Category: Space Technology Mission Directorate

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NASA Tech Breathes Life Into Potentially Game-Changing Antenna Design

Source: NASA

Some 30 years ago, a young engineer named Christopher Walker was home in the evening making chocolate pudding when he got what turned out to be a very serendipitous call from his mother.
Taking the call, he shut off the stove and stretched plastic wrap over the pot to keep the pudding fresh. By the time he returned, the cooling air in the pot had drawn the wrap into a concave shape, and in that warped plastic, he saw something – the magnified reflection of an overhead lightbulb – that gave him an idea that could revolutionize space-based sensing and communications.
That idea became the Large Balloon Reflector (LBR), an inflatable device that creates wide collection apertures that weigh a fraction of today’s deployable antennas. Now, with an assist from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, funded by the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, which supports visionary innovations from diverse sources, Walker’s decades-old vision is coming to fruition.
The concept turns part of the inside surface of an inflated sphere into a parabolic antenna. A section comprising about a third of the balloon’s interior surface is aluminized, giving it reflective properties.
With NIAC funding, and a grant from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Walker was able to develop and demonstrate technologies for a 33-foot-diameter (10 meters) LBR that was carried to the stratosphere by a giant balloon. For comparison, the aperture of NASA’s massive James Webb Space Telescope is over 21 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter.
“There was no place other than NIAC within NASA to get this off the ground,” says Walker, now a astronomy and optical engineering professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “At first, I was afraid to share the idea with colleagues because it sounded so crazy. You need a program within NASA that will actually look at the radical ideas, and NIAC is it.”
Parabolic dish antennas use their concave shape to capture and concentrate electromagnetic radiation. The larger the antenna’s diameter, or aperture, the more effective it is for capturing light or radio waves and transmitting radio signals over great distances.
In astronomy, there is a tremendous advantage to placing telescopes above the Earth’s atmosphere, which tends to distort or degrade signals coming from space. The challenge is that traditional large reflector antennas are heavy, unwieldy, and difficult to stow, leading to launch constraints and risky in-space deployment schemes.
The LBR design solves both problems. Made of a thin film structure, it inflates like a beachball, providing a stable parabolic-dish shape without the need for bulky and complex deployable hardware, and can fold into a tiny volume.  
In 2018, Freefall Aerospace, a company co-founded by Walker to develop and market the technology, demonstrated the LBR’s potential aboard NASA’s stadium-sized stratospheric balloon, which carried a 3.28-foot scale model to an altitude of 159,000 feet.
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Next up for the technology is a high-speed communications demonstration in low Earth orbit aboard a 6-unit CubeSat, about the size of a shoebox, called CatSat. It was selected for flight in 2019 as part of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. It is a joint effort involving NASA, Freefall Aerospace, the University of Arizona, and Rincon Research Corporation in Tucson, Arizona.
After reaching low-Earth orbit, CatSat’s inflatable antenna deployment system will deploy from its container, inflate to a diameter of about one-and-a-half feet, and begin transmitting back high-definition Earth photos. The mission is slated for launch with several other CubeSats on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket as part of the Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) 43 mission.
A more ambitious lunar mission concept is also being explored. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, would use the inflatable antenna in tandem with a new instrument called Terahertz Spectrometer for In-Situ Resource Utilization, a miniature, high-power laser precisely calibrated to detect water, a critical exploration resource.
“The technology demonstrated by CatSat opens the door to the possibility of future lunar, planetary and deep-space missions using CubeSats,” said Walker.
It might be difficult to believe this all started because a young engineer’s idea of dinner one evening was what most would consider dessert. Then again, one could say the proof was in the pudding.

