Award Data

Future NASA flight missions are considering passive wavefront and amplitude control in astronomical applications such as the search for exo-planets. NASA's Discovery mission proposal called out the need for a coherent 2-dimensional array of fiber bundles for this application. In this SBIR proposal we propose to develop monolithic polarization maintaining (PM) coherent fiber bundle arrays consistin ...

Accurate measurement of atmospheric parameters with high resolution needs advanced lasers. In this SBIR program we propose to develop innovative Q-switched high power 2.05micron fiber laser with pulse energy greater than 10mJ, repetition rate of 10Hz to 1KHz, and pulse duration of 200ns using our proprietary innovative highly efficient Tm-doped glass fiber. This new fiber laser will be an all-fibe ...

We will design and formally verify a VLIW processor that is radiation-hardened, and where the VLIW instructions consist of predicated RISC instructions from the PowerPC 750 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The PowerPC 750 ISA is used in the radiation-hardened RAD750 flight-control computer that is utilized in many NASA space missions, including Deep Impact, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the ...

The hundreds of stream cores in the latest graphics processors (GPUs), and the possibility to execute non-graphics computations on them, open unprecedented levels of parallelism at a very low cost. In the last 6 years, GPUs had an increasing performance advantage of an order of magnitude relative to x86 CPUs. Furthermore, this performance advantage will continue to increase in the next 20 years be ...

In this SBIR project, APEI, Inc. is proposing to develop a high efficiency, rad-hard 3.8 kW silicon carbide (SiC) Power Processing Unit (PPU) for Hall Effect thrusters. In Phase I of the project, APEI, Inc. will focus on investigating various circuit topologies, developing and applying performance metrics (i.e., optimizing magnetics, passives, frequencies, power density, efficiency, etc.), and de ...

The Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) has placed a high priority on determining the nature, distribution and transport of volatiles on the moon. The objective of this proposal is to create chip scale gas chromatographs for lunar exploration. Under DARPA support, Cbana has created a new class of microGCs that are smaller than ever before and yet show performance similar to those of full ...

The objective of this proposal is to create new gas chromatographs (GCs) for contaminant monitoring in spacecraft air that do not require any reagents or special carrier gases. Under DARPA support, Cbana has created a new class of microGCs that are smaller than ever before and yet show performance similar to those of full scale commercial GCs. In the proposed work we will redesign the GCs so th ...

The objective of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of using some newly discovered materials, water-stable metal-organic frameworks (MOF), as filters for pollutants common in indoor air. By way of background, recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-supported work from Professor Masel’s laboratory has shown that a new class of water-stable MOFs shows unprecedented adsorp ...

Better performing ablative thermal protection systems than currently available are needed to satisfy requirements of the most severe crew exploration vehicles, such as the Mars Sample Return with 12-15 km/s Earth entry. The primary objective of CU Aerospace's Phase I work will be to fabricate and test aromatic thermosetting copolyesters (ATSP) composites for use as ablatives in next generation sp ...

A constant demand exists to improve the sensitivity of trace chemical species measurement systems, which is often limited by the performance of the infrared photon detector components. The significant cooling required to reduce dark currents and increase detectivities is a practical concern associated with these infrared detectors. For geostationary and low-Earth orbital platforms, passive cooling ...