Award Data

Leveraging Agiltron’s industrial leading developments for optical measurement of motion in MEMS devices, we propose to use electro-optical sensors for measuring the displacement and gap in the NIST micro-rheometer. No electrical connections are required to the moving parts. All electronics and optics are removed from the chip so that it is inexpensive and disposable. A fixed, simple micro-fluidi ...

The technical objective of this project is to develop a prototype of a face recognition application in a cloud computing environment utilizing MBARK as the middleware. The application will have a client piece that will run on a mobile device such as a laptop and a server piece that will run on a higher-performance computing cluster. The specific objectives of this development project can be enumer ...

To further advance the characterization and utility of microcantilevers, next generation optical detectors with higher frequency response, improved displacement resolution and lower noise for weak signal detection are needed. Consequently, Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc. (RMD) will develop a turnkey optical detector module for use in characterizing the displacement and resonant frequencies of m ...

Severe weather impacts our daily lives, society and nation’s economy. From an average of $10B (2005 dollars) annual loss due to tropical cyclones since 1900 to $200B in the commercial shipping industry that is threatened by severe ocean storms to the hundreds of lives and assets being lost in the $20B recreational boating industry. In these cases and many more, accurate now-casting and forecasti ...

Reaction wheels are used to stabilize satellites and to slew their orientation from object to object with precision and accuracy by varying the rotational speed of the wheels. Three or four wheels are usually used with three of them aligned along orthogonal axes. The degree to which pointing stability is achieved depends on the stability of the wheels' angular momentum vectors while spinning, ...

NASA sees an increasing role in the near future for small satellites in the 5-100 kg size range. A potentially disruptive technology, small satellites are being eyed as platforms for the rapid demonstration of new technologies and important science missions. Currently, small satellite platforms struggle to balance the three critical tasks of collecting enough power, acquiring data and downlinking ...

Energid Technologies proposes the development of a digital simulation to replace robotic vehicles in field studies. It will model the dynamics, terrain interaction, sensors, control, communications, and interfaces of a robotic vehicle with the goal of supporting validation and training. The simulation will be very easy to use by simple execution on a networked PC. It will connect to NASA's ...

Impact Technologies has proposed development of an effective prognostic and fault accommodation system for critical DC power systems including PV systems. Overall goal for this program is development of techniques that enable power system fault tolerance based on diagnostic features from the solar cells, power bus, and power transistors. After completion of Phase I efforts towards this goal, Impac ...

Model calculations and risk assessment estimates indicate that secondary neutrons, with energies ranging between 0.5 to>150 MeV, make a significant contribution to the total absorbed dose received by space crews during long duration space missions [1-3]. Advanced scintillation materials, which exhibit radiation type and mass dependent emission times, coupled to SSPM detectors, provide the optimum ...

In the proposed Phase II program, we will continue the development of Mg bipropellant rockets for Martian PAV applications. In Phase I, we proved the feasibility of this game-changing technology. Through chemical analysis, we determined that Mg can be combusted with CO2 condensed in-situ from the Martian atmosphere to yield Isp ~240 s. We then successfully demonstrated a low fidelity Mg-CO2 roc ...