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Follow NASA’s Starling Swarm in Real Time

Source: NASA

NASA’s Starling CubeSats are zipping through low Earth orbit in the agency’s latest test of robotic swarm technologies for space.  The four Starling spacecraft, launched in July 2023, are testing a group of small satellites ability to coordinate and cooperate independently without real-time updates from mission control.
NASA invites the public to follow the Starling mission live in NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System 3D visualization, which uses real-time data in an interactive solar system simulation. The positions of the planets, moons, and spacecraft – including Starling – are shown as they travel through space.
The Starling mission, managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, will test multiple flight patterns and autonomous capabilities, including maneuvering to stay together as a group, creating and patching their own communications network, keeping track of each other’s relative position without use of GPS,  and autonomously changing their combined science data collection strategy based on the latest readings from onboard sensors.
Autonomous technologies are vital to NASA’s space science and exploration goals, especially when exploring environments far from Earth where signal delays make real-time maneuvering impractical or impossible. Satellites and spacecraft operating in a networked, autonomous, and coordinated capacity will help humanity explore the unknown and conduct better science than ever before.
NASA’s Ames Research Center leads the Starling project. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, based at Ames and within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), funds and manages the Starling mission. Blue Canyon Technologies designed and manufactured the spacecraft buses and is providing mission operations support. Rocket Lab USA, Inc. provided launch and integration services. Partners supporting Starling’s payload experiments include Stanford University’s Space Rendezvous Lab in Stanford, California, Emergent Space Technologies of Laurel, Maryland, CesiumAstro of Austin, Texas, L3Harris Technologies, Inc., of Melbourne, Florida, and NASA Ames – with funding support by NASA’s Game Changing Development program within STMD.
For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.

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NASA Makes It Easier to Find Assistive Technologies for Licensing

Source: NASA

NASA develops a variety of technologies to explore space and beyond for the benefit of humanity. One measure of its success is the impact on the daily lives of millions of people with injuries and disabilities who are assisted with innovative treatments and products developed from NASA-derived technology.

After all, it was thanks to NASA’s resources that Adam Kissiah, an electronics instrumentation engineer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, was able to create what would become the cochlear implant. This assistive technology is now considered a medical wonder and has restored hearing to hundreds of thousands of adults and children across the planet since its creation nearly 50 years ago.
And now, NASA is making it easier than ever to find and access patented inventions born from space exploration that could help design or manufacture assistive technologies. To help spur the next generation of assistive technologies, NASA has compiled patented technologies with potential applications to this industry in one place. Companies are invited to browse the list for innovations that can help improve an existing product or launch the creation of something new.
“NASA is no stranger to improving the world of health and medicine. Our technologies benefit all humanity, and making them easier to find for companies creating these tools to improve people’s quality of life just made sense,” said Dan Lockney, program executive for NASA’s Technology Transfer program. “We can’t wait to learn how these innovations born from NASA expertise will help people lead healthy, productive, and independent lives.”
According to the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA), assistive technologies are products, equipment, and systems that enhance learning, working, and daily living for people with disabilities. This includes everything from hardware, such as prosthetics, hearing aids, and wheelchairs, to software like screen readers and communication programs.

Another notable NASA assistive technology spinoff is JORDY, or Joint Optical Reflective Display. The device enables people with low vision to read and write. JORDY enhances an individual’s remaining sight by magnifying objects up to 50 times and allowing them to change contrast, brightness, and display modes, depending on what works best for their low-vision condition.

The curated list on technology.nasa.gov features hardware and software available for licensing, including:
A robotic upper body exoskeleton that helps the user control the shoulder and elbow to rehabilitate people suffering from the effects of a stroke or traumatic brain injury
A glove to help reduce the grasping force needed to operate tools for an extended period of time, born from a collaboration to build a robotic astronaut
3D printing techniques to help build delicate or complex parts
New and improved processes to fabricate circuitry
In January 2024, representatives from NASA’s Technology Transfer program will be present at the ATIA conference in Orlando, Florida. Attendees will be able to learn more about the assistive technologies available for licensing.
NASA’s Technology Transfer program, managed by the Space Technology Mission Directorate, ensures technologies developed for missions of exploration and discovery are broadly available to the public, maximizing the benefit to humanity. Learn more by visiting the Technology Transfer Portal at:
https://technology.nasa.gov

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More than Grants: Perspectives from Past NASA-funded Researchers

Source: NASA

Each year, researchers nationwide embark on journeys of discovery facilitated by funding from NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants (STRG) program. They uncover innovations that benefit future research and their careers after graduation.
In 2023, STRG hit a significant milestone, making its thousandth award through the most recent cohort of NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTRGO) selections.
The STRG program supports academic researchers – graduate students to senior faculty –­ through five unique solicitations to examine ideas and approaches critical to making science and space exploration more effective, affordable, and sustainable. The vast majority of STRG awards go to graduate students through NSTGRO, resulting in the development of innovative technology while enriching the careers of students and the aerospace workforce.

