Award Data

Earths outer radiation belt, which consists of electrons with hundreds of keV to MeV energies, is a highly dynamic and driven environment.The large variations in electron flux, if unaccounted for, can cause satellites that travel through this complex region to experience anomalous behavior ranging from temporary satellite outages due to electrostatic discharge events in system electronics to poten ...

Verification of the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) algorithms and software utilized onboard spacecraft is of paramount importance to ensure resilient, correct operation after launch. Rather than wait until the GN&C software has been deployed to perform on-orbit verification, offline verification integrated into the design process will improve mission performance, significantly reduce the ...

Military systems operate in complex, adversarial environments where their initial planned operations are often overcome by events, but soldiers use those systems in creative ways to achieve their mission objectives. For example, complex ground robotic systems that were initially deployed for surveillance and explosive ordinance disposal have instead been used as decoys, ammunition carriers, and ot ...

Optical cryocoolers, which are compact and produce no vibrations, are ideal for many electronics and sensor applications. In particular, some advanced metrology systems require cooling to around 124 K, the temperature at which the coefficient of thermal expansion for crystalline silicon goes through a null point. Currently, the dominant solid-state cooling technology is thermoelectric cooling, whi ...

SIFT proposes Network Enforcement Using TRansactONs (NEUTRON) a dynamic fine-grained network enforcement policy design that captures network dependencies.NEUTRON closes the knowledge gap between mission needs and observed network traffic to increase mission network awareness. Then using that knowledge develops a revolutionary security enforcement policy based on network transactions.It reduces the ...

Radio frequency communications and sensors are everywhere in both personal and military life. RF fields are also used in some medical therapies. However, little is known about the medical effects that result from the routine exposure of tissue to RF fields. To understand such effects, new instrumentation is needed that can quantify the RF radiation amplitude with spatial resolution comparable to t ...

The Department of Defense relies on a worldwide network of radar and optical sites to maintain Space Situational Awareness.Although careful consideration during site selection process solves some of this mission's challenges, optical sensor imaging of objects at significant ranges is always hampered by many other factors, such as limited-aperture optics and atmospheric turbulence.There remains, ho ...

The development and implementation of new damage morphology models for concrete materials is critical to understanding their dynamic behavior during severe shock loading environments.Current constitutive models of conventional strength concretes do not accurately represent the behavioral characteristics of new ultra-high strength concretes because of differences in damage mechanisms during failure ...

J.T. McGraw and Associates,LLC,in collaboration with Purdue University, propose to demonstrate and test deployment of prototype COTS-derived optical SSA sensors designed to rapidly reconstitute and enhance global surveillance of GEO and near-GEO space.JTMA's advanced designs, techniques and algorithms allow small telescopes to achieve sensitivities very near those of larger traditional systems.Whe ...

Gradient Technology in conjunction with Professor M. Hillmyer of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota proposed to develop advanced technology to recover and convert the explosive and urethane binder found in plastic bonded explosives. This technology provides a unique reclamation, recovery, and reuse opportunity for dramatically reducing the disposal cost of technology munit ...