Award Data

NASA is considering multiple missions involving long-term cryogen storage in space. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are the typical cryogens as they provide the highest specific impulse of practical chemical propellants. These cryogens are stored at temperatures of nominally 20 K for hydrogen and 90 K for oxygen. Due to the large size of these tanks, refrigeration loads to maintain zero-boil- ...

Earth observing missions like NASA's LANDSAT Data Continuity Mission - Thermal Infrared Sensor (LDCM-TIRS) require greater spatial resolution of the earth than the ~ 100m provided by the current instrument. Improving resolution to the desired ~ 30m requires increasing the number of pixels on target from the current 640x3 to ~ 2048x3. The TIRS instrument contains 640x512 longwave infrared quantum ...

Advanced space borne instruments require cooling at temperatures of 10 K and below. Potential missions include the Origin Space Telescope and the Superconducting Gravity Gradiometer. Cooling loads for these detectors will range from 50 mW to 500 mW at the primary load site, with additional loads at higher temperatures for other subsystems. Due to jitter requirements, a cryocooler with very low ...

NASA's future remote sensing science missions require advanced thermal management technologies to maintain multiple instruments at very stable temperatures and utilize waste heat to keep other critical subsystems above minimum operational temperatures. Two-phase pumped loops are an ideal solution for these applications. A critical need for these pumped loops is a refrigerant pump that reliably c ...

Vadum will develop Chemical, Heterogeneous sensor fusion Incident awareness Module (CHIME)asoftware module that will ingest data from a large number of asynchronous, heterogeneous and multi-tiered sensors to automate the process of estimating the source attributes of a chemical or biological release. CHIME generates estimates from a continuous stream of raw sensor data with successive estimates al ...

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used as an analysis tool to help the designer gain greater understanding of the fluid flow phenomena involved in the components being designed. The next step in the design process is to modify the design to improve the components performance, typically performed manually by the designer in a trial and error fashion. The innovations proposed herein will provide ...

Supercritical air at cryogenic temperature is an attractive source of breathing air because of its very high density and low pressure. However, heat leak into the cryogenic tank causes the stored air to expand and vent, thus limiting the storage life of a charged system. We propose to develop a storage system for supercritical air packs that provides cryogenic cooling that will enable long-term ...

The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine currently being developed at NASA Johnson is an attractive technology for minimizing transit time and crew harm during future space exploration missions. One of the critical challenges in developing a flight engine is thermal management of the high-temperature, superconducting electromagnets used to constrain and accelerate the pl ...

Lightweight, high-temperature radiators are needed for future, high-efficiency power conversion systems for Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP). Creare has developed flexible radiators that are extremely lightweight, stowable in small volumes, and deployable with small forces, but are limited by materials to temperatures below 350 K. These novel radiators incorporate integral micrometeorite protect ...

Field emission electric propulsion (FEEP) thrusters have gained considerable attention for spacecrafts disturbance compensation because of excellent characteristics. The application of current FEEP has been slow in developing mainly caused by high specific power, which limit the milli-Newton thruster development due to insufficient onboard power. Dramatic field improvement from nanometer carbon ...