuador (and tentatively adjacent Peru), a reevaluation of the status of earlier synonymizedLoasa calycinaBenth. became necessary. Consequently,Nasa calycinacomb. nov.is rehabilitated at species level andNasa loxensisis redefined. 

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2. 3GPP Mobile Telecommunications Technology on the Moon

   https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO55745.2023.10115746  

   Edwards, Bernard; Wagner, Raymond; Zemba, Michael; Millard, Wesley; Braham, Stephen; Gifford, Kevin; Somerlock, Oscar (March 2023, IEEE)

   Under NASA’s Artemis program, NASA is planning to send astronauts back to the Moon in the next couple of years. Near term missions will be analogous but much more sophisticated versions of the last couple of Apollo missions. However, unlike Apollo, this time NASA intends to put the infrastructure in place to support long term human presence and eventual industrialization of the Moon. To make this vision a reality, NASA plans to collaborate with commercial and international partners as much as possible as opposed to developing, building, and operating equipment on its own. Lunar infrastructure will eventually be built over time by many organizations, public and private, to support sustained human exploration, science, and industrial activities. Obviously, this vision for the future will be impossible without a robust lunar communications and navigation system that can support many users with varying degrees of services. On Earth, most people are very familiar with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G mobile telecommunications technology. NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation office would like to see a lunar communications and navigation network with similar capabilities to the cellular communication networks most of us enjoy today. Building such a network will require participation by many organizations. This paper will provide an overview of NASA’s interest in using 5G and beyond on the lunar surface; it will also describe current work based on 3GPP standards within NASA or funded by NASA, such as Nokia’s upcoming Tipping Point demonstration of 4G / LTE on the lunar surface. 

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3. Validation of Ionospheric Modeled TEC in the Equatorial Ionosphere During the 2013 March and 2021 November Geomagnetic Storms

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2023SW003480  

   Chou, Min‐Yang; Yue, Jia; Wang, Jack; Huba, J. D.; El Alaoui, Mostafa; Kuznetsova, Maria M.; Rastätter, Lutz; Shim, Ja Soon; Fang, Tzu‐Wei; Meng, Xing; et al (June 2023, Space Weather)

   Key Points Validation of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) by the state‐of‐the‐art ionospheric models hosted by NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Multiple metrics and skill scores are used to assess the performance of ionospheric models in capturing storm time TEC anomaly GLObal Total Electron Content and JPL Global Ionospheric Map perform best, and physics‐based models perform better than the empirical model in capturing storm TEC variations 

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4. Understanding and Characterizing Speaker Roles within Naturalistic Task-Based Communications: The Fearless Steps APOLO-11 Corpus

   Chandra-Shekar, M.; Hansen, J (December 2022, Acoustical Society of America (Fall Meeting))

   Naturalistic team based speech communications requires specific protocols/procedures to be followed to allow for effective task completion for distributed team members. NASA Apollo-11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the moon and return them safely. Mission specialists roles within NASA Mission Control (MOCR) are complex and reflected in their communications. In this study, we perform speaker clustering to identify speech segments uttered by the same speaker from recently recovered Fearless Steps APOLLO corpus (CRSS-UTDallas). We propose a pretrained network to obtain speaker embeddings and use a framework that builds on these learned embeddings which achieves a clustering accuracy of 73.4%. We also track/tag key speakers-of-interest across three critical mission phases and analyze speaker roles based on speech duration. NASA communication protocols dictate that information be communicated in a concise manner. In automated communication analysis, individuals higher in trait dominance generally speak more and gain more control over group processes. Hence, speaker duration of primary- versus -secondary speaker and speaker turns are metrics used to determine speaker role. This analysis provides greater understanding of communications protocol and serves as a lasting tribute to the «Heroes Behind the Heroes of Apollo» as well as preserve “words spoken in space.” 

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5. Fearless Steps APOLLO: Challenges in keyword spotting and topic detection for naturalistic audio streams

   Joglekar, A.; Lopez-Espejo, I.; Hansen, J.H.L. (May 2023, Program of the meeting Acoustical Society of America)

   Fearless Steps (FS) APOLLO is a + 50,000 hr audio resource established by CRSS-UTDallas capturing all communications between NASA-MCC personnel, backroom staff, and Astronauts across manned Apollo Missions. Such a massive audio resource without metadata/unlabeled corpus provides limited benefit for communities outside Speech-and-Language Technology (SLT). Supplementing this audio with rich metadata developed using robust automated mechanisms to transcribe and highlight naturalistic communications can facilitate open research opportunities for SLT, speech sciences, education, and historical archival communities. In this study, we focus on customizing keyword spotting (KWS) and topic detection systems as an initial step towards conversational understanding. Extensive research in automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech activity, and speaker diarization using manually transcribed 125 h FS Challenge corpus has demonstrated the need for robust domain-specific model development. A major challenge in training KWS systems and topic detection models is the availability of word-level annotations. Forced alignment schemes evaluated using state-of-the-art ASR show significant degradation in segmentation performance. This study explores challenges in extracting accurate keyword segments using existing sentence-level transcriptions and proposes domain-specific KWS-based solutions to detect conversational topics in audio streams. 

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