Award Data

As the unmanned exploration of Mars and Venus becomes more of a focus area at NASA, inflatable, rigidizable wings will become an enabling technology. The successful development of this type of wing will also have significant military applications in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Rigidization of inflatable wings provides several potential advantages, including reducing the vulnerability to punct ...

Light (UV and visible) curing composite matrix resins are being explored as an attractive means for rigidizing inflatable spacecraft for large space-deployed structures such as solar sails, radar and communications antennas, radiometers, and solar arrays. Light curing provides a controlled, clean, low power rigidization technology to harden these inflatable spacecraft once they have achieved the ...

The Live from Space Station? Outreach Payload (LFSSOP) is a technologically challenging, exciting opportunity for university students to conduct significant research in the biological or physical sciences culminating in a university student built payload that is launched and placed on the International Space Station. Experiment features will be accessed and controlled by high school students via a ...

This program will result in the creation of the first technology designed to provide robotic explorer vehicles with the ability to ?learn and remember? the terrain over which they travel. While it is described as a geographic information system it will be used to explore artificial satellites like the space shuttle as well as planet surfaces. The SmartTopo software system will be developed to be ...

The objective of the proposed project is the development of technology for more efficient and effective human-computer supervision of complex systems. Systems that combine humans and automation in a synergistic or cooperative manner may be termed hybrid systems. Hybrid systems offer advantages over both purely automated systems and purely manual systems in many circumstances. However, future hybri ...

Trace contamination of the International Space Station (ISS) by formaldehyde?a known carcinogen? is a significant potential threat to crew health. The spacecraft maximum allowable concentration (SMAC) in air is only 40 parts per billion and ambient concentrations appear to be increasing as formaldehyde outgasses from a variety of plastic components. Monitoring formaldehyde levels is difficult be ...

The ability to grow food and recycle components of cabin air are critical to the success of long-term space flight missions. In order to assure that plants used for biomass production grow under optimal conditions, sensors are required to monitor the generation of biogenic and other relevant gases. In particular, ethylene gas must be carefully controlled to promote rapid growth of biomass produc ...

SHOT proposes an innovative microfluidic device designed to effect a 2-dimensional resolution of a mixture of proteins based on isoelectric point (pI) and molecular weight. A novel approach is proposed to achieve 2-D-gel equivalence. The first dimension is to be immobilized isoelectric focusing, and the second dimension will utilize an array of 100+ size-exclusion chromatography columns in micro ...

An innovative superconducting transition edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeter array with superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) readouts is described for high energy and high spatial resolution X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy and microanalysis. The proposed microcalorimeter instrument offers an energy resolution that is comparable to and potentially even better than wavelength disp ...

An innovative surface micromachining technique is described for the fabrication of closely-packed arrays of transition edge sensor (TES) x-ray microcalorimeters. This technique enables individual TES microcalorimeters to be suspended on a thin membrane for thermal isolation from the bath temperature. The TES detectors are fabricated from normal metal/superconductor bilayers with a transition tempe ...