Award Data

Aging and durability of aircraft in both the military and civilian sectors are becoming major issues as the existing fleet continues to age. Additionally, the increased use of composite structures in the civilian fleet, such as in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A380, make the understanding and/or improvement of composite durability, particularly durability of repairs, even more critical ...

Establishing human presence outside the protective cover of earth's atmosphere is a challenge. On earth, the atmosphere does not only present breathing gas, it also acts as a thermal buffer and protects the biosphere from harmful radiation. Shielding of humans from harmful radiation during long-term stays on an extraterrestrial body like the moon is a difficult task. Lunar regolith provides an ...

Any manned missions to extraterrestrial locations will require shelter structures for a variety of purposes ranging from habitat usage to biomass production. Such shelters need to be constructed in such a way to minimize stowed volume and payload weight. The structures must also be very durable and have the ability to survive punctures without collapsing. Ways of increasing available crew-load ...

The proposed Phase I program will demonstrate the feasibility of the in-space production of large aperture antenna structures. The use of a novel open cell foam, previously developed for NASA space antennas, will allow the deployment of reflectors at low cost and very low transport volume compared to currently used technologies like solid metal or mesh reflector. The use of a foam substrate also ...

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 ...

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 ...

Advanced diagnostic systems have the potential to improve safety, increase availability, and reduce maintenance costs in aerospace vehicle and a variety of other mechanical system. Numerous recent research efforts have produced a variety of diagnostic algorithms that show significant promise, but to date advanced diagnostic approaches have seen rather limited use in operational air vehicle syste ...