Award Data

Advanced Materials Technology, Inc (AMTI) responds to the NASA solicitation S2 "Advanced Telescope Systems" under subtopic S2.05, "Optics Manufacturing and Metrology for Telescope Optical Surfaces". The proposed program is aimed at developing large, ultra-lightweight mirror substrate, including membrane optics for very large aperture space telescopes. The novel materials offer considerable weigh ...

During the phase I program Northwestern and APS, Inc., have manufactured several different materials systems that are lighter than Beryllium and stiffer than Aluminum. These high specific strength materials are also easily fabricated into larger shapes or even net shape processed. The mechanical (tensile and modulus) and thermal physical (CTE, thermal conductivity) property data for several syste ...

NASA, the Department of Defense (DoD), and Commercial spacecraft programs have the desire to minimize program costs while continuing to ensure mission robustness and flexibility. The spacecraft system that is a cost driver throughout the program life cycle is the Command and Data Handling System (C&DH), along with the associated algorithms and software. Advanced Solutions Inc (ASI) plans to deve ...

Achieving low-cost space missions implies lowering all phases of mission development, including spacecraft design, assembly, integration and test. The concept of the wireless spacecraft bus is something most technical people are at least half familiar with - the half which includes wireless data transfer, something available on every computer laptop today. But wireless is not really wireless if th ...

AeroSoft proposes to develop a full featured CFD toolkit for analysis of the aerothermal environment and its effect on space vehicles. In Phase I, AeroSoft proposes to implement multi-component ablation along with material response into AeroSoft's structured and unstructured CFD solver GASP. In Phase I, GASP's internal thermal solver will be augmented to include the effects of ablation. In Ph ...

In situ wind and turbulence measurements play a key role in the support and validation of Earth science missions using spaced-based technology. NASA has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in support of these Earth science missions, but the current UAVs do not have sensor packages to make science quality measurements of parameters including three-dimensional wind, turbulence, temperature, ...

Every day, turbulence has an adverse effect on aircraft operations and capacity of the NAS, costing the airline industry at least $100 million annually in delays, operational inefficiencies, and injuries. There is a need to research and develop traffic flow and ATM methods that mitigate the turbulence impact to NAS operations, but turbulence is poorly represented in current airspace simulation an ...

To meet the increasing power demand of today's spacecraft systems, an integrated power electronics system capable of interfacing, and simultaneously controlling, three power ports is proposed in this project. This new proposed power electronic architecture employs a single-stage power topology, thus allowing cost-effective control of power flow with improved efficiency, power density, and reliabil ...

As NASA prepares for future space missions and the return to the moon by 2020, astronauts will be required to spend more time exposed to the hazards of performing Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA). Providing and maintaining reliable communications and overall information transfer is imperative during EVA operations not only to relay progress during the task but also to monitor the health and abilit ...

We propose to build and evaluate NDIR Analyzers that can be used to observe Eddy Covariance Flux and Absolute Dry Mole Fraction of CO2 from stationary and airborne platforms for a great range of environments. Both open- and close-path analyzers are to be evaluated. Phase I succeeded in building a fast CO2 analyzer with 100 Hz modulation frequency and sensitivity within a factor of two of the targe ...