Award Data

The Advanced Space Suit carries consumable cooling water maintained at ambient pressure within a soft-walled, flexible reservoir. To ensure uninterrupted thermal control it is critical to monitor the volume of water remaining, but no known sensor is suitable for this task. Existing measurement techniques are unacceptably sensitive to the motion and varying geometry of the reservoir in microgravity ...

An important NASA mission is to detect, count and track near-earth asteroids for a variety of reasons including the hazards of collisions with our planet. Such asteroids are mostly dark, small and cold (~ 200K); so they are best detected in the very longwave infrared (VLWIR) wavelengths greater than ~ 12 microns where they glow brightest. To accomplish this, we developed in Phase I a record-perfor ...

Ballutes, or inflatable decelerators, offer significant advantages over rigid shells for aerocapture of planetary spacecraft and for earth reentry of cargo by providing mass savings and simplified packaging features. Traditional ballutes, however, have provided little or no trajectory control. For new platform functionality, high drag must be accompanied by some degree of control; also, incorporat ...

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 ...

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In order to mitigate risk to equipment and crew, NASA needs nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques and sensors that are capable of detecting holes, pits, cracks, and corrosion of structures that are not visually accessible. The Independent Assessment of Instrument for ISS On-Orbit NDE highlights the challenges and importance of performing NDE of the international space station (ISS) pressure w ...

NASA's observational products generate petabytes of scientific data, which are highly underutilized due to computational requirements; disjoint data access protocols; and task-specific, non‑reusable code development. Our overall objective is to accelerate NASA science through development of an open-source, Python-based Pipeline for Observational Data Processing, Analysis, and Collaboration ( ...

The current methodology for testing the penetration resistance of textile materials to various chemical agents has a number of drawbacks, including significant uncertainties in the resulting data, inefficiency and expense, risk to test personnel, and limited range of test conditions. The objective of the proposed work is to apply unique computer models for textiles with accompanying experimental ...

Tethers Unlimited, Inc. (TUI) proposes to develop the Metal Advanced Manufacturing Bot-Assisted Assembly (MAMBA) Process, a robotically managed metal press and milling system used to create precision parts on orbit. This manufacturing process provides an alternative to 3D printing metals in space, which is difficult due to space environment, feedstock safety concerns, and print quality issues. I ...

As SmallSats become the “Satellite of Choice” for NASA and other Government and Private Space Missions, there is a growing need to enable SmallSats to perform “Long Baseline” and “Spatially Diverse” observation, measurement and collection missions. Traditionally, these types of missions would be performed either by using formation flying or by using “large” satellites equipped wit ...