National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research 2001 Program Solicitation
CHAPTER 8.2.4
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8.2.4 Launch and Payload Processing Systems
NASA Installation: Kennedy Space Center
In support of the strategic development of NASA's Technology Plan, the Center
of Excellence for Launch and Payload Processing Systems is continually advancing
the state of the art in launch and payload processing hardware, software, and
support activities. Development of innovative technologies needed to improve
operational safety and reliability, reduce costs and shorten flight hardware
processing turnaround times is critical to NASA's continued excellence in launch
and payload processing. NASA's goals to achieve affordable access to space require
greater efficiencies in ground operations for current and future space flight
vehicles and payloads. The four primary goals of the Center of Excellence are
to (1) assure that sound, safe, and efficient practices and processes are in
place for privatized/commercialized launch site operations; (2) increase the
use of KSC's operations expertise to contribute to the design and development
of new payloads and launch vehicles; (3) utilize KSC's operations expertise
in partnership with other entities (government, industry, academia) to develop
new technologies for future space initiatives; and (4) continually embrace core
capabilities (people, facilities, equipment, and systems) to meet agency objectives
and customer needs for faster, better, and cheaper development and operations
of space systems.
Core technology challenges to support this Center of Excellence for this Solicitation
include:
Spaceport Range Technologies
Proposals should address the development of new concepts, methodologies, processes
and technologies that may be applied to or are specific to Spaceport Range needs.
Specific topic areas are:
- Weather Instrumentation and Systems: Research new and innovative
sensors' instrumentation and system technologies that support the detection
and real-time evaluation of atmospheric conditions that influence weather
related decisions. These include remote sensing of atmospheric conditions;
methods and algorithms for accurate predictions; multi-spectral instrumentation;
and complex computational systems that affect the safety of launch and landing
operations, and vehicle performance during these phases.
- Spaceport Range Systems: New and innovative technologies that include
ground-based sensors and instrumentation that would safely reduce the required
support infrastructure and personnel. Specific areas of need are metric tracking
of vehicles, communications, navigational aids, detection of air and sea traffic,
and weather sensors (see above). These sensors and instruments are intended
to be complementary to the SBR (see below) and would be required to detect
and monitor surface conditions by increasing the overall system resolution
and accuracy and integrating the data.
- Space Based Range (SBR): New and innovative in-space technologies
that provide for simultaneous support of multiple vehicle operations at the
same or other ranges/spaceports from space platforms. This will include the
development of technologies for sensors and instrumentation systems that perform
or support the following functions: metric tracking, area surveillance, navigation
aids, and atmospheric sensing. Each of these functions will require development
of one or more of the following technologies; Integrated multi-, hyper-, and
ultra-spectral instrumentation and sensors; Multi-channel transceivers. These
will provide directors/controllers and vehicles vital real-time data that
is necessary to interface with the National Airspace System for all phases
of ascent and decent.
- Decision Models and Simulation: New and innovative methods that safely
reduce conservatism while providing the fidelity necessary to ensure safe
and cost effective real-time decision models. Improvements in real-time computational
capability and code development can significantly improve assessments. Specific
technologies that would be necessary are:
- Parallel processing enhancements associated with source term quantification
will provide significant increases in performance.
- Modeling code improvements will increase fidelity and improve understanding
of potential problems.
- Active model validation approach and simulators would be employed to
ensure improvements have scientific merit and quantify model performance.
- Range Information Systems Management: New and innovative communications
methods, standards and technologies that support the integration and management
of geographically and functionally distributed instrumentation and computational
systems into an integrated Spaceport(s) Range system.
- Command, Control and Monitoring: New and Innovative technologies
that include real-time advisory systems for the operators and users; data
reduction, analysis, and archiving; configuration validation and management;
and low cost high fidelity training capabilities that minimize impact to operational
systems.
Process Engineering
Proposals should address the development of new concepts, methodologies, processes,
and/or software support systems that advance the state-of-the-art in process
engineering technologies. Specific areas of emphasis include, but are not limited
to, those topics listed below:
- Systems, Process, and Operations Modeling, and Simulation and Analysis:
New technologies must be developed and existing technologies improved in the
area of ground processing assessments for any future launch vehicles including
both Expendable Launch Vehicle (ELV) and Reusable Launch System (RLS), development
and assessment of Mars/moon surface operations, sparing analysis for human
Mars/moon missions, discrete event simulation and modeling and analysis techniques,
automated process simulation and processing systems and virtual shuttle processing
models.
