Award Data

Large space-deployed structures such as synthetic aperture radars, radiometers, and solar arrays are receiving a great deal of interest by NASA in the Earth Sciences program. These large structures by necessity must be ultra-lightweight and low stored volume. Inflatable or self-deployable approaches that become rigid after they reach the correct shape appear to be a promising approach for fabricat ...

There is an increasing need for large, reliable, and cost-effective inflatable space antennas for communications applications. This Phase I program will focus on the design and development of open-celled foams as structural elements in self-deploying antenna systems. Foams offer the following significant advantages over conventional materials for these applications: open cellular structure allowin ...

Performance requirements for polymer matrix composites (PMCs) in aerospace and transportation applications are generally quite stringent. Among these requirements are excellent thermal stability, high strength and high toughness. Easy processing is also desirable. Electron-beam (e-beam) curing has the potential to significantly reduce the overall cost of manufacturing PMC parts for use in aerospac ...

N/A

N/A

Next generation design software will support fully associative geometric and physics-based analysis models throughout the entire product life-cycle. Most current CAD systems directly support finite element systems, but use proprietary database formats that do not promote diverse tool use and may not exist throughout the entire product life-cycle. Model sharing in common practice has been limited t ...

N/A

Platforms for scientific instruments increasingly require attitude knowledge and optical instrument pointing at sub-arcsecond accuracy. No low-cost commercial system exists to provide this level of accuracy for guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) and precision instrument pointing. ATA proposes to introduce a small inexpensive inertial attitude reference system based upon magnetohydrodynamic (M ...

N/A

The specific proposed innovation is the use of an active radiometer in place of conventional radar techniques for measuring rainfall over the earth's surface from satellite platforms. This technique provides a substantial savings in data acquisition time that can be used to increase the scan rate and to improve the spatial resolution (i.e. reduce the footprint) of the measurements. This will provi ...