Award Data

Supercomputing plays a major role in many areas of science and engineering, and it has had tremendous impact for decades in areas such as aerospace, defense, energy, finance, and telecommunications—to name just a few. Supercomputing enables many of our most important high-tech tools, and nowhere is it more important than at NASA, where attaining increased computing speed and performance at lower ...

Advanced Materials Technology, Inc (AMTI) responds to the NASA SBIR solicitation X8 "Space Cryogenic Systems" under subtopic X8.01, "Cryogenic Fluid Transfer and Handling". The proposed Phase I SBIR program is aimed at developing new cryogenic insulations for passive thermal control, resulting in zero boil-off storage of cryogens. The passive thermal control will serve to limit the heat leak int ...

Exploration of planetary surfaces will require a communication architecture that supports operational capabilities in which fixed and mobile assets on the planetary surface can communicate seamlessly and securely to coordinate planetary exploration as well as communicate back to Earth. Communication systems operating on planetary surfaces will also require innovative solutions for analyzing and ch ...

Silicon carbide (SiC) and other wide band-gap semiconductors offer great promise of high power rating, high operating temperature, simple thermal management, and ultra-high power density for both space and commercial power electronic systems. However, this great potential is seriously limited by the lack of reliable high temperature device packaging technology. The objective of this proposed resea ...

Robotic sample acquisition is essentially grasping. Multi-finger robot sample grasping devices are controlled to securely pick up samples. Equations have been developed to provide optimal grasps for perfectly modeled objects, but grasping unmodeled objects like a random sample on planetary surfaces is an open research problem. Approaches to grasping unmodeled objects use various sensors, such as ...

An important consideration of long duration space flight operations is interpersonal dynamics that effect crew cohesion and performance. Flight surgeons have stated the need for unobtrusive monitoring to help detect if crews are having difficulties with coping with long duration spaceflight environments. The long-term goal of this project is to develop a set of applied technologies that can monito ...

The prevailing approach to non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of aircraft components is to set an inspection schedule based on what is generally known about the component in question. Engineers perform tests on samples, get field reports, and include a safety factor based on criticality. Then, when the schedule dictates, the component is inspected and a binary decision is made: Back in service? O ...

NASA has expressed the need to assess crew autonomy relative to performance and evaluate an optimal level of autonomy that maximizes individual and team performance. For this project, we propose to leverage our Automated Behavior and Cohesion Assessment Tools (ABCAT) system, which we designed for NASA for a recent project. The ABCAT system was designed in part to assess crew performance, which we ...

Develop Small Satellite Analysis Laboratory (SatLab): A simulation-of-simulations framework to integrate component and engineering simulations into a single larger simulation capable of full satellite system trade analysis and optimization, in order to reduce the cost and increase the quality of design and development of new small satellites and space vehicles, and test system upgrades and modific ...

Based on successful space testing onboard the Midstar1 satellite, Eclipse Electrochromics have been identified by a number of organizations as well as NASA as a high interest technology. For nanosats, the critical design challenge is achieving autonomous control of the EclipseVEDsTMfor spacecraft thermal self regulation without the need for human intervention. To achieve this goal, Ecli ...