Award Data

Drag reduction for aerial vehicles has a range of positive ramifications: reduced fuel consumption with the associated economic and environmental consequences, larger flight range and endurance and higher achievable flight speeds. Recent numerical results yielded solid evidence that very small disturbances in the form of a spanwise traveling force wave on a surface could reduce drag by 70%. Our pa ...

A critical danger of space flight programs is contamination of the spacecraft environment. Assessing environmental health requires monitoring technologies to mitigate the risk of infectious disease among the crew before, during, and after flights. The danger of infectious diseases in space is amplified by the limited medical facilities available to the crew during a mission. The contained spacecra ...

The Bioastronautical Systems Development Company (BSDC) proposes to develop habitat technologies for conducting long-term commercial research with mice in microgravity. Our research addresses solicitation section B4.02 Space Commercialization for the design/development of microgravity payloads for space station applications that lead to commercial products or services. In partnership with BioServe ...

The Phase I effort produced the designs and sample items for six measures of cognitive skills necessary for effective small unit leadership. The primary objectives of the proposed Phase II effort are to develop further these five measures, including thecomputer simulation, to validate the assessment battery, and to develop and validate a business version of the 2 leadership measures. The last ob ...

In November 1998 a network of seismic stations was deployed by S. Anandakrishnan (now at Penn State) and others in West Antarctica. These autonomous stations returned state-of-health data via satellite, and stored high-volume instrument data for later retrieval. The satellite links demonstrated a novel and sophisticated application of technology to the problem of retrieving in situ data from harsh ...

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) are considered suitable for use in components for high-strength structural composites used in spacecrafts. However, structurally similar boron nitride (BN) nanotubes that promise both mechanical and electronic superiority over CNTs have not been studied in great detail so far due to the absence of facile preparative techniques. BN nanotubes exhibit good mechanical strength, ...

Metron Aviation, Inc. builds a tool for Traffic Flow Management (TFM) that integrates existing and emerging technologies in the areas of modeling and operations analysis to enable the evaluation of proposed TFM initiatives (Figure 1). The key innovation of this effort is the integration of the Post Operations Evaluation Tool (POET) and the Future ATC Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET) in order to ac ...

Limitations with existing cloud cover detection (CCD) techniques for large dataset processing and new challenges presented by the increase in the quantity and quality of data in the commercial realm, offer an opportunity for R&D into new and improved methods for the detection of clouds and cloud shadows in acquired imagery. We propose to develop innovative software for automated pixel-based cloud ...

AeroAstro and the University of Colorado propose to develop an autonomous satellite power control system to dynamically monitor, schedule and distribute power resources on microsatellites , while remaining sensitive to the mission objectives. The Autonomous Power Scheduler (APS) will maximize power efficiency and availability while being situationally-aware of bus conditions. The concept system wo ...

UTD proposes to develop a lightweight, tethered autonomous small diameter core drill capable of reaching 200 m in depth, and greater, and able to extract core samples for the determination of water and/or biological life forms. The significance of this research is the enabling of exploration for water on Mars and exploration of other planetary bodies (as well as comets and asteroids). The intent i ...