Skip Navigation
Home | Organization | News/Events | Research | Publications | Destinations | Partnering | Software
Partnering
Ames Exploration Systems Office
Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Information   
SBIR & STTR

NASA SBIR & STTR Home Page

We manage and participate in the management of SBIR and STTR projects in several topic and subtopic areas.  Below is a list of the topics for which Ames serves as either Lead or Participating Center.  If you are interested in applying for SBIR or STTR funding in any of these areas, click on the area of interest to learn more and to contact us. 

Autonomous Reasoning/Artificial Intelligence


Computer System Architectures


Data Acquisition and End-to-End-Management


Data Input/Output Devices


Database Development and Interfacing


Expert Systems


Human-Computer Interfaces


Portable Data Acquisition or Analysis Tools


Software Development Environments


Software Tools for Distributed Analysis and Simulation

Research Topics

B3.08 Software Architectures and Integrated Control Strategies for Advanced Life Support Systems
Lead Center: JSC
Participating Center(s): ARC, JPL, KSC

The purpose of this subtopic is to develop advanced control system technologies that can support an integrated approach to the command and control of Advanced Life Support (ALS) for future long-duration human space missions, including a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars. The control strategies for ALS systems must deal with continuous and discrete processes and with dynamic interactions between subsystems such as air revitalization, water recovery, food production, solids processing, and the crew. The goal of autonomously controlling an ALS system challenges many areas of technology, including distributed data management and control, sensor interpretation, planning and scheduling, modeling and simulation, and validation and verification of autonomous control systems. These various technology areas must eventually be integrated into a coherent system that runs day after day for years and that can effectively interact with crewmembers who place their lives in its hands. The control strategy must be able to reach across the system and down into its parts to gather all data necessary to achieve its control objectives. Interfaces to crew, ground control, and other spacecraft systems must allow for insight into control strategies, choices, and pending actions and allow for manual control at any level.

The challenges of controlling regenerative life support for an enclosed crew environment involve the ALS goals to minimize expendables, to minimize crew and ground involvement, and to incorporate biological systems for recycling air, water and solids. The interdependence of environmental processing systems, and the need for reducing operations support costs are included. There is a need for the development and evaluation of control architectures and strategies which meet these challenges, both by building on current advances in distributed, modular, object-based protocols, and by new advances in integration of agent technology, planning, and resource management across heterogeneous systems. This includes:

New Control Strategies for Closed-Loop Systems
Advanced Life Support consists of a combination of physico-chemical systems with biological systems to recycle air, water, solid waste, plants, and food. The system is closed with respect to hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon in order to reduce the amount of consumable air water and food necessary for extended human presence on other planets. Closed systems and biological systems have different constraints and control paradigms than conventional processes. There is a need for new control algorithms, analyses, strategies, and techniques that can accommodate this architecture.

Distributed Network Protocols, Including Support for Fieldbus and Intelligent Controllers
The robustness of the control and data paths for equipment and subsystems is determined by the fieldbus protocols that connect them. Fieldbus protocols have been developed for the special needs of the aerospace and process control industries. There is a need for investigation and adaptation of these protocols, and the development of new protocols to support the type of distributed intelligent systems and networks envisioned for human exploration missions. These protocols need to be robust and fault-tolerant, and to support a large number of heterogeneous systems. Ideally, these protocols should support both local and interplanetary connectivity.

Development of Ontologies for Communication Among Autonomous Systems or Control Agents
Human exploration missions involve hundreds of systems developed by dozens of organizations. To develop software that can integrate across these systems and integrate with operations requires the use of common terminology across multiple disciplines. A common taxonomy or common ontology needs to be developed for the types of control problems associated with integrated control of advanced life support systems.

Software Development Methodologies for Autonomous Systems
This includes requirements management, testing, performance metrics, and long-term maintenance support, including development for growth and support for model-based simulations. There is a need for new tools to support the development of distributed autonomous control systems throughout the program life cycle. This includes tools for managingprototyping, requirements, design, design knowledge capture, testing,and growth and maintenance across multiple development teams.

Approaches for Integration of New Controls Technology (both hardware and software) with Existing Legacy Systems
Some space technologies are relatively mature. New controls technology must be compatible with legacy fieldbuses and operations concepts in addition to providing new functionality. There is a need for tools and development methodologies that can accommodate growth in system functionality.

Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) Across Multiple Systems; Sharing of Parameters and Data Between Heterogeneous Systems
The majority of FDIR approaches focuses on single subsystems and depend on a homogeneous platform and software architecture, often using a blackboard or shared memory model to share data between modules. There is a need to perform FDIR across multiple heterogeneous systems across networks. Ideally, FDIR should support cooperative efforts between group operations and planetary systems.

