NASA SBIR 2016 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Fibertek, Inc.
13605 Dulles Technology Drive
Herndon, VA 20171 - 4603
(703) 471-7671

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Dr. Michael Albert
malbert@fibertek.com
13605 Dulles Technology Drive
Herndon, VA 20171 - 4603
(703) 471-7671

CORPORATE/BUSINESS OFFICIAL (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Ms. Tracy Perinis
tperinis@fibertek.com
13605 Dulles Technology Drive
Herndon, VA 20171 - 4603
(703) 471-7671

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 3
End: 4

Technology Available (TAV) Subtopics
Long Range Optical Telecommunications is a Technology Available (TAV) subtopic that includes NASA Intellectual Property (IP). Do you plan to use the NASA IP under the award?
No

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Space laser communications offer the promise and opportunity to downlink greatly increased data volumes from space as a supplement to radio frequency (RF) systems. The objectives of this SBIR support NASA's deep space and near-earth optical communications needs by developing and making key technologies available to spacecraft/instrument developers and ground station operators that scale data volumes dramatically at a cost point that enables operational use for NASA missions. We propose to develop a modular optical ground station architecture that can scale to hundreds of Gbps data rates from lunar and near-earth orbits in a gradual, low-cost, readably scalable manner accommodating the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) network standards and in the future supporting multiple protocols. This SBIR will also develop a spaceflight high speed Serially Concatenated Pulse Position Modulation (SCPPM) data channel encoder for the spaceflight modem and the complementary decoder for ground station use. Current and future space technology demonstration programs have been successful in maturing laser optical technology and have primarily focused on the space segment of the link. Fibertek will develop an integrated spaceflight and ground station optical communication architecture that provides NASA and/or its potential commercial suppliers with the ability to support hundreds of Gbps downlink. space missions with laser and lidar instrument payloads.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The ground station technology developed supports high bandwidth NASA mission needs for LEO, GEO to earth downlink. The unique waveform development can be incorporated into NASA missions for in Lunar, L1, L1 and deep space lasercom flight terminals and enables multi-channel operations.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The technology developed in this SBIR has immediate applications in supporting non-NASA DoD and commercial laser communications activities. DoD flies a wide array of high data volume sensors and is working toward increasing downlink data rates. This work also support future space flight laser com systems provider and future ground station operators who desire to amortize the cost of their systems and support a diversity of satellites. Their challenge is to support their network protocols which are high rate PPM, OOK, PSK protocols.