Award Data

Accurate knowledge of heat flux is critical in assessing the design, performance, and survivability of hypersonic flight vehicles. Despite decades of research and testing, much is still unknown regarding hypersonic instabilities and transition mechanisms that define the state of the boundary layer. While the existence of these features is known, the ability to accurately measure them remains a cha ...

The YSZ Environment Sensing (YES) sensor is an electrochemical sensor that offers temperature, oxygen concentration and pressure measurement solution in ultra-harsh environments common in hypersonic ground test facilities. Its key component is the yttria-stabilized zirconia, which has a history of being utilized as a thermal barrier coating for jet engines, will survive elevated temperatures beyon ...

The Air Force is looking to improve calibration capabilities for instruments that measure flow and structure behavior in high speed airflows. Of particular interest is the flow regime where aerothermal effects are present, generally at speeds of Mach 5 and higher. High frequency oscillations in the incoming airflow are critical to the flow development around the vehicle so improved calibration for ...

Near-Earth space environment is hazardous to satellites. This harsh particle radiation can penetrate protective shielding, accumulate in sensitive materials and can damage even well shielded electronic components causing temporary malfunctions or a complete system/mission loss. The goal of the proposed work is to provide the Air Force with a state-of-the-art model of the outer zone energetic elect ...

Space superiority requires space protection and space situational awareness (SSA), which rely on rapid and accurate space object behavioral and operational intent discovery. The presence of adversaries in addition to real-time and hidden information constraints greatly complicates the decision-making process in controlling both ground-based and space-based Air Force surveillance assets. The focus ...

The problem addressed in this effort is to automatically learn historical ephemeris space catalog time, position, and velocity entity track update error uncertainties (i.e., without track error covariances) and to automatically (e.g., without expert event labeling) produce: – unmodeled non-gravitational space catalog update flags – abnormal unmodeled catalog update flags with abnorma ...

Successful completion of this Phase II proposal will fully characterize and evaluate a material for use in RF windows on hypersonic flight vehicles. Phase II will specifically examine the materials suitability through RF testing in X, Ku, and Ka bands and at elevated temperatures to 2000°F. The desired outcome will be a material with predictable, repeatable dielectric properties over frequency ...

Target detection and recognition is a challenging problem because of changes in appearance, viewing direction, occlusion and other covariates. Systems that can accurately and efficiently detect and track objects can provide several benefits in surveillance, monitoring and other applications. As part of this effort, we propose to develop a robust learning-based approach to detect, track and recogni ...

Through the execution of our Phase 1 effort, Nutronics, Inc. and Montana State University developed an improved means to optimize the Pellizzarri cost functional for coherent imaging using digital holography. Our algorithm developed during the Phase 1 effort accelerates convergence times by a factor of 20-40 for the majority of scenarios evaluated. Our proposed Phase 2 effort has a two-fold focus: ...

The objective of this proposal is to enable high-sensitivity, passive imaging system of natural mm-wave emissions, which can be used as standalone or fused with other imaging modality such as conventional IR imagery in degraded environments. This is achieved through a unique antenna integrated electro-optic (EO) modulator, where received mm-wave signals modulate an optical carrier. The optical car ...