Control System Failure Tolerance
Critical systems provide functional redundancy in the case of failure or performance degradation. There is a need for new approaches to providing failure tolerance for both hardware and software components of the control systems. Of particular importance is the reduction of crew time for maintenance, and reduction of dependence on re-supplying hardware, as these are the most expensive constraints on these systems.

Planning and Scheduling
This includes reactions to system faults, supporting adjustments to operations, inventory, and logistics because of planned and unplanned maintenance. There is a need for tools to support development and deployment of applications that support planning and scheduling. Developed applications should support the integration of both planet-side and Earth-side activities.

Development and Integration of Autonomous System and Intersystem Control with Crew and Ground Operations
There is a need for tools, architectures, and technology that can support integration of operations between crew, ground operators, ground applications, and onboard applications.

Development of Architectures that Support a Range of Autonomy, from Fully Autonomous to Fully Manual, with the Corresponding Range of Support for Human Interaction
Autonomous systems for human exploration missions must provide visibility, situational awareness, and an ability to change the level of autonomy based on both situation and human input. As unexpected situations arise that are outside the scope of design, autonomous control systems must interact with crew and ground operators at varying levels of transparency. Unlike Earth-based systems, the planet-side crew will not be subsystem experts and may be isolated from ground support. Local systems must safely and robustly aid the crew in both troubleshooting and nominal operations. There is a need for software architectures and development methodologies, including system and crew modeling, to provide such capabilities.

[back to top]

E3.01 Automation and Planning
Lead Center: ARC
Participating Center(s): GSFC

The Automation and Planning Subtopic solicits proposals that allow either spacecraft or ground systems to robustly perform complex tasks given high-level goals with minimal human direction. Technology innovations include, but are not limited to: 1) automation and autonomous systems that support high-level command abstraction; 2) efficient and effective techniques for processing large volumes of data (commonly available on the Internet) into useful information; 3) intelligent search of large, distributed data archives, and data discovery through searches of heterogeneous data sets and architecture; and 4) automation of routine, labor intensive tasks that either increase reliability or throughput of current process. Specific areas of interest include the following:

  • Search agents that support applications involving the use of NASA data;
  • Methods that support the robust production of data products given a set of high-level goals and constraints;
  • Autonomous data collection including the coordination of space or airborne platforms while adhering to a set of data collection goals and resource constraints;
  • Autonomous data logging devices (software, or hardware and software) supporting a variety of weather and climate sensors, capable of ground-based operation in a wide variety of environmental conditions; such systems would probably be solar powered with accurate time stamping;
  • Planning and scheduling methods related to Earth Science Mission objectives;
  • System and subsystem health and maintenance, both space- and ground-based;
  • Distributed decision making, using multiple agents, and/or mixed autonomous systems;
  • Automated software testing;
  • Verification and validation of automated systems;
  • Automatic software generation and processing algorithms;
  • Control of Field Programmable Gate-Arrays (FPGA) to provide real-time products.

[back to top]

T1.01 Information Technologies for System Health Management, Autonomy, and Scientific Exploration

Information technology is a key element in the successful achievement of NASA's strategic goals. Modern tools and techniques have the capability to redefine many design and operational processes, as well as enable grand exploration and science investigations. This subtopic seeks innovative solutions to the following information technology challenges:

  • Onboard methods that monitor system health and then automatically reconfigure to respond to failures and sustain progress toward high-level goals. Special emphasis will be on computational techniques for coordinating multi-agent systems in the presence of anomalies or threats.
  • Onboard, real-time health management systems that perform quickly enough to monitor a flight control system (including spacecraft and fixed or rotary wing aircraft) in a highly dynamic environment, and respond to anomalies with suggested recovery or mitigation actions.
  • Integrated software capabilities that allow automated science platforms, such as rovers, to respond to high-level goals. This could include perception of camera and other sensor data, position determination and path planning, science planning, and automated analysis of resulting science data.
  • Data fusion, data mining, and automated reasoning technologies that can improve risk assessments, increase identification of system degradation, and enhance scientific understanding.
  • Techniques for interconnecting and understanding large heterogeneous or multidimensional data sets or data with complex spatial and/or temporal dynamics.
  • Computational and human/computer interface methodologies for inferring causation from associations and background knowledge for scientific, engineering, control, and performance analyses.
  • Software generation tools that capture designer intent and performance expectations and that embed extra knowledge into the generated code for use by automated software analysis tools doing validation and verification, system optimization, and performance envelope exception handling.
  • Tools and techniques for program synthesis and program verification of high-assurance software systems.
  • Innovative communication, command, and control concepts for autonomous systems that require interaction with humans to achieve complex operations.

