Award Data

Marine phytoplankton are critical in sustaining life on Earth. They are key drivers of the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon and other nutrients, and account for 50% of global photosynthesis. Phytoplankton growth is the fundamental component of the 'ocean biological pump'?one of the two primary mechanisms that cause the ocean to be a significant sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide ...

The innovation in this SBIR Phase II project is the development of a unique triple junction inverted metamorphic technology (IMM), which will enable the manufacturing of very lightweight, low-cost, InGaAsP-based multijunction solar cells. The proposed IMM technology is based on ELO (epitaxial lift-off) and consists of Indium (In) and Phosphorous (P) solar cell active materials, which are designed ...

We will implement an environment for design, formal verification, compilation of code, and performance and power evaluation of Systems on a Chip (SOCs) consisting of heterogeneous processor cores that can be single-issue pipelined, superscalar, or VLIW, and are binary-code compatible with any existing Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Particularly, we will ensure binary-code compatibility with t ...

Advances in high power, photovoltaic technology has enabled the possibility of reasonably sized, high specific power, high power, solar arrays. At high specific powers, power levels ranging from 50 to several hundred kW are feasible. Coupled with gridded ion thruster technology, this power technology can be mission enabling for a wide range of missions ranging from ambitious near Earth NASA miss ...

The work will focus on the 3D implementation of the Phase 1 CHARM mesher, with solution-adaptive iteration for CFD and non-CFD applications. The proposed 3D method will incorporate and extend a previously developed method of generating field-guided hexahedral elements from a metric tensor field. While the fundamental technical approach?a combination of metric tensor conditioning, metric-tracing me ...

This proposed Phase II program builds on the Phase I effort addressing NASA's future mission requirements by: 1) developing higher performing TPS materials capable of meeting the demands of multiple severe mission trajectories; and 2) integrating TPS materials with the sub-structure to improve overall robustness and decrease mass. The program's goal is to extend Phenolic Impregnated Car ...

Improving the acoustical environment is critical in aeronautics. Airports and aeronautical systems manufacturers are facing ever-increasing demands to reduce noise levels. Aeronautical applications require the use of high quality microphones with a large dynamic range, sometimes in large arrays. These arrays are expensive. The advent of lower cost microphones that meet the users' specifica ...

During this program, Fiber Materials, Inc. (FMI) will develop practical methods for preparing Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) materials for joining thermal protection system segments and penetrations of the heat shield assembly. Current and future mission flight environments and designs, such as those for Mars Science Laboratory Aeroshell (MSLA) and anticipated for New Frontiers and Mar ...

We propose an improved cathode based on our novel theory of the role of scandium oxide in enhancing emission in tungsten-impregnated cathodes. Recent results have demonstrated the efficacy of nano-particle scandium oxide, but a detailed theory on the mechanism of operation has been lacking. Our theory explains published data and points to an optimized cathode, which we propose here to build and ...

Based on the successful separation of 20 compounds using a 1 m coated microcolumn in Phase I, we propose to design a new micro-gas chromatograph (microGC) system to separate and detect of all contaminants listed in NASAs "Spacecraft Maximum Allowable Concentrations for Airborne Contaminants (SMACs)" using cabin air as the carrier gas, and to integrate the entire system to maximize the detection of ...