Award Data

As the unmanned exploration of Mars and Venus becomes more of a focus area at NASA, inflatable, rigidizable wings will become an enabling technology. The successful development of this type of wing will also have significant military applications in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Rigidization of inflatable wings provides several potential advantages, including reducing the vulnerability to punct ...

Light (UV and visible) curing composite matrix resins are being explored as an attractive means for rigidizing inflatable spacecraft for large space-deployed structures such as solar sails, radar and communications antennas, radiometers, and solar arrays. Light curing provides a controlled, clean, low power rigidization technology to harden these inflatable spacecraft once they have achieved the ...

To determine pointing and position vectors in both local and inertial coordinate frames, multi-spacecraft missions typically utilize separate attitude determination and formation metrology systems. For low Earth orbits (LEO), fleet position and geometry knowledge is almost exclusively achieved by using GPS data or ground uplink. In the ab-sence of this information, inter-satellite ranging between ...

To achieve the capability to affordably produce scores of nano-spacecraft for envisioned constellation missions, a new manufacturing process is needed to reduce the time and cost of fabricating and testing the nanosats. However, to achieve substantial savings, a fundamental paradigm shift in how spacecraft are built must be made. Current spacecraft are built with the same processes and procedures ...

NASA has determined that the use of modular and reconfigurable components is critical for the success of future large and complex space systems. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to be able to assemble and reassemble modules both on the ground and on orbit. Therefore, it requires a means to join components that is simple, reliable, and non-intrusive as well as strong and stiff enough ...

For a distributed aperture sensor, especially at infrared and optical wavelengths, the relative position of the aperture components must be known and controlled precisely. When the aperture components are on separate independent spacecraft, determining the relative range and bearing is the challenge our proposed innovation addresses. The estimation of the relative range and bearing will be used ...

Barron Associates, Inc. proposes to develop a novel on-line trajectory optimization approach for Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) under failure scenarios, targeting alternative abort-landing sites. Key features of the proposed approach are: An innovative on-line optimization approach: By describing decision variables (variables whose optimal solutions are sought) in terms of appropriate basis func ...

To remain competitive, the US aerospace industry must continually improve system performance (e.g. increased adaptation and autonomy), enhance safety (e.g., fault tolerant systems), and reduce costs. These improvements demand avionics software that is orders of magnitude more complex than that used in current operational systems. While software complexity is increasing, there is a tremendous (an ...

This proposal describes a plan to design, develop and demonstrate the capabilities of microwave techniques for precise and accurate measurements of various parameters associated with rain and snow fall. We have developed and demonstrated the capabilities of multi-frequency (13.6, 27 and 35 GHz) forward and backscatter measurements with high precision using a single instrument during Phase I. We pr ...

Rolling wall vessels (RWV) utilizing both single cell lines and co-cultures with two or more cell types are contributing significantly to our understanding of tumor development, cell biology and the role of cell-cell interaction in physiological processes. These studies would be significantly enhanced if the various populations of cells could be individually identified and monitored over the cours ...