Award Data

This SBIR project will address the combined effects of aerothermal heating, rain erosion, and moisture and gas diffusion on the degradation of interceptor missile radomes designed for hypersonic travel. A novel method of protecting hypersonic interceptor missiles from the rigors experienced at velocities several times the speed of sound is proposed. The technology is based on the conversion of a ...

Many steering mirrors have been developed over the years, but never has one been explicitly designed for high dose radiation environments or long-term space operations. As a result, deployed spaced based optical systems for line-of-sight stabilization or beam control have not benefited from the higher bandwidth control and better error rejection that can result from designs incorporating fast ste ...

Aqwest proposes to investigate an innovative staged magnetocaloric refrigerator (SMCR) for thermal management of spacecraft payload electronics. SMCR offers a high-performance approach for thermal management of laser communication equipment and infrared (IR) sensors, while improving the overall payload energy efficiency and reducing its weight. The proposed project will leverage previous work by ...

Foreign missile threat will increase as ballistic missile technology becomes available on an international scale. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) requires high performance, high sensitivity and low noise infrared sensors for space based sensing applications that operate in environments where radiation hardness is essential to mission operation. Radiation hard by design (RHBD) readout integrated circu ...

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The FIRST RF approach to multi-beam phased array antennas proposed for this phase I program uses innovative application of techniques traditionally used in communication networks in order to simultaneously perform RF analog beamforming of multiple beams simultaneously on a single RF manifold. The proposed methods are scalable to a large number of simultaneous beams, and are independent of both the ...

Phased array antenna systems are growing in use within military systems. These arrays of thousands of elements need precise control of the aperture distributions to meet requirements for gain, sidelobes, etc. Errors in these phase and amplitude distributions over time will degrade the performance of these apertures. FIRST RF favors simple concepts with little or no hardware impact that fully ch ...

The development of Libration Management System’s (Libration Systems) SGLS compatible mobile ground station will allow for a low cost solution to support micro and small satellite missions operations, provide 3-D tracking of spacecraft, allow for in-field direct communication to a satellite using DoD approved waveforms, and to allow fusion of multiple data links (K and S/L bands) for these satell ...

Our PHASE II effort intends to take forward the 3 best Black Surface Processes as a result of the PHASE I study effort. The processes chosen: Deep Space Black (DSB), Deep Cobre Black (DCB), Deep Immersion Black (DIB), have shown the potential to meet the surface quality needs of the community on a variety of substrate materials. All require additional effort in PHASE II to open the "application ...

Next generation BMD sensor systems are anticipated to be highly networked. One radar concept has a single or a few illuminators and multiple receive antennas. It is desirable that the receive arrays be electronically steerable and support multiple simultaneous receive beams. Therefore, these future surveillance radars need to be more agile. To meet their mission objectives, they require wideband, ...