Award Data

Silicon Carbide based ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) offer the potential to fundamentally change the design and manufacture of aeronautical and space propulsion systems to significantly increase performance and fuel efficiency over current metal-based designs. Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) and our team members at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) are developing, designing and fabr ...

Blended wing body (BWB) aircraft provide an aerodynamically superior solution over traditional tube-and-wing designs for a number of mission profiles. These platforms provide an all-lifting surface with a reduced wetted area, which lead to significant aerodynamic improvements over their conventional counterparts. However, due to their lack of a conventional tail surface with which to trim in pitch ...

In response to NASA's solicitation for light-weight and power efficient instruments that enable in situ compositional analysis, Q-Peak in partnership with the University of Hawaii proposes to develop a compact, robust, and efficient instrument to combine all laser based spectroscopies capable of performing imaging, Raman, Laser Induced Breakdown, Laser Induced Fluorescence and LIDAR The main adva ...

After successfully demonstrating the basic functionality of a damage-detecting, self-healing 'smart' material system in Phase I, Aurora and UMass Lowell aim to advance the material technology to a TRL 5 in Phase II. The team will use their 'smart' material system to design and manufacture various scaled-up core-stiffened composite specimens in application-appropriate geometries, and subsequently t ...

The proposed innovation is a spacecraft that could be used for lunar or asteroid prospecting missions. The mission plan would involve sending the spacecraft to an asteroid or other target, and analyzing the regolith for traces of water and other elements to be mined later for in-situ resource utilization. The system features multiple innovations. One is game-changing high delta V solar electric p ...