Award Data

Aqwest proposes to investigate an innovative staged magnetocaloric refrigerator (SMCR) for thermal management of spacecraft payload electronics. SMCR offers a high-performance approach for thermal management of laser communication equipment and infrared (IR) sensors, while improving the overall payload energy efficiency and reducing its weight. The proposed project will leverage previous work by ...

Foreign missile threat will increase as ballistic missile technology becomes available on an international scale. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) requires high performance, high sensitivity and low noise infrared sensors for space based sensing applications that operate in environments where radiation hardness is essential to mission operation. Radiation hard by design (RHBD) readout integrated circu ...

With the advent of new digital receiver exciters it is now feasible to generate innovative waveforms that can adapt rapidly to meet changing environments and scenarios. In order to meet the numerous and diverse objectives of this request for proposal we propose an approach that combines recent advances in the area of radar waveform design based on chaotic systems, multisensor data fusion based on ...

In order to successfully identify a lethal object in a ballistic missile launch complex it is important to have a good description (or image) of the interrogated area. Radar’s ability to interrogate and accurately characterize complex target environments is of great importance for missile defense. Large targets and high resolution surveillance radar systems provide multiple raw detection data de ...

The FIRST RF approach to multi-beam phased array antennas proposed for this phase I program uses innovative application of techniques traditionally used in communication networks in order to simultaneously perform RF analog beamforming of multiple beams simultaneously on a single RF manifold. The proposed methods are scalable to a large number of simultaneous beams, and are independent of both the ...

Phased array antenna systems are growing in use within military systems. These arrays of thousands of elements need precise control of the aperture distributions to meet requirements for gain, sidelobes, etc. Errors in these phase and amplitude distributions over time will degrade the performance of these apertures. FIRST RF favors simple concepts with little or no hardware impact that fully ch ...

Insider threat has been an increasingly important problem given low employee morale in today’s tight economy and the increasing reliance on third-party software (including COTS components) that are generally only available in machine-code form and are in many cases produced oversees. We believe that a key to addressing the problem of insider threat is the use of powerful program analyses i ...

A reverse engineer who has the ability to examine software in an off-line lab has an enormous advantage over one who is forced to work “in the field”. In contrast to the software’s intended environment, a reverse engineer can work undetected, and can more easily make use of analysis tools such as debuggers or emulators if they have fine control over the system that is executing ...

Helios Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. and Michigan Technological University propose to develop and estimate the performance of innovative adaptive wideband waveforms for missile defense radar applications that are jointly and simultaneously optimized on transmit and receive for realistic operating considerations, optimized for expected target, clutter and jamming spectral support and optimized for c ...

Micro and nano satellites continue to play an increasing role in future military applications. New mission scenarios are driving the need for higher agility and thus for new actuators capable of meeting the higher torque requirements. In Phase 1, Honeybee Robotics developed a mature concept for a high torque, low power CMG-based attitude control actuator called TORC (Tiny Operationally Responsive ...