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: 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 ...

ABSTRACT: The Phase II technical objectives follow directly from the Phase I effort, where all tasks necessary for RF photonic receiver fabrication were demonstrated. The Phase II effort will pursue two major objectives: 1) further development of SEO100 EO polymer based chips, packaged devices and arrays in collaboration with University of Dayton (antenna designs), taking advantage of multiphoto ...

ABSTRACT: Thermospheric densities are critical in determining orbital drag for providing collision avoidance warnings for manned and unmanned spaceflight, accurately cataloging orbiting objects, predicting reentry times, and estimating satellite lifetimes, on-board fuel requirements, and attitude dynamics. One of the critical drivers to thermospheric density models is the extreme ultraviolet (EUV ...

ABSTRACT: The overall technical objective of this Phase II effort is to develop computational tools for computing response sensitivities of parametric multi-disciplinary air vehicle systems that exhibit nonlinear dynamic behavior for use in gradient-based optimization, smart sampling, uncertainty quantification, and risk assessment. To this end, the ZONA/MIT team will extend the 2-D ZEUS time-dom ...

ABSTRACT: The objective of this proposal is to develop efficient sensitivity analysis methods based on adjoint techniques for multi-disciplinary time-dependent problems. The approach is based on the discrete adjoint, which is derived and implemented on a software component basis, with the various multidisciplinary software components being linked together through a Python interface, thus preservi ...

ABSTRACT: Our objective is to develop a vision system for a micro air vehicle (MAV) or other robotic system that allows it to operate in extremely low light levels, including in zero light conditions and without reliance on GPS. We propose building two systems. The first system will operate primarily in the visible and NIR domain and utilize silicon based photoreceptor circuits. This system will ...