Award Data

Autonomous systems, when subjected to novel environments and tasks, suffer from issues with unknown unknowns. Under these circumstances, human intervention is frequently required. In deep space, such as a manned mission to Mars, communications with Earth require minutes round trip, effectively removing a typical safety net for the astronauts onboard when dealing with autonomous systems and sensors ...

The proposed effort concerns technologies related to cryogenic propellant production, storage, transfer, and usage to support NASArsquo;s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) goals. nbsp;They include a broad range of applications, scales, and environments consistent with future NASA missions to the Moon and Mars.nbsp;nbsp;More specifically, the project will addressnbsp;development of a piecewise-sm ...

Achieving trustworthy and trusted autonomy starts early in the development process through performing hazard analysis, fault analysis, identifying mitigating requirements, and carefully and rigorously tracing those requirements all the way into design, models, implementation, and tests. However, traceability can be time-consuming, costly, and error-prone. To address these challenges, significant a ...

Supporting human life on long-tern space exploration missions, such as manned missions to the surface of Mars, require sustainable resource utilization with minimal support from Earth. In response to this need, NASArsquo;s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) mission was put in place to provide a sustainable infrastructure for long-tern missions, such as exploration of extraterrestrial planets. One ...

The development of rocket propulsion systems requires rigorous testing. Technology with low-technology readiness levels (TRL) can be proven in small scaled down experiments. However, components and systems with higher-TRLs must be tested at full-scale conditions. These full-scale tests usually require numerous non-homogenous sensors and instrumentation meticulously placed over large distances that ...

The objective of this work is to develop highly Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) efficient neuromorphic processors that can train deep learning algorithms. The training phase for deep learning is very compute and data intensive. Being able to train a network on the satellite eliminates the need to send large volumes of data to earth for training a new network. However, this requires an extremely ene ...

Exploration of the Moon, or Mars, will require the development of landing vehicles, whose primary task is to decelerate its cargo and safely touch down on the surface. However, this is not a trivial task for these types of environments. As the jet/plume from the rocket engine, used to decelerate the vehicle, encounters the surface, the low atmospheric pressure, low gravity, and cohesive soil prope ...

The accelerator developed by Niobium Microsystems, Inc. (Niobium) is scalable in terms of parallelism and memory capacity, so that it can be targeted towards a variety of platforms, from small battery operated devices to large high-performance compute systems. It also has the ability to perform online learning when operating on neuromorphic workloads, drawing inspiration from the Hebbian learning ...

Electrical power management designed for use in spacenbsp;requiresnbsp;electronics capable of operating without damage in the galactic cosmic ray space radiation environment. Unfortunately, the adoption ofnbsp; SiC and GaN technology into space applications is hindered by their susceptibility to permanent degradation and catastrophic failure from single-event effect heavy-ion exposure. This degrad ...

Advances in aviation offer significant potential benefits in the transportation of packages and passengers by uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS). These aircraft can improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase safety, and provide new capabilities in various industries. However, before uncrewed aircraft can be widely adopted, they must be shown to be safe. New advances in artificial intelligence and rob ...