Award Data

Spacecraft and lunar bases generate a variety of wastes containing water, including food wastes, feces, and brines. Disposal of these wastes, as well as recovery of water, is necessary. However, evaporation of water also evaporates compounds with foul odors, some of which are much more volatile than water. Even apart from a water recovery system, foul odors sap crew morale, and must be eliminat ...

Touchstone Research Laboratory, Ltd. (Touchstone) has developed a novel and innovative Out-of-Autoclave (OOA) composites manufacturing process with an electrically heated carbon foam tooling system. Electrically Heated Tooling (EHT) utilizes a coal-based carbon foam (CFOAMREG) core that serves as both the tool substrate and the heating source for a composite part being cured. The tool heating is a ...

Metal Matrix Composite (MMC) materials offer tremendous potential for lightweight propellant and pressurant tankage for space applications. Thin MMC liners for COPVs would have enough strength to withstand tensile loading at maximum expected operating pressure (MEOP) and compressive loading at zero pressure without buckling. Thus, performance benefits would be expected when compared to aluminum, ...

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A novel design for an in situ atmospheric sensor for CO2 and trace gases is proposed. The sensor, named AirCore, provides the advantages of existing in situ sensors (e.g. high resolution) but eliminates possible biases in analysis that often originate from imperfect measurement condition. The AirCore provides a significant savings in cost and weight while increasing the capabilities of existing ...

This proposal addresses NASA's need for non-autoclave composites manufacture. The Constellation program, including the Ares V launch vehicle, will require very large-scale structures and conventional autoclave-based composites which are very costly and suffer from logistical problems. Out of autoclave (OOA) composite manufacturing technology has the potential to solve the constraint issues of aut ...

This proposal describes a mobile solid-state Neutron Energy Spectrometer (NES) for lunar soil moisture determination. Cosmic-ray interactions within the lunar soil will yield secondary neutrons and protons, among other particles. The produced neutrons will travel within the soil, scattering off of materials such as hydrogen. Interactions with hydrogen will greatly reduce the energy of the neutrons ...

The Phase I of the SBIR “Smart Fault Management” project aims to demonstrate how the fault management process can be innovated by exploiting concepts from a combination of well-established and emerging disciplines such as Bayesian Statistics, GPU-accelerated numerical simulations, Data Science, and Machine Learning that are disrupting the current status quo in many scientific and engineering f ...

The proposed research aims to develop a metal matrix composite (MMC) fabric that, when combined with additive manufacturing, will lead to weight reduction, increased structural performance, and reduce fabrication costs of structural components within launch vehicles. The approach focuses on developing a MMC fabric that will be used to selectively reinforce metallic components that are subjected to ...

The project consist of the development of a new intelligent flight control system with learning capabilities and a high degree of assurance, that can be certified by the FAAMachine learning and artificial intelligent research has led to many tangible results and recent developments in cognitive control and decision making. Although automatic flight controllers are widely used and they have become ...