Award Data

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have matured to the point where they are being used throughout many modern applications. nbsp;Explainable AI (XAI) ndash; AI in which humans can understand the decisions or predictions made by the AI system ndash; is becoming critical for many applications, including Air Traffic Management (ATM). In contrast, ML-enabled and AI-enabled systems ...

Whether in industry, at home, or in the lab, most fluids handing operations and equipment would fail immediately when directly employed in the microgravity environments of orbiting or coast spacecraft. This is due to the innate assumption of gravity in nearly everything we do, make, and think. Thus, special engineering considerations must be made to account for the large length scale inertial-visc ...

A novel screen-accelerator grid pair is offered for ion thrusters for electric space propulsion. They will be flat and highly tensioned and fastened to ceramic frames. The frames provide extreme rigidity. The tensioning of the masks virtually eliminates relative movement of grid apertures, even at high vibration levels and large temperature excursions. This technology was proven in the manufacture ...

To address the need for smaller, lighter, and less expensive optics for NASA instruments, a novel optical technology platform based on using additive manufacturing (AM) of custom-engineered nanocomposite materials will be demonstrated. It will be shown that custom optical materials with precise index and dispersion values that can be used to fabricate aberration-free freeform gradient index (GRIN) ...

nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Closure of the oxygen loop will be a critical requirement during future, long-duration, manned missions.nbsp; The current carbon dioxide reduction assembly recaptures oxygen as water via the Sabatier reaction, in which, four moles of H2 and one mole of CO2 react to form one mole of CH4 and two moles of H2O losing half of the input H2.nbsp; In ...

With the Artemis program, NASA plans to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. The need for oxygen extraction from lunar regolith has been identified by STMD (Space Technology Mission Directorate). As knowledge about lunar water recourses is limited, alternative pathways to extract oxygen are reque ...

Human accommodations requirements will eventually dictate the necessity of simple, safe, routine, robust, ergonomic, and effective means for a broad variety of human accommodations clean-up activities in a broad variety of spacecraft. A low-g wet/dry vacuum provides one such solution. If such a low-g accommodating device could be delivered to NASA with the quality, durability, and performance of t ...

nbsp;Enhanced capabilities of Silicon Carbide (SiC) power semiconductor technology permit new ultra-high voltage and current applications and offer attractive options for power electronics in satellites, space stations and space exploration. However, the space environment has multiple radiation sources that interact with the SiC crystal and can damage the circuit. Studies show that when heavy ions ...

With the advent of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications growing in the last decade, many aspects of NLP and AI are ready to be applied to new problems in new domains.nbsp; This SBIR effort specifically merges NLP and AI technologies in a system that is designed to ensure aviation systems safety.nbsp; A combination of speech analytics, voice-to-text conver ...

We propose to investigate the utilization of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques for the fabrication of analytical instrumentation especially those requiring high or ultra-high vacuum environment to function.nbsp; This includes particle optic systems such as electron and ion microscopes, X-ray sources, and mass spectrometers.nbsp; By leveraging AM, the weight, cost, and development time can all ...