The next 2024 NSTGRO opportunity is open for proposals through Nov. 1, 2023. It marks the 14th consecutive year that STMD has sponsored U.S. citizen and legal permanent resident graduate students who show significant potential to contribute to NASA’s goal of creating innovative new space technologies for our nation’s science, exploration, and economic future.
This space technology research investment milestone prompted NASA to reflect on three grantees inspiring and developing a diverse U.S. aerospace technology community.
Eliad Peretz wanted to apply before becoming a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Growing up in Israel, working on his grandfather’s olive grove taught him the value of planning and working hard at a young age.
“I knew NASA was the place for me,” said Peretz. He viewed STRG as a way in the door, to work directly with NASA and, maybe, one day for NASA.

Funded by a 2015 grant, Peretz used artificial intelligence to design lightweight spacecraft solar cells. He spent summers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. There, he had direct access to agency experts who helped advance the research while discovering something along the way.
“I realized that I didn’t want to be a person who can only solve a single problem; I wanted to solve many problems for spaceflight,” said Peretz. “For me, it was a life-changing program and experience.”
Today, Peretz works in the Heliophysics Division mission at NASA Goddard. He asks scientists and engineers for their most challenging problems and comes up with concepts, unlike anything that’s been done before.
Monique McClain, a 2017 grant recipient, embarked on a different path after graduating from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She is an assistant professor in Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering, using the NSTRF experience to help her students.
“I was hooked on science fiction as a kid and thought the chief engineer in ‘Star Trek’ was the coolest job,” said McClain. “They got to solve all the challenging problems.”
The “problem” of her research was to improve control over how a solid rocket motor burns by creating complex propellant shapes using a new 3D printing technology.
“Space Tech Research Grants stood out because it was more than just a stipend,” said McClain. “It allowed me to make research decisions, visit government labs, and develop professionally.”
McClain tested her 3D-printed components at NASA Marshall and the U.S. Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California.
Her current work focuses on understanding multi-material properties and improving 3D printer designs, while other researchers continue to build on her graduate project and are exploring technology commercialization opportunities.

MONIQUE McClain
Space Technology Research Grant recipient

In graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin, Kaci Madden worked on robotic exoskeletons. Her uncle is an amputee; growing up, she saw how prosthetic technology evolved. Madden wanted to design devices that helped people.
Funded by a 2015 NASA grant, she learned how to evaluate fatigue using robots to monitor astronaut health and performance more accurately. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Madden tested Robo-Glove, collected data, and built her professional network.
“NASA has a sense of comradery, vision and mission,” said Madden. “Everyone I met was willing to help or introduce me to someone who could further my research and support theirs.”
Madden said the opportunity propelled her career forward. She found a different mechanism for helping people and currently works for a healthcare start-up that empowers researchers to study rare diseases.
“I have a lot of gratitude to the STRG program itself for offering these funds and the people I got to work with,” said Madden. “They deserve a lot of credit – they are the shoulders I stood on to complete my dissertation under this fellowship.”
NASA Space Technology Research Grants are part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). This program is one of many early-stage funding opportunities for researchers in academia. To browse other funding opportunities, visit:
https://techport.nasa.gov/opportunities

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NASA Seeks Development of Universal Payload Interface

Source: NASA

NASA is calling on innovators to help solve some of the challenges in rapidly testing technology payloads across a wide range of commercial flight vehicles and test environments. As NASA explores the unknown in air and space, the agency is making increased use of commercial suborbital vehicles, spacecraft, and lunar landers to help advance new capabilities. However, the process to ensure payloads can properly interface with a host vehicle is currently complex, time-consuming, and can vary greatly from vehicle to vehicle, as well as between suborbital flights, orbital flights, and beyond.
To change the pace of space by moving technologies into flight testing and between different flight environments as quickly as possible, NASA’s Flight Opportunities program is asking businesses, academic institutions, entrepreneurs, and other innovators to develop a flight-ready universal payload interface for its third NASA TechLeap Prize. 
The NASA TechLeap Prize’s Universal Payload Interface Challenge  invites applicants to propose an optimized “system of systems” to enable easy integration of diverse technology payloads onto various commercial suborbital vehicles, orbital platforms, and planetary landers. The proposed universal payload interfaces should seamlessly adapt a wide range of small space payloads – be they technologies, laboratory instruments, or scientific experiments – for flight testing.

