Award Data

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Locating, summarizing and presenting large collections of Earth science data in a highly distributed and networked environment is critical in NASA's mission for Earth Sciences. Technologies supporting management, storage, search and retrieval of very large, distributed, geo-spatial earth science data volumes are urgently needed to cope with the impending data survivability crisis. For instance, th ...

Aspen systems proposes to develop an innovative and smart sensors to continuously monitor ambient air compositions by utilizing a resonating tunable micro-cavity technology. The new device will directly measure the unique vibrational resonance of gas molecules and determine its concentration for each constituent gas species. In Phase I, we will experimentally demonstrate the proposed concept by ...

The overarching challenge of tele-presence is to provide an environment to the human operator that is sufficiently familiar that the interface itself does not become burdensome and distract from the goals of the mission. The ultimate achievement would be to embed the operator into a scene in such a way as to convince him or her that they are actually on site. We propose a technology that can pot ...

A new servo-drive technology is available to support energy storage and navigation for micro-satellites. Exploiting the ?pinning? effect of high-temperature superconductors, high-speed momentum wheels can be suspended in a stable condition that is virtually independent of speed (unlike magnetic levitation). Aside from the motor drive, this levitation system is compact and highly energy efficient. ...

Integration of three proven, non-contact, optical metrology techniques with an emerging new polishing approach in a single machine will enable the rapid production of large aspheric mirrors with nanometer-class overall accuracy, excellent smoothness, and nearly arbitrary radius of curvature (concave or convex) and aspheric form. Two of the metrology approaches are a multi-point profilometer that w ...

This work proposes to capitalize on our Phase I success in monolithically integrating magneto-optic and magnetic materials with semiconductor platforms in order to reduce the size and weight, as well as increase the performance, of NASA?s strategic optical systems. Nonreciprocal components play extremely important role in laser systems and telecommunications. Currently all such components are disc ...