The Department of Energy's (DoE) Sandia National Laboratory, in cooperation with NIST, developed the portable Josephson Voltage Standard. This new compact, fully automated calibration system for direct current reference standards and digital voltmeters has proved useful to NASA, and technicians may eventually adapt this portable concept for space applications. NASA began using one portable Josephson Voltage Standard among all its Centers, saving the cost of $150,000 per laboratory system at each Center.

DoE and NASA collaborated on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment, which flew on a Space Shuttle mission during FY 1998. The AMS collaboration was the first time such a detector has been put in orbit, and it measured antimatter and dark matter in space.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is operated by the University of California for DoE, recently completed testing a space instrument designed to provide a better understanding of the compositions of comets and asteroids and delivered the instrument for eventual integration with the NASA spacecraft. The first spectrometer combines two spectrometers into one package and is known as the Plasma Experiment for Planetary Exploration. This experiment package can analyze the composition of many types of cosmic matter and can also determine whether a nuclear or chemical explosion took place in the upper atmosphere or in space.

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists received a grant from NASA to use laboratory space instrument design and manufacturing expertise to test critical components of an instrument for possible use on a future mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa. Simultaneously, three researchers from Los Alamos worked as part of a 17-member international team to determine for NASA the technical requirements for an instrument to study that moon's icy surface. The team began studying many criteria, including how to distinguish the various radar reflection signals returned by rocks, cracks in the ice, salty and nonsalty ice, and other conditions on the Europa's surface.

DoE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory continued to serve as one of NASA's nine Distributed Active Archive Centers as part of NASA's EOSDIS, a key component of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Finally, DoE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory continued to support NASA's research on radiation levels in space and their effects on the human body.