NASA SBIR 2005 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Nightsky Systems, Inc.
3916 Lauriston Rd
Raleigh ,NC 27616 - 8612
(919) 261 - 0936

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Carl   Blaurock
carl@nightsky-systems.com
3916 Lauriston Rd
Raleigh, NC  27616 -8612
(919) 261 - 0936

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
The proposed innovation is a 6DOF controllable mirror mount with high dynamic range and fast tip/tilt capability for space based applications. It will enable the actuation of large (~1m) mirrors over centimeter stroke with low bandwidth to correct deployment errors, provide sub-micron correction of thermal distorsion with picometer precision, and enable nanometer/nanoradian tip/tilt wavefront correction up to tens of Hz. The actuator will be designed to decouple the mirror from support resonances so that the mirror control system can suppress the system dynamic response. The mount will be optimized from a systems perspective, including thermal effects, total mass including the amplifiers and induced mechanical noise.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
NASA is planning many future observatory missions that would benefit from a successful FPMM demonstration. A short list includes the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interometer (TPF-I), Single Aperature Far Infrared Observatory (SAFIR), Vision Mission ? Stellar Interferometer (VM-SI), Thirty Meter Space Telescope (TMST), Fourier-Kelvin Stellar Interferometer (FKSI), and the Space Infrared Interferometric Telescope (SPIRIT). All of these missions pose the challenge of a large, lightweight aperature with extremely Secondary Mirror positioning requirements.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
FPMM would be extremely beneficial to space telescopes that require agility. The demand for increased resolution is driving systems to larger aperature size, but this decreases modal frequency exponentially. Conventional control approaches that limit the bandwidth to a decade below the first flexible mode will be come the limiting factor on agility. FPMM could enable a larger aperature system with faster slew settle times than current systems. The Earth pointing community is one potential beneficiary.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Controls-Structures Interaction (CSI)