Award Data

There is a persistent pressure upon NASA crew members to achieve very high productivity during their missions. Significant challenges exist to maintaining manageable workload while the crew is performing their many and varied tasks allotted for each day while ensuring the crew maintain situation awareness. NASA crew members deal with a large amount of very high technology equipment and perform exp ...

The NASA Low-Cost Small Spacecraft Program is focused on the technologies, subsystems, methodologies, and mission concepts for space missions which lower the over-all cost for scientific exploration. We propose to support these effort through building a "simulation-of-simulations" software suite that allows (a) development of a standard small satellite architecture framework, (b) capture of all a ...

NASA space imagery is gathered and transmitted back to earth in many formats. One of the newer formats is the lossy/lossless image format CCSDS (CCSDS 122.0-B-1), which uses wavelet decomposition combined with a bitplane encoder to achieve good data rates while keeping visual fidelity. It was designed for space missions, and in particular is designed to implement in low power hardware. This solici ...

An important consideration of long duration space flight operations is interpersonal dynamics. The crew will be working very closely for extended periods of time and the distance between the spacecraft and earth-bound flight surgeons will prevent real-time communication. Breakdown of morale or the psychology of crew may result in increased stress, conflict, erratic behaviors, reduced cohesion, and ...

Robotic sample acquisition is basically grasping. Multi-finger robot sample grasping devices are controlled to securely pick up samples. While optimal grasps for perfectly modeled objects are known, grasping unmodeled objects, like a surface sample, is an open research problem. A major source of difficulty in robotic grasping, therefore, is the sensing of object parameters and grasp quality. H ...

Low-cost, environmentally compatible synthesis methods are used to prepare silicate nanoparticles with surface areas, surface polarity and hierarchical lamellar and mesoporous structures ideally suited as barrier and reinforcing agents for epoxy and polyimide thermoset polymers for use in next generation air transport systems (NGATS) and related aerospace vehicles. Unlike organoclays, which requi ...

In many situations, aerospace structures are subjected to a wide frequency spectrum of mechanical and/or acoustic excitations and therefore, there is a need for the development of numerical modeling techniques that are applicable for the resolution of dynamic response of complex systems spanning the entire frequency spectrum. However, the dynamic behavior of these structures at different frequency ...

Michigan Aerospace Corporation (MAC) is pleased to present the following Phase II proposal for a Fabry-Perot Based Interferometer Receiver for the High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) System. Under the Phase I work, MAC successfully developed instrument models and created a conceptual design for an aircraft-qualified receiver that can be used with the current HSRL collection optics. This design ...

In a successful Phase 1 project for NASA SBIR topic A1.05, "Data Mining for Integrated Vehicle Health Management," Michigan Aerospace Corporation (MAC) demonstrated its SPADE anomaly detection software to key personnel in NASA's Intelligent Systems Division (ISD) and with data from our partners at Boeing, SpaceX and GMV Space Systems. The feedback from these demonstrations was used to establish f ...

One of the main attributes contributing to the civil competitiveness of rotorcraft, is the continuously increasing expectations for passenger comfort which is directly related with reduced vibration levels and reduced interior noise levels. Such expectations are amplified in the VIP market where people are used in the acoustic and vibration levels of civil and executive jets. One of the most cri ...