Award Data

Current state of the art inertial measurement units (IMUs) co-locate a set of accelerometers and gyroscopes into a single package. CU Aerospace (CUA), in partnership with the University of Illinois, propose to develop a scalable and distributed IMU for space robotics and CubeSat applications. The user can choose to include an arbitrary number of inertial sensors beyond the minimal number of sensor ...

We propose the development of a very high specific power integrated electric turbofan directly driven with a high frequency, air-core synchronous motor. If the target specific power is achieved, this technology could increase the viability of turbo-electric airplanes for commercial air transport, leading to significantly lower carbon emissions and energy use in aviation. The key innovation is the ...

The fast-light effect in a cavity, in the active or passive mode, has emerged as an important mechanism for enhancing the sensitivity of many devices. Recently, we have been investigating the development of gyroscopes and accelerometers using the active mode, in which the cavity is a Fast-Light Ring Laser (FLRL). Specifically, we have demonstrated, on a table-top, a pair of counter-propagating F ...

An important NASA mission is to remotely analyze fires, such as wildfires and burning biomasses, for their chemical content. The chemical species of most interest have infrared spectral signatures at wavelengths ranging from 1.5 microns to 12 microns. A broadband infrared focal plane array (FPA) with that spectral coverage and high quantum efficiency is a key technology to enable this mission. Qma ...

To support development of atmospheric balloons and gossamer structures, NASA requires a capability for real-time, dynamic strain measurement in thin polymeric membranes during deployment and flight. This capability will provide quantitative test data to inform balloon design efforts, as well as enable real-time monitoring of material state during flight. Existing technologies include wired or wi ...

Future astrophysics missions require efficient, low-temperature cryocoolers to cool advanced instruments or serve as the upper stage cooler for sub-Kelvin refrigerators. Potential astrophysics missions include Lynx, the Origin Space Telescope, and the Superconducting Gravity Gradiometer. Cooling loads for these missions are up to 300 mW at temperatures of 4 to 10 K, with additional loads at higher ...

The innovation of the Agricultural SOil Moisture and Irrigation Status (A·SOM·IS) platform is the development of operational and moderate resolution mapping and assessment of soil moisture, irrigation status (irrigated vs not), and crop water stress metrics at field scale for agricultural decision support tools. The platform focuses on utilization of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and blends SAR ...

Akadio proposes to develop H5 Hermes, an enhancement to HDF5 to enable high efficiency I/O performance for HDF5 applications that perform many related reads and writes across large data structures. Such I/O operations are often a serious bottleneck for large scale simulations, resulting in I/O bottlenecks that significantly degrade overall performance.There are existing HDF5-based solutions simila ...

Reducing the inert mass of propulsion systems in sample return spacecraft will reduce their launch costs and increase opportunity for these missions. Compared to a pressure-fed system, a propellant pump-fed system can significantly reduce overall propulsion system mass, especially for a system with high propellant throughput. To address this need, we propose to develop a compact, lightweight elect ...

We propose to use advanced algorithms for compressive sensing (CS) using inpainting which utilize machine learning to improve the capability of existing or novel hyperspectral imaging (HSI) systems. These approaches will allow for an order of magnitude improvement in the frame acquisition speed of existing detectors at a high compression ratio with no loss of resolution, while at the same time per ...