Award Data

Reduced mass composite materials are crucial to the success of aerospace systems, but are inhibited by expensive autoclave consolidation, especially for large parts. To remedy this, NASA-LaRC has been developing cost-effective high-performance thermoplastic composite materials for years. NASA materials could dramatically reduce the cost of large aerospace structures, because those materials avo ...

The present invention provides an ultra-reliable and low loss fiberoptic manifold for lightweight, high-efficiency, photonic phased-array antennas. Our approach is sate-of-the-art in design and closely coupled with proven volume fiber optic component manufacturing techniques, holding a promise of realizing space qualified optical digital delay with performance and cost that have not been achieved ...

Leveraging on our industry leading switchable photonic delay commercial product offerings, Agiltron proposes to develop the next-generation 8-bit delay line that meets the challenging requirements of lower insertion loss and higher switching speed. The next-level performance improvement will be achieved by implementing a new precision glass micro-optic fiber assembly technology in combination wi ...

The proposal addresses a new class of IR detector that mimics the snake's thermal sensing ability. The design is based on the extensive research derived findings on biological IR sensing systems and leverages recent material process progress in multi-layered nano-scale membrane preparation. The revolutionary polymer bubble array IR imager offers significant improvements in IR imager performance ...

CCDs (Charge-Coupled Devices), and more recently, CMOS (complementary-symmetry metal-oxide-semiconductor) APS (Active Pixel Sensor) cameras have revolutionized imaging instrumentation and the many fields that utilize these instruments. Both these technologies rely on integrating, the analog photo-current generated in each pixel, which limits their sensitivity and bandwidth. Counting individual opt ...

This Phase II SBIR describes the fabrication and characterization of a position sensitive detector with internal gain. Phase I research demonstrated the fabrication of several position sensitive avalanche photodiodes (APDs), including quadrant and lateral-effect photodiodes. With position resolution equivalent to commercially available silicon detectors, but responsivity three orders of magnitude ...

We propose an end-to-end video-based system for online class recognition of moving vehicles observed by a passive stationary camera. SAVOR (or System for Automated Video-based Object Recognition) continuously detects, tracks, and classifies vehicles within the camera's field of view in real time, additionally providing a live operator display and archiving data and results for later analysis. To o ...

The development of inexpensive unmanned aircraft will soon bring the opportunity to place persistent organic hovering sensors at key locations in support of intelligence gathering, targeting, and force protection missions. As many of the sensor packages flown on these assets will be line-of-sight dependent, careful platform placement will be crucial for sensor effectiveness. In order to assure g ...

Detection and tracking of dismounts in foliage is difficult due to low target speed, foliage attenuation, small target RCS, internal clutter motion, forest animals, and target motion dynamics. The detection of individual dismounts reliably with reasonable false alarm rates will be extremely difficult in some circumstances and may require extended periods of observation. However if dismounts trav ...

The purpose of this project is to continue developing tools to match existing Computer Assisted Design (CAD) software to Geant4 with a special view to shielding simulations for NASA. Geant4 is a particle transport and interaction simulation toolkit,originally developed to help with Monte Carlo simulations of high energy physics experiments. It represents decades of development and is the standar ...