Award Data

ABSTRACT: State of the art Orbital Transfer Vehicle systems and GEO transfer missions require the demanding combined requirements of both high Thrust-to-Power (greater than 150 mN/kW) and high specific impulse (greater than 3000 s), all at constant power. The 9 kW PROTEAN system is a two-stage plasmoid thruster which adds secondary Neutral Entrainment (NE) to the ElectroMagnetic Plasmoid Thruster ...

ABSTRACT: An ability to reduce the weight of cables has the potential to provide significant cost savings, reduce maintenance and improve reliability of satellites. The costs of developing and producing satellites are linearly proportional with the satellite"s weight, with each kilogram costing around $1 million when delivery-to-space costs are included. With global satellite launches expected to ...

ABSTRACT: The objective of this STTR proposal is to develop and demonstrate a radiation hardened organic-based solar array adaptable to nanosatellites which exhibits flexibility, variable topology, high specific power, and low cost. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) represent a transformative technology with great potential for extremely high-throughput manufacturing at very low cost. They have the po ...

ABSTRACT: High-performance organic electro-optic (OEO) polymers can enable the development of advanced EO technologies for achieving significantly reduced energy consumption and bandwidth enhancement in future information and communication technologies. One of the most critical steps in developing successful photonic technologies is to have high quality, reproducible materials that can be availab ...

The technological systems on which today's war-fighters depend, reflecting today's society, are vulnerable to the effects of sudden high-energy events from our Sun. Because the propagation speed for sudden increases in X-rays from a solar flare is the speed of light, it is necessary to truly forecast these events in order to mitigate their effects; the ionospheric response and influx of ...

The objective of this proposal is to develop Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module (SAASM) compliant GPS receiver for Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) applications. In this proposal, we explore an approach to design the GEO GPS SAASM receiver based on improved techniques for signal acquisition (or detection) and then signal tracking (and demodulation) of weak GPS signals. GPS signals availa ...

ABSTRACT:Emergence and feasibility for flexible body-worn electronics and particularly medical patches requires high performance electronics capability.The problem is that these new technologies must have flexible and conformal physical formats and conventional electronic components are not in any way flexible. In the CLAS Phase I program, a new flexible high-performance manufacturing and material ...

TUI proposes to complete the development of two novel technologies that will enable pico-satellites in LEO to efficiently close the link with standard issue handheld radios on the ground. The first technology is a dual-band software-defined radio (SDR) that will provide UHF SATCOM to soldiers on the ground and a unified S-band link for backhaul and spacecraft command and control. SDR-based process ...

ABSTRACT: SIFT, with subject matter expertise from the UAS pilots and sensor operators (SOs) at UAV Associates and in sensor processing capabilities from Ball Aerospace, will develop FLA2SH (Flexible Levels of Adaptable Autonomy for Sensor Handling) to extend and integrate with AFRL"s successful Flexible Levels of Execution-Interface Technologies (FLEX-IT) architecture for multi-modal delegation ...

ABSTRACT: This project will investigate the feasibility of a computing appliance which uses Temporal Virtualization to help ameliorate the effects of malicious software activity. Temporal Virtualization involves the manipulation of virtual time in Type-2 (software) virtual clients in a way that frustrates an adversary"s attempts to corrupt or break out of virtualization. An attack model is assume ...