Award Data

Colorado Power Electronics (CPE) has built an innovative modular power processing unit (PPU) for Hall Thrusters, including discharge, magnet, heater and keeper supplies, and an interface module. The innovations of this high-performance PPU are its resonant circuit topologies, magnetics design, modularity, and its stable and sustained operation during severe Hall effect thruster current oscillation ...

The number of sensors that are deployed continues to increase for scientific, commercial and intelligence related applications. Quantities of sensor data are increasingly available. NASA and NOAA are generating large quantities of sensor data involving earth, oceans and weather observations. US intelligence and commercial endeavors are also generating vast amounts of sensor data, gathered from sou ...

The proposed innovative two-dimensional (2D) empirical mode decomposition (EMD) analysis was applied to NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission database in phase I in an attempt of extracting and revealing the finest details of regional and seasonal variations. The proposed innovation is a robust and adaptive data analysis method based on a 2D adaptive isotropic decompo ...

The innovations proposed here are Ka-band (38 GHz) group III-nitride power FETs and the dislocation density reducing epitaxial growth methods (LPE) needed for their optimal performance and reliability.Ka-band power transistors with>60% Power Added Efficiency (PAE) are not commercially available. The primary limitations to their manufacture are lack of mature process technology at major GaN foundri ...

The key innovation in this effort is the development of an industrial-grade analysis testbed to integrate simulation tools, such as ACES, with aviation environmental effects models, such as the Aviation Environmental Design Toolkit (AEDT), to provide a "360-degree" evaluation of new operational concepts. The testbed will be demonstrated by producing such a "360-degree" evaluation of advanced Next ...

Critical to the success of delivering on the promise of deep space optical communications is the creation of a stable and reliable high power multichannel optical uplink/beacon. Optical Engines proposes to deliver in phase 2 2 compact and low cost fiber amplifiers suited to the uplink application. This will be accomplished through the use of Optical Engines proprietary Multi-Fiber Coupled 2.5kW la ...

To improve the working performance, increase efficiency, reduce cost, and track system health status and failure modes of advanced propulsion systems; miniaturized, robust sensing systems for measuring and monitoring physical parameters, such as pressure, would be highly advantageous. Technical challenges for developing reliable sensing systems lie in extremely harsh working conditions the micro s ...

The development of a standoff sensor that can measure 3D components of wind velocity in the vicinity of an airport has the potential to improve airport throughput, safety and efficiency. The goal of this research is to develop a Lidar Wind Profiler (LWP) that uses multiple near-parallel lidar beams to track the motion of atmospheric aerosol structures and extract multi-component wind data. In Pha ...

This proposal describes the development of a wireless multisensor system for NASA application to remote wireless sensing of temperature distributions in composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) and development flight instrumentation (DFI) for test facilities for large area composite component validation testing. Phase 1 demonstrated ASR & D's ability to produce temperature sensors with ...

AOS has shown that it is feasible to use the combined NASA/SBIR resources from Phases I and II to:(i) Build a turn-key analyzer system that has the dual-band/differential architecture and is small, light and sensitive enough to be deployed in the smallest zone of the Global Hawk (GH);(ii) Demonstrate TRL 9 and flight readiness of the analyzer system for deployment on the GH and(iii) Validate the a ...