Award Data

Sensors based on chip-scale atomic devices (CSADs) offer portability, manufacturability, and high performance for precision navigation and timing (PNT) missions. Key systems for PNT including atom interferometric gyroscopes (AIG) and atomic clocks. Ongoing advances and innovations in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are directly relevant to CSADs. Different material bases have been used in PICs ...

Large ground-based telescopes require adaptive optics (AO) to correct for distortions introduced by atmospheric turbulence. In order to function, the AO system must track a bright point source. Although a natural star may be used, full sky coverage requires an artificial beacon created with a laser. The most common type of laser guide star (LGS) employs the mesospheric layer of sodium atoms at an ...

This effort seeks verification tools and techniques to ensure safety and stability of spacecraft Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GN&C) algorithms, particularly the attitude control system integrated with autonomy software. Advanced control algorithms and autonomy are increasingly necessary to enable responsiveness of fleets of vehicles to attitude constraints and object avoidance. Verus Researc ...

To meet the requirements of the AF18A-T015 solicitation, MaXentric and University of California San Diego are proposing the development of a low loss, high linearity capacitor. The tunable capacitor target is a compact integrated design, capable of a tuning range up to 4:1, with a minimum Q of 80 at 4 GHz, and handling up to 20W CW. During phase I, UCSD studied a novel varactor structure to improv ...

New, innovative laser spectroscopy technology will be developed for performance quantification and combustion characterization in a Rotational Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE). The effort will push the state of the art in tunable laser absorption spectroscopy to enable fast time response diagnostics of the extreme pressure and temperature conditions of an RDRE.

The main objective of this STTR effort is three-fold. First, to develop and demonstrate in Phase I a Bayesian methodology exploiting flight test data in order to identify critical store carriage tests and clear non-critical store carriage configurations by updated analysis. Second, to extend in Phase II the scope of this methodology to viscous flows with analysis enriched using analytical sensitiv ...

A growing number of electronic applications within the Air Force, such as devices for power conditioning and distribution, RF power amplification, and high power lasers have been identified for increased heat transfer requirements to maintain operational temperatures at acceptable levels while increasing the performance through higher power. However, this same target research that requires increas ...

Currently fielded multi-beam CDL systems have been developed in an ad-hoc manner consisting of a collection of poorly integrated off the shelf technologies where controllers, radios, routers, firewalls, encryptors, and antennas are bolted together to reduce time to field. Proprietary API’s, electrical interfaces, and hardware interfaces impede the success of the approach and result in a sub ...

We will deliver a new software architecture for scene generation named the Realistic Image and Neighborhood Generator (RING). Instead of being tied to a single tool, RING will provide interfaces suitable for a wide variety of image and scene rendering tools to run and interact with other codes. As an initial implementation of the interfaces, we will incorporate Stellar Science’s powerful, f ...

Current techniques for supporting Multi-Level Security (MLS) on embedded devices rely on maintaining secure connections back to centralized servers or dedicated computers for managing authentication and access controls. To provide the embedded devices with the capability to handle content of differing security levels directly on device, the operating system (OS) must properly and securely isolate ...