Award Data

Systima in collaboration with University of Washington is developing a high performance injection system for advanced green monopropellant AF-M315E micropropulsion systems (0.1 – 1.0 N) for small- and micro-satellites and cubesats (100 kg-500 kg and

Legacy refractory materials that have origins dating to the original Saturn program are commonly used in current launch facilities. Although they fail to meet the target requirements, they are the only approved material. Our research team has demonstrated a baseline system during the Phase I effort that combines a non-cement binder, a high temperature macro aggregate, and reactive nano aggregates ...

Passive microwave sensors aboard satellites provide valuable information regarding weather conditions by measuring atmospheric attenuation over a broad range of frequencies from 0-200 GHz. Additional ground-based sensors are desirable to provide complementary upward looking measurements that can be used to refine existing attenuation models. Operating over such a large bandwidth, however, places ...

The overall technical objective of this multi-phase project is to develop and validate a so-called 'AAW-Process' that consists of (i) the Active Aeroelastic Wing (AAW) technology of employing multiple control surfaces in tandem for achieving loads alleviation and drag minimization using the over-determined trim capability of ZONA Euler Unsteady Solver (ZEUS), and (ii) the aeroelastic tailoring tec ...

The proposed innovation is a low-cost, retrievable and reusable, autonomously guided dropsonde capable of deploying from a host aircraft and performing in-situ atmospheric measurements. We have decided to name this platform the NavSonde−an autonomously navigable sonde-glider. The proposed effort focuses on the engineering work involved with the retrieval of high altitude volcanic ash plume samp ...

An eye-safe, multispectral cross-track scan subsystem with a large receiver aperture and a narrow FOV is proposed for the NASA Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) to increase the horizontal scan area coverage. The /-14 degree cross-track scan capability will cover /- 5 km from nadir at a 20 km altitude. The cross-track scanner uses a bidirectional scan pattern, which collects 10,000 data points per cross ...

The Trusselator technology will enable on-orbit fabrication of support structures for high-power solar arrays and large antennas, achieving order-of-magnitude improvements in packing efficiency and launch mass while reducing life-cycle cost. The Phase I Trusselator effort successfully demonstrated fabrication of continuous lengths of high-performance carbon fiber truss using a novel additive manu ...

NASA has drawn attention to an impending need to improve energy-efficiency in low supersonic (M

The Phase I project successfully demonstrated the feasibility of developing a technology that will reduce cost and manufacturing time, broaden design options, and improve performance of large space optics. Primarily addressed is light weighting ULE glass mirrors for large telescope systems. While milling and cutting materials such as ULE or SiC is often performed at Ormond using a novel abras ...

NASA missions for planetary exploration require high power, long-life Hall thrusters. However, thruster power and lifetime are limited by the erosion of plasma channel walls. Current plasma channel insulators, BN or Borosil, have the required low secondary electron emission (SEE) but are susceptible to xenon plasma erosion. AlN has exceptionally high plasma erosion resistance but suffers from hig ...