- Human Factors (HF) Engineering: Innovative research is needed in
the area of assessments on the human Mars/moon vehicle design, application
of HF principles early in the design stages of systems to prevent and reduce
human error, perform usability testing on systems and prototypes, development
of advanced intelligent training systems and wireless communication headsets.
- Process Design and Development: There is a need for advanced technologies
to be developed in the area of optimization of new processes, knowledge capture
systems, work instruction systems, and management support systems.
- Work Methods/Measurement: Research is needed in the advancement of tools
to assist in the development and assessment of crew timelines for human Mars/moon
missions and work methods and measurement techniques.
- Scheduling/Capacity Analysis: New technologies must be developed
in the area of assessments of crew timelines for human Mars/moon missions
from the perspective of expected maintenance demands versus allocated crew
time to perform maintenance, advanced resource and schedule optimization systems,
and smart storage and inventory systems.
- Risk and System Assessment: Innovative research must be developed
in the area of identification of enhanced risk assessment techniques from
a systems integration perspective, lessons learned database, application of
safety hazard analysis, failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) and critical
items list (CIL), fault tree analysis, reliability, maintainability and availability
predictions (mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR),
etc.). Additional enhancements needed in generating quantitative risk assessments
such as Fault Tree Analyses linked to an Event Tree serving as a pivotal event
timeline (provides the probability of loss of vehicle or crew and detail component
failures, which lead to this undesirable event.).
Regenerative Environmental Technologies
Proposals are solicited for innovative and commercially viable technologies
in environmental monitoring and management of bioregenerative life support systems.
Of particular emphasis is the development of systems or sensors to monitor functionality
of a bioregenerative system and critical technologies for effective operation
of the managed environment of a plant growth chamber. Specific topic areas are:
- Functionality Monitoring for Bioregenerative Life Support
- Microbial: Innovative technologies for monitoring microbial
populations in prototype systems under development at Kennedy Space Center
are needed for better understanding the microbial community structure
and function. Techniques are sought for rapid (real-time) identification
and monitoring of the microbial ecology within hydroponic and bioreactor
systems. Quantification of population size, species richness, community
composition, microdiversity, and microbial growth are of particular interest.
Techniques for direct analysis of microbial diversity without culturing
are also desired.
- Plant Health: Novel techniques for automatic/remote detection
of plant stresses are sought for use in plant growth chambers using lighting
systems. Plants stresses to be identified include but are not limited
to changes in atmospheric components and perturbations of hydroponic solutions
such as nutrient deficiencies and toxicity's and microbial anomalies.
Stress detection technique should preclude human intervention, i.e., robot
and neural net recognition programming.
- Technologies for Closed Plant Growth Systems
- Lighting Systems: Light sources which have a significant life
cycle while also providing high electrical conversion efficiencies greater
than 50 percent and producing an optimized radiation spectrum (e.g., 80
percent in 580-700nm and 20 percent in 400-480nm) for plant photosynthetic
processes are highly sought. Innovative methods for transferring/distributing
light energy to the plant canopy (leaf surfaces) with minimal loss are
also desired.
- Nutrient Monitoring: On-line and real-time monitoring of inorganic
ions in plant nutrient solutions are desired. Simultaneous monitoring
and quantification of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, chlorine,
magnesium, sulfur, zinc, manganese, iron, boron, copper, and molybdenum
are preferred.
- Atmospheric Monitoring: Real-time monitoring of the constituents
of the chamber environment may be very helpful in identifying a negative
trend in plant growth and allow corrective action if such parameters are
found to be heading towards unfavorable limits. Desired measurements include
but are no limited to: air temperature, air velocity, radiation, and the
concentrations of the following atmospheric constituents: water, carbon
dioxide, carbon monoxide nitrous oxide, gaseous nitrogen, oxygen, ammonia,
ethylene, and argon. Low power, low mass, self-calibrating sensors as
part of an overall sensor web are preferred.
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