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Lead-lag motions of rotor blades in helicopters require damping to stabilize them. In practice, this has necessitated the use of external hydraulic dampers which suffer from high maintenance costs. High operational (lifecycle) cost has prompted rotorcraft industry to use elastomeric lead-lag dampers that result in "dry'' rotors. However, complex behavior of elastomers provides challenges for model ...

The current state-of-the-art co-axial swaged tantalum (Ta) heaters use magnesium oxide (MgO) insulators, which limits their operation to temperatures well below 1300ºC to prevent undesirable chemical reactions between Mg and Ta and heater failure. This program will develop a new ceramic insulator that is chemically compatibility with Ta and has high thermal stability at temperatures of 1300ºC-1 ...

NASA will fly x-ray microcalorimeters on several mission payloads scheduled within the next 5 years: New and improved IR/Visible blocking filters are urgently needed to realize the full potential and throughput of these missions. The innovation proposed, high transmission polyimide support mesh, will replace the nickel mesh used in previous blocking filter designs. Polyimide's composition affords ...

nLight has demonstrated highly-uniform APD arrays based on the highly sensitive InGaAs/InP material system. These results provide great promise for achieving the performance and uniformity requirements necessary to enable 3D LIDAR applications such as autonomous precision landing and hazard detection avoidance. The high degree of uniformity demonstrated offers the potential for biasing the entir ...

Limited downlink data rate constrains the amount of data that can be sent to earth from a spacecraft. Data from the onboard health monitoring sensors needs to be accommodated within a small fraction of this downlink bandwidth. The problem is more acute for interplanetary missions, where the downlink data rate is significantly lower than the low earth orbit missions. Such constraint prohibits trans ...

Our proposed innovation is to design and fabricate a diode pumped Er:YAG micro-chip laser capable of varied repetition rates and high pulse energies using the single emitter-based high brightness pump developed in the Phase I. Future NASA missions will require high-pulse power with variable repetition rate flash and scanning LIDAR systems. Such LIDAR systems offer the advantages of excellent spat ...

This work concerns the development of a prototype of a Volume Scattering Function (VSF) sensor for measurement of this inherent optical property(IOP) of seawater. The proposed prototype combines new development from Phase-I with our existing technology to extend existing capability for measuring VSF from 0.1 to 20 degrees, out to 170 degrees. We have developed a new and innovative sensor module th ...

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