Award Data

For long-term exploratory space travel, there will be a critical need for in-situ diagnosis and assessment of biological specimens from symptomatic astronauts, especially, disease pathogens (virus, bacterium, or fungus) and microbial contaminants. Hence, a real-time, non-culture-based microbial detection, identification and quantification system for on-flight monitoring and evaluation of pathogens ...

Nanosatellites are receiving increased interest since they are proving reliable for surveillance, communication and other space missions. Also, the possibility of launching "constellations" of them offers unique capabilities for low-cost experimentation, sensing and communications in space. In comparison to larger spacecraft, their development time and costs have reduced and their launch costs a ...

A spacecraft thermal control system must keep the cabin (both air and its structure if manned) and electronic equipment within a narrow temperature range even though the environment may vary from very cold to warmer than room temperature. Since water is safe to use and an excellent coolant (other than its high freeze point and volumetric expansion during freeze), a water coolant loop often is use ...

Single multi-sensor teleoperated systems are not optimal for NASA exploratory missions because they limit the coverage area and scope of exploration and create a single point for mission failure. A better solution would use many robots cooperating to maximize exploration area and location accuracy while minimizing total system power and weight. The goal of this research is to investigate pulsed ...

An accurate predictive capability of coupled fluid-structure interaction in propulsion system is crucial in the development of NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS). This STTR effort will develop a multi-disciplinary tool to improve CFD prediction capability in modeling coupled fluid structure interaction (FSI) phenomena for many SLS propulsion applications such as flexible inhibitors for SRMs ...

An opportunity to boost energy efficiency in homes and buildings exists through the design of functional radiative properties in glass and other building materials. Current surface materials ignore or take first-order approaches to complicated spectral behavior, leading to sub-optimal properties. The sensitivity of material properties to microscale surface structuring creates a design challenge ...

ABSTRACT: This project will apply resonant infrared pulsed laser ablation techniques to deposit environmentally-durable, adherent and conformal anti-reflection (AR) coating on a plastic (polycarbonate) substrate. The proposed broadband AR coating is based on a multilayer architecture of low-refractive index polymer and high-refractive index polymer or polymer hybrid materials. High quality poly ...

ABSTRACT: Tech-X Corporation in partnership with the University of Washington will develop a commercial tool for modeling multi-fluid and single fluid plasmas including the ability to model problems using unstructured grids. An oracle will be developed to inform the user of the validity of plasma models in the regime of a given simulation. Algorithms developed at the University of Washington (i ...

ABSTRACT: Microscopy is a critical enabling technology for advancing our understanding of nature. Imaging nanoscale objects with light in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and soft x-ray regions of the spectrum has advantages over visible light for resolution, elemental specificity, and imaging internal structures. Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) has been developed as a tool to get around the li ...

ABSTRACT: The need for improved routing to support ad-hoc satellite communications is apparent and protocol research has been performed to date which would greatly impact future DoD systems. The Internet Router in Space (IRIS)technology developed by SEAKR and Cisco has provided an advantageous mixture of space-qualified capability and commercial device performance and provides a strong basis upo ...