Award Data

Distributed Spacecraft Missions (DSM) architectures provide unique scientific and programmatic benefits including multipoint in-situ measurements, multi-angle viewpoints, and improved understanding of the connections between separately measured phenomena and their time variations. However, these missions impose significant operational demands on ground tracking resources and mission operators alik ...

Luna will team with Dr. John Bowers of UCSB to continue development of an Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) system-on-chip using heterogeneous silicon photonics to enable a minimal weight structural health monitoring system. This system-on-chip will be the building block for distributed sensing interrogation systems that are the size of a deck of playing cards. This lightweight, rugged ...

Physical Sciences Inc. and Purdue University propose to develop a novel approach to scavenging heat from high intensity thermal environments encountered during space missions and converting this thermal power to electrical power at high efficiency. Examples include extremely hot heat shields during vehicle entry into planetary atmospheres (Mars/Venus probes) and during high speed ascent through p ...

Built upon the progress in Phase I period, Winchester Technologies, LLC is pleased to propose to investigate practical magnetoelectric antennas during the Phase II period based on solidly mounted resonators (SMR), which will have enormous impacts on DoD and civilian antenna applications. State of the art antennas suffer from three major open challenges: (1) large antenna size > ?0/10, (2) antenna ...

Physical Sciences Inc., in cooperation with University of Notre Dame, will develop a method for the persistent detection of aerosolized biological warfare agents using a distributed and cooperative sensor network within a Bayesian framework. The proposed system, named BioNet, will provide a wider coverage and two-fold reduction in false alarm rate over individual sensor performance through intelli ...

Thegoal is to develop asoftwaretool that implementsa novelapproach applicableto fitgeneral pharmacologic, toxicology, or other biomedical data, that mayexhibita non-monotonic dose-responserelationship for which thecurrent parametricmodels fail. Thesoftwareexplores dose-responserelationships using both monotonicand non-monotonicmodels,and estimates theassociated doseresponsecurves,which can further ...

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project is the development of software to help bioscientists analyze more tissue in less time and with higher accuracy and reproducibility. Currently, stereology studies require a trained technician to sit before a computer screen, making tedious manual counts (clicks) on hundreds to thousands of mic ...

Managing the flow of water, nutrients, and contaminants in watersheds is vital to addressing pressing issues related to water scarcity, access to clean drinking water, energy production, resilience to natural and anthropogenic perturbations, and ecological restoration. Decisions about the management of watersheds critically depend on the accuracy with which the flow of water and chemicals through ...

The Neutron Spin Echo (NSE) method has provided unique information about the dynamics of soft materials, including confirmation of the de Gennes model of polymer reptation, and quantitative measurement of the bending moduli of various membranes. In almost all cases these measurements have been made at small neutron scattering angles, where structural correlations with length scales between 10 nm a ...

The composition of atmospheric particulate matter (“aerosols”) strongly influences health and environmental impacts, but there exist few time-resolved, long-term records of particle-phase chemical composition due to lack of appropriate monitoring tools. Needed is an instrument that is robust, easy-to-operate, with automated calibrations and data reduction, to provide operationally-inexpensive ...