Planning and scheduling (P&S) is an essential task for managing current and future NASA missions. P&S systems are used in many areas of spacecraft operations including science planning, flight dynamics operations, and space and ground network scheduling. Typically, different tools are used by… More

NASA faces many systems engineering challenges as it seeks to conduct exploration and science missions concurrently. One such challenge is implementing a repeatable systems engineering process to missions that vary greatly in scale and complexity. The same process applied to lunar and Mars… More

Spacecraft ground systems are on the cusp of achieving "plug-and-play" capability, i.e., they are approaching the state in which the various components can be quickly integrated with near-automatic interoperability. When properly architected, such systems offer advantages over their traditional… More

Over the next decade, a host of new technologies and capabilities will be needed by NASA to support Project Constellation. For risk reduction considerations, it is desirable that they be flown on other missions prior to use on vehicles such as Orion or Altair. An innovative and cost-effective… More

Emergent Space Technologies Inc. proposes to develop the Ground Enterprise Management System (GEMS) for spacecraft ground systems. GEMS will provide situational awareness for distributed ground systems, and an understanding of how events and automated actions impact the system in real-time. Recent… More

he objective of this proposal is to research, design and develop an automated real-time targeting and guidance (ARTGUID) software for precision lunar landing and descent. The software tool will be reliable, extensible, scalable and verifiable based on the complex mission-driven requirements on the… More

United States spaceports carry out the impressive task of launching and recovering spacecrafts and payloads which represent extremely unique and expensive assets. The successful deployment, recovery, and operation of these assets are essential to our scientific discovery, economic prosperity, and… More

Covariance realism and consistency are critical to precision tracking and long-term orbit prediction of resident space objects (RSOs). This proposal tackles the key challenges that would yield realistic state estimation error covariance measures for tracking RSOs with relevant covariance consistency… More

United States spaceports carry out the critical task of launching and recovering vehicles and payloads. These are extremely unique and expensive assets, and their successful deployment, operation, and recovery are essential to our nation's scientific discovery, economic prosperity, and national… More

The MRSiG will be able to replace many of the expensive, highly specialized RF signal generators with cheaper generic boxes that can be customized as the technologies are updated. MRSiG boxes can be utilized throughout the entire RF hardware development cycle, from the breadboard to the flight… More

The Air Force goal of persistent space situation awareness will be achieved in part by the integrated application of distributed sensors appropriately exploited through advanced methods of fusion and automated analysis. This proposal aims to provide commanders with automated, real-time… More

Early Hardware-in-the-Loop (HWIL) simulation is essential to early retirement of space mission development risks. Upcoming NASA missions such as MMS involve complex high Earth orbits making the use of GPS difficult, though NASA has developed GPS receivers capable of performing in these… More

Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. (Emergent) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) propose to investigate the navigation performance and computational burden of a second-order Kalman filter that uses a new method of computing second-order derivatives using multi-complex numbers, a… More

ABSTRACT: Recent improvements in atmospheric density modeling now provide more confidence in spacecraft ballistic coefficient (BC) estimations, which were previously corrupted by large errors in density. Without attitude knowledge, forecasting the true BC for accurate future state and uncertainty… More

ABSTRACT: The Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) Mission System (JMS) needs to process situational awareness (SA) data from many sources and incorporates the resulting assessments to perform automated, intelligent tasking of space assets. SA and automated resource management (RM) for space… More

Operationally Responsive Space missions require a rapid satellite configuration and launch to fulfill the needs of in-theatre commanders. A GPS receiver that can be used with cubesats and that meets the SWaP requirements for these launches and that can perform GPS based scientific missions from the… More

The proposed innovation is to use the comm-based measurements available from many advanced satellite cluster wireless networks to improve the flexibility and robustness of relative and absolute navigation systems without the additional expense, weight and power that a traditional navigation backup… More

NASA is installing the Communications, Navigation, and Networking reConfigurable Testbed (CoNNeCT) onto the truss of the International Space Station to demonstrate software-defined radio (SDR) technology, and is now accepting proposals for new and useful SDR experiments to fly on CoNNeCT that are… More

The need for science-grade Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) sensors that are low Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) is well recognized. The ability to provide precise positioning and pointing in real-time is a capability needed for formation flying, rendezvous and proximity operations, and radio… More

ABSTRACT: As the number of objects in orbit about the Earth and the capabilities of satellites increase, it becomes more difficult to obtain true space situational awareness (SSA). In many cases, the small size or distance of these resident space objects (RSOs) further complicate this problem… More