Award Data

Reduced mass composite materials are crucial to the success of aerospace systems, but are inhibited by expensive autoclave consolidation, especially for large parts. To remedy this, NASA-LaRC has been developing cost-effective high-performance thermoplastic composite materials for years. NASA materials could dramatically reduce the cost of large aerospace structures, because those materials avo ...

The current Shuttle LOX loading pumps have several issues requiring high-maintenance and resulting in low reliability. The proposed pump system would mitigate NASA's concerns on reliability in this critical application by virtue of the seal arrangement tested in Phase 1 and the design of each pump to be able to meet the current fill rates in the event of one unit's failure. Phase I focussed on the ...

Uncooled focal plane arrays have improved dramatically and array sizes of 320x240 elements in a 50-?m pitch are commercially available at affordable cost. Black Forest Engineering proposes to design a readout integrated circuit to allow fabrication of a large format 1024x768 element uncooled sensor. The significant innovation is the use of 0.18 ?m CMOS design rules, high duty cycle signal sampling ...

Boulder Nonlinear Systems, Inc. (BNS) proposes to develop an Electro-Optic Imaging Fourier Transform Spectral Polarimeter (E-O IFTSP). The polarimetric system is based on BNS? patented FTS technology, where ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) polarization switches control device operation. The designed system has simple drive/calibration requirement, and the capability to acquire complete Stokes po ...

In comparison to stereovision, it is well known that structured-light illumination has distinct advantages including the use of only one camera, being significantly less sensitive to background clutter, and not requiring the target object to have nonambiguous features. But because structured-light illumination requires a scanning process, it is inappropriate for humancomputer interfacing where the ...

The new generation of, high performance electric propulsion missions will require high mass throughput and most likely the use of grided ion thruster equipped with carbon based grids will be required to meet the extremely high life requirements. However, because of the high susceptibility of these carbon based grids to damage during recycle event they will require a low stored energy beam power D ...

High information content electronic displays remain the most difficult element of the human-machine interface to effectively miniaturize. Mobile applications need a high-definition display small enough to variously be comfortably worn, easily integrated into crowded cockpits, or fit into spacecraft workspaces?environments where even current LCD flat panels, especially when their power sources and ...

This program targets the development of new highly anisotropic nonlinear optical nanocomposite materials for NASA and non-NASA applications in advanced photonic and optoelectronic devices and optical integrated circuits. Integration of electronic and optical components onto a single platform is becoming essential to advancing sensor, computational, memory, and communications technologies. Design ...

This proposed Small Business Innovative Research Phase I addresses the development of a catalytic system for efficient conversion of carbon dioxide and hydrogen to hydrocarbon and organic species via carbon monoxide. This approach is particularly relevant to future Mars missions, since the Martian atmosphere is comprised of over 95% CO2. The proposed approach will utilize Fischer-Tropsch Synthesi ...

This proposed work will develop a pump, which is based on two novel and unique design features. The first feature is a lobed pumping mechanism which operates with orbital motion. The second feature is the novel manner in which the orbital motion is generated. This pump has monolithic construction, is intrinsically sealed, and mechanically balanced. Power is provided to the pumping mechanism by ...