Award Data

Helium plays several critical rolls in spacecraft propulsion. High pressure helium is commonly used to pressurize propellant fuel tanks. Helium cryocoolers can be used to sub-cool and thereby densify cryogenic propellants such as liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LO2). The use of densified cryogenic propellants can reduce the gross payload weight of a launch vehicle by up to 20%, or incr ...

In this program, Agiltron and the groups of Professors Rubner and Cohen at MIT propose a novel nano-porous coating for next generation NASA UV anti-reflection (AR) applications. The collaborative research leverages recent breakthroughs in nano-porous self-assembled low reflective index multilayer structures achieved at MIT, and Agiltron's recently developed mist coating processes. The proposed UV ...

Agiltron has developed a breakthrough modular IR imaging technology that employs a photomechanical effect, in which an array of micro-machined sensor pixels converts IR radiation into visible light signals that can be optically detected by commercial off-the-shelf CMOS or CCD visible-light imagers. With commercial CMOS imagers achieving multi-megapixel resolution, the resolution of the modular Agi ...

Many commercially available digital dosimeters are bulky and are unable to properly measure dose for space radiation. The complexity of space flight design requires reliable, fault-tolerant equipment with the capability of providing real-time dose readings during a mission, which is not feasible with the existing thermo-luminescent dosimeter (TLD) technology. The project will create a compact, ...

Stereochemistry is an essential element of our organic life. Only certain enantiomers are useful as drugs for the human body. Raman optical activity (ROA) provides stereochemical information down to the bond levels. Many biomolecules like proteins and DNA can be studied to understand their structural chemistry and structure related dynamics. These methods do not require material in the crystal ...

We will fabricate and test microfluidic designs for a micro-electromechanical system based complete blood count (CBC) analysis in separate modules and integrate them into a working prototype. A first module constitutes a hydrodynamic focusing injector and cell impedance meter. A second module takes hydrodynamically focused cells and measures light scatter in the forward and orthogonal directions ...

New technology is needed for sensing and characterizing incipient defects, and assessing the effects of aging in aerospace components. Next generation materials, including nickel-based superalloys that are exceedingly difficult to inspect with existing technology are being adopted by designers and manufacturers. The ability to ascertain the remaining life of a spacecraft component, and develop mit ...

Many NASA space and Earth programs in the infrared range 1060-1550 nm are limited by the detector performance that require long exposure time due to their low sensitivity and/or high noise. Large format infrared photon counting arrays with ranging capability would provide a valuable tool to many space missions. Current state of the art fabrication of photon counting infrared detector arrays on non ...

Long range, RF space communications do not meet anymore the bandwidth requirements or power constraints of future NASA missions. Optical communications offer the potential to dramatically increase the link bandwidth and decrease the emitter power. High-bandwidth, long-range optical communications require reliable high-gain, photon-counting detectors operated at moderate cooling with high detection ...

In order to facilitate wider understanding and use of NASA and other scientific data sources through publicly available and familiar tools, such as the Google Maps, Payload Systems Inc. proposes to develop a flexible scientific data search, analysis and visual presentation tool suite. This suite will use a modular plug-in approach to retrieve and translate information from user-selected networked ...