A maximum of three winners will receive up to $650,000 each to build their system plus the opportunity to flight test it at no cost. The focus is on achieving a simplified and streamlined payload integration process that has the potential to accelerate future flight-testing timelines.
The challenge with payload integration is the variety of vehicles used for flight testing, such as the commercial suborbital rocket-powered vehicles and landers, high-altitude balloons, and aircraft flying parabolic profiles that Flight Opportunities uses. The program also works in close cooperation with the Small Spacecraft Technology programto offer access to platforms hosting payloads in orbit.
“The TechLeap Prize is a great way to engage the greater community to find a solution for payload integration that will reduce the time to flight test and ultimately accelerate the development of technologies that are critical for addressing key gaps for NASA and the nation,” said Danielle McCulloch, program manager for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, which is managed at Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. “This has the potential to be a huge step forward for advancing space exploration and expanding the space economy.”
Reducing the cost and complexity of payload integration will support future missions. Facilitating the operations and safety of disparately designed and developed payloads and ensuring that they function across a variety of vehicles is critical.
Through this challenge, NASA aims to find affordable and easy-to-use solutions that enable the rapid transition of payloads from the bench to integration for testing on a wide range of commercial flight vehicles.

Registration deadline: February 1, 2024, at 5pm ET
Application deadline: February 22, 2024, at 5pm ET
To register, apply, review the technical details, and read the rules, visit the TechLeap Prize website.

The NASA TechLeap Prize, funded by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, was initiated to rapidly identify and develop technologies of significant interest to the agency through a series of challenges. This is the third challenge conducted as part of the NASA TechLeap Prize. Past challenges include Autonomous Observation Challenge No. 1 and Nighttime Precision Landing Challenge No. 1.
Flight Opportunities, part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) helps space technologies reach maturity more quickly by testing them on suborbital flights as well as on hosted orbital platforms, which are available in cooperation with STMD’s Small Spacecraft Technology program. These flight tests can provide critical data and insight into how a technology is expected to perform in its intended space environment, as well as help reduce risk prior to much more costly missions. The NASA Tournament Lab, part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program within STMD, manages the TechLeap Prize, which is administered by Carrot.

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5 Things to Know About NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications

