Award Data

Long-lived Venus landers require power and cooling. Heat from the roughly 64 General Purpose Heat Source (GPHS) modules must be delivered to the convertor with minimal ÄT. The cooling system must be shutoff during the transit to Venus without overheating the GPHS modules. This program will develop an alkali metal Variable Conductance Heat Pipe (VCHP) integrated with a two-phase heat collection/tr ...

Loop heat pipes (LHPs) can provide variable thermal conductance needed to maintain electronics and batteries on Lunar/Martian rovers/landers within desired temperature range. During lunar day, the LHP transfers the heat to the radiator for rejection. During the fourteen-day-long lunar night, the sink temperature drops, lowering LHP and WEB/battery temperatures. Without a variable thermal link, the ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovative Research project proposes to develop a multiscale computational methodology capable of accurate prediction of the properties and performance of insulating ablative materials that are used to protect the re-entry of vehicles from excessive thermal loads. In particular, this effort will focus on multi-million atom, reactive molecular dynamics (MD) simulations o ...

This NASA Phase I STTR effort will establish the feasibility of developing a compact broadband near to mid-IR programmable optical comb for use in laser based remote sensing and communications. The comb generator will use a waveguide-based optical parametric gain block technology that can have ultra wideband (>250nm) operation with very high gain (>25dB) in a very compact footprint. This approach ...

To provide reliably secure communications, development of quantum optical devices for encrypted ground-to-space communications is a necessity. The overall goal of this NASA effort is to develop and deliver efficient, single-pass quantum optical waveguide sources capable of backward quasi-phase-matched interactions for generation of high purity photon pairs for use in an on-demand photon source to ...

This SBIR Phase I effort proposes to establish the feasibility of developing a UV Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC); a compact, highly efficient, waveguide-based frequency conversion module for the generation of phase modulated UV radiation for use in multi-wavelength lidar applications such as NASA LaRC's HSRL program. The proposed module will provide phase modulated 355 nm radiation for calibratio ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I effort will investigate the feasibility of using electro-optic (EO) beam scanning element to control coupling into a fiber as a fiber coupled pulse shaper. The goal of the pulse shaper is to reduce a 4-6ns pulse to 0.4-0.6ns pulse at 1064nm and/or 532nm at input powers at the 2mJ level. The highest utility of the proposed pulse shaper is its progr ...

PI at ArkLight proposes a novel approach to photon counting detectors at near-IR (1-1.8 µm) and mid-IR (3-4 µm) with single photon sensitivity, representing an innovative Lidar technology for ASCENDS mission. She will convert the input signals at 1.27 µm and 1.57 µm to those at 579 nm and 634 nm, respectively, within a periodically-poled LiNbO3 wafer, pumped by a Nd:YAG laser at 1.064 µm or a ...

Clamp-on ultrasound cryogenic flowmeters using single crystal piezoelectric transducers are proposed to enable reliable, accurate cryogenic instrumentation needs in support of NASA Lunar Lander, Ground Operations, Altair, Ares, and Lunar Surface Systems programs. In-space, on the lunar surface, and on the Earth Exploration Systems architecture presents cryogenic storage, distribution, and fluid ha ...

Solution errors are inherent in any Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. Systematic identification, reduction, and control of these various error sources is crucial if the results of CFD simulations are to be trusted for design and performance assessment of air vehicles. While grid refinement studies may verify the spatial accuracy of a solution, these studies are generally laborious a ...