The 2022 Phase 2 SBIR Selections were recently announced. The following selections are relevant to Heliophysics.
- Dragster: An Ensemble Assimilative Model for Satellite Drag by Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates, LLC (now Orion Space Solutions)
- Enhancement of the Geomagnetic Cutoff Models inside SIRE2 (SIRE2-Real) by Fifth Gait Technologies, Inc.
- Solar-blind solid-state energetic particle detection for next-generation instruments by Advent Diamond Inc
- Compact All Sky Interferometric Doppler Imager (CASIDI) by Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates, LLC (now Orion Space Solutions)
Dragster: An Ensemble Assimilative Model for Satellite Drag
With the decreasing cost of launching objects into space, the number of objects in Earth orbit has significantly increased. Over 27,000 objects greater than 10 cm are tracked by the Department of Defense’s Space Surveillance Network orbiting Earth. Ensuring that these objects, which include operational satellites, don’t collide with each other or with any new satellites we launch into space is becoming increasingly difficult. Space traffic management relies on atmospheric density and drag models to predict the positions of these objects over time and generate collision alerts. Thanks to funding from the Air Force, Orion Space Research has developed a full-physics model of Earth’s upper atmosphere supported by data assimilation techniques, called Dragster which enables satellite drag predictions from 30 to 1,000 km.
The goal of this Phase 2 SBIR Project is to migrate Dragster to work in a Cloud-based computing environment, raising the NASA TRL of Dragster from its current TRL 5 to TRL 8, and making it accessible in a standardized way by multiple users and providing a superior form of space traffic management that would increase safety and scale of the growing space traffic management market
Enhancement of the Geomagnetic Cutoff Models inside SIRE2
The radiation environment in space is known to be filled with dangerous energetic particles and radiation that can damage or upset the operations of our space assets. A number of tools currently exist such as CREME96, GEOSPACE, SPACERAD to predict the environment and its effect on space hardware. These existing models have limitations though that a newly developed Space Ionizing Radiation Environment and Effects (SIRE2) toolkit by Fifth Gait Technologies, Inc. is aiming to address.
The goal of this Phase 2 SBIR Project is the SIRES2 toolkit including providing over 30 years of historical data to calculate the peak flux, mission-integrated fluence, and flux time series from historical and damaging Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) events in addition to the ability to apply historical geomagnetic cutoff calculations to the environment calculations. This will, for the first times, enable users to benchmark spacecraft to historical SEP events or provide anomaly assessment to these historical storms to modern spacecraft.
Solar-blind solid-state energetic particle detection for next-generation instruments by Advent Diamond Inc
Diamonds can be used as a semiconductor just like silicon and just like silicon have been used as radiation detectors. Diamond has a relatively large bandgap of 5.5 eV which makes it “solar blind” since this is larger than the energy of most solar UV and visible light. It also provides good radiation tolerance and fast response times. However, technical hurdles exist in the development of high quality diamond detectors which have limited their potential for use in space-based instrumentation. Advent Diamond and their collaborators at the ASU Diamond Lab have recently demonstrated several new high novel diode-structured diamond components which show significant promise in enabling diamond detectors.
The goal of this Phase 2 SBIR Project is to develop a 3-layer mechanically thick diamond detector to enable a single chip energy telescope for heavy ion measurements with energies in the range of MeVs.
Compact All Sky Interferometric Doppler Imager (CASIDI) by Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates, LLC
Our neutral atmosphere and the ionosphere directly interact in complex and dynamic ways that are actively being studied. Dynamic events in each region impacts the other while auroral electron precipitation increase the plasma density and conductivity in the ionosphere and heat the upper atmosphere. One way to characterize the dynamics of this system is by monitoring the wind fields in the upper atmosphere from the ground looking up with Interferometric Doppler Imagers. These imagers measure the airglow emission from a metastable state of Oxygen at 6300 Angstrom. First demonstrated in 1960, this approach has been used by multiple observers across geographically-distributed sites to provide a global picture of our upper atmosphere.
The goal of this Phase 2 SBIR Project is to develop a next generation Compact All Sky Interferometric Doppler Imager (CASIDI) capable of measuring a two-dimensional upper atmosphere wind field from the ground every few minutes, with very good precision. This will be achieved by innovating in two areas, super-polished flat optical elements which are ideal for filtering the light, and a new compact design. These two innovations combined will yield a less expensive imager which will enable it to be deployed to more geographically diverse regions providing significantly better coverage of the global dynamics of our upper atmosphere.