Source: NASA

Slated to launch on Oct. 12 with the Psyche mission, DSOC will demonstrate technologies enabling the agency to transmit higher data rates from deep space.
NASA’s pioneering Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment will be the first demonstration of laser, or optical, communications from as far away as Mars. Launching with NASA’s Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name on Thursday, Oct. 12, DSOC will test key technologies designed to enable future missions to transmit denser science data and even stream video from the Red Planet.
Here are five things to know about this cutting-edge technology demonstration:
1. DSOC is the first time NASA will test how lasers could increase data transmission from deep space.
Until now, NASA has used only radio waves to communicate with missions that travel beyond the Moon. Much like fiber optics replacing old telephone lines on Earth as demand for data grows, going from radio communications to optical communications will allow increased data rates throughout the solar system, with 10 to 100 times the capacity of state-of-the-art systems currently used by spacecraft. This will better enable future human and robotic exploration missions, along with supporting higher-resolution science instruments.
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Learn more about how DSOC will be used to test high-bandwidth data transmission beyond the Moon for the first time – and how it could transform deep space exploration. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech2. The tech demo involves equipment both in space and on Earth.
The DSOC flight laser transceiver is an experiment attached to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, but Psyche relies on traditional radio communications for mission operations. The laser transceiver features both a near-infrared laser transmitter to send high-rate data to Earth and a sensitive photon-counting camera to receive a laser beam sent from Earth. But the transceiver is just one part of the technology demonstration.
There is no dedicated infrastructure on Earth for deep space optical communications, so for the purposes of DSOC, two ground telescopes have been updated to communicate with the flight laser transceiver. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will host the operations team, and a high-power near-infrared laser transmitter has been integrated with the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, California. The transmitter will deliver a modulated laser signal to DSOC’s flight transceiver and serve as a beacon, or pointing reference, so that the returned laser beam can be accurately aimed back to Earth.
Data sent from the flight transceiver will be collected by the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, which has been equipped with a special superconducting high-efficiency detector array.
3. DSOC will encounter unique challenges.
DSOC is intended to demonstrate high-rate transmission of data of distances up to 240 million miles (390 million kilometers) – more than twice the distance between the Sun and Earth – during the first two years of Psyche’s six-year journey to the asteroid belt.  
The farther Psyche travels from our planet, the fainter the laser photon signal will become, making it increasingly challenging to decode the data. As an additional challenge, the photons will take longer to reach their destination, creating a lag of over 20 minutes at the tech demo’s farthest distance. Because the positions of Earth and the spacecraft will be constantly changing as the photons travel, the DSOC ground and flight systems will need to compensate, pointing to where the ground receiver (at Palomar) and flight transceiver (on Psyche) will be when the photons arrive.
4. Cutting-edge technologies will work together to make sure the lasers are on target and high-bandwidth data is received from deep space.
The flight laser transceiver and ground-based laser transmitter will need to point with great precision. Reaching their targets will be akin to hitting a dime from a mile away while the dime is moving. So the transceiver needs to be isolated from the spacecraft vibrations, which would otherwise nudge the laser beam off target. Initially, Psyche will aim the flight transceiver in the direction of Earth while autonomous systems on the flight transceiver assisted by the Table Mountain uplink beacon laser will control the pointing of the downlink laser signal to Palomar Observatory.
Integrated onto the Hale Telescope is a cryogenically cooled superconducting nanowire photon-counting array receiver, developed by JPL. The instrument is equipped with high-speed electronics for recording the time of arrival of single photons so that the signal can be decoded. The DSOC team even developed new signal-processing techniques to squeeze information out of the weak laser signals that will have been transmitted over tens to hundreds of millions of miles.

5. This is NASA’s latest optical communications project.
In 2013, NASA’s Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration tested record-breaking uplink and downlink data rates between Earth and the Moon. In 2021, NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration launched to test high-bandwidth optical communications relay capabilities from geostationary orbit so that spacecraft don’t require a direct line of sight with Earth to communicate. And last year, NASA’s TeraByte InfraRed Delivery system downlinked the highest-ever data rate from a satellite in low-Earth orbit to a ground-based receiver.
DSOC is taking optical communications into deep space, paving the way for high-bandwidth communications beyond the Moon and 1,000 times farther than any optical communications test to date. If it succeeds, the technology could lead to high-data rate communications with streaming, high-definition imagery that will help support humanity’s next giant leap: when NASA sends astronauts to Mars.
More About the Mission
DSOC is the latest in a series of optical communication demonstrations funded by NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions (TDM) program and the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages DSOC for TDM within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and SCaN within the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.
The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. JPL is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Psyche is the 14th mission selected as part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center, is managing the launch service. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis.
For more information about DSOC, go to: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/dsoc
News Media Contacts
Ian J. O’NeillJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-354-2649ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
Alise FisherNASA Headquarters, Washington202-358-2546alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov

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NASA’s Honey Astrobee Robot Returns to Space

Source: NASA

The International Space Station is abuzz with the return of one of NASA’s Astrobee smart robots. The yellow Honey Astrobee, one of three free-flying robots, was unboxed in space after spending nearly a year at its home base, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Honey returned to Earth in September 2022 for maintenance and repairs.
NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg helped unpack Honey from its flight container and verified the robot was ready to get back to work. After initial checks, Honey was able to independently disengage from its docking station, maneuver through the space station’s Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), and re-dock successfully without crew supervision.
The Astrobee Facility provides the orbiting laboratory with a robotic system for research and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) outreach. Astrobee consists of three cubed-shaped robots, software, and a docking station used for recharging. The robots, which use electric fans as propulsion in the microgravity of the space station, aim to help manage routine spacecraft tasks so that astronauts can focus on jobs that only humans can perform. The project provides payload opportunities as well as guidance to users from academia, private industry, NASA, and other government agencies in the execution of approved research and STEM objectives.
Astrobee was funded by NASA’s Game Changing Development Program, part of the Space Technology Mission Directorate. Ongoing funding is provided by NASA’s International Space Station Utilization Office.