[back to top]

X5.02 Virtual Exploration
Lead Center: ARC
Participating Center(s): JSC

Future NASA Exploration Systems will require humans to effectively interface very large sets of both software and physical data. This demands significant advances in human machine interfaces that will incorporate 2- and 3-D multimodal displays, which will be supported on the back end by high-end computing and sophisticated data management, data fusion, and data mining algorithms. Such interfaces are required for accessing physical spaces, as in teleoperation for robotic exploration, for accessing data repositories, as in ultralarge immersive data sets, and for accessing data that augments human models, as in immersive model exploration and sensory augmentation. The purpose of this call is to catalyze the creation of specific software products and interface design case studies that will enable NASA individuals to explore physical- and software-based data sets as outlined above.

Innovative proposals are sought in the following areas:

  • Technologies supporting telerobotics, particularly in the presence of multisecond communications delays, including:
    • Predictive interfaces
    • Force feedback systems
    • Multisensorial displays
  • Interfaces for analysis of large heterogeneous databases, including:
    • Interactive 2- and 3-D environments, including but not limited to, real-time exploration of these models
    • Multimodal displays
  • Multisensor data fusion for purposes of both data analysis and situational awareness (e.g., for mission operations and/or telerobotics)
  • Data management and data archiving for large data sets (tera to peta bytes)
  • Data mining, data compression, and data processing for analysis of large data sets
  • Human sensory augmentation for real-time exploration

[back to top]

X7.02 Intelligent Onboard Systems
Lead Center: ARC
Participating Center(s): GSFC, JSC

The intent of this subtopic is to seek innovative technologies that enable intelligent onboard systems to dramatically increase onboard autonomy. As NASA prepares for future exploration missions, system status and performance capability is required to ensure crew safety and mission. Traditional means of providing this information, such as inspections and preventive maintenance, are an extremely limited utility for exploration missions. Other solutions, such as telemetry data, become less useful as communication bandwidth shrinks and communication delays increase. Under these circumstances, increasing the intelligence of the onboard systems provides the best means of managing onboard system operations. Intelligent onboard system technologies generally involve the use of goal-oriented autonomous operations, requiring means for sensing the environment and making intelligent choices with regard to resources, operations, health and safety, logistics, and configuration. Specific areas of research include the following:

Intelligent Onboard System Architecture
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative methods that integrate the core set of intelligent system elements including system reconfiguration, integrated vehicle health management, planning and execution, and human machine interactions, to ensure the right information is delivered at the right place and time to execute the onboard vehicle system functions throughout all mission phases.

Reconfigurable Systems
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative techniques and strategies for performing system reconfigurations based on Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) information. System reconfiguration is an important element of system and vehicle management functions. One of the main characteristics of this element is that an intelligent agent will sense and react to the environment by reconfiguring the vehicle systems based on the current situation and resource requirements to maximize operational margins. In addition, the reconfiguration function must take into account the avionics architecture which includes hardware and software cross strapping of systems and data, and redundancy management of the vehicle.

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM)
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative techniques for performing system health management functions. IVHM holds many promises for future flight improvements. The function is designed to decrease the anomaly response time. Different inference mechanisms may be explored to focus on detecting failures, determining the root cause, and reporting the severity of the failures based on the operating context and priority. Prognostic techniques might also be used to anticipate system degradation, which enables further improvement in mission success probability, operational effectiveness, human-machine teaming, and automated functional restoration.

Planning and Execution (P&E)
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative techniques for performing the P&E functions. The planning function is designed to facilitate the coordination of plans and to resolve conflicts across multiple systems and operational constraints, such as coordinating multiple procedures, flight rules, and malfunctions, to achieve the mission objectives. The execution function is to perform the planned procedures. In order to improve the robustness of the execution function, however, alternatives paths should also be modeled to accommodate the changing environment. For this area of research, the performance and the scope of the P&E function must be evaluated in the context of the future space vehicle operation concepts. The issue related to how much the long-term planning function needs to be modeled onboard should be assessed and traded for the complexity of knowledge capture, verification, and validation costs.

Human/Machine Interface
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative techniques for performing the human/machine interface functions. The goal of the human/machine interface element is to integrate the human crewmembers into a highly automated onboard system. While most vehicle functions will occur under the control of the automation, the human crew must be able to take control of some or all of the vehicle functions in certain mission phases. Because the vehicle is highly automated, it is anticipated that the crewmembers will allow the onboard vehicle automation to handle most, if not all, of the routine operations. Another important goal of the human/machine interface element is to explore the various techniques for providing situational awareness of the current vehicle state. Using this awareness, the crew must have the ability to safely transition from automated control to manual control during all mission phases. Subsequent manual control must be safe, effective, and efficient.

Operations Knowledge Management
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative tools, techniques, and representations to capture the corporate knowledge about manned spacecraft operations and to quickly and effectively update, test, and certify the operational knowledge and rule bases. Currently, the space flight operations knowledge is being documented in a variety of different sources. For example, flight rules are used in manned space operations to document policies affecting crew safety, vehicle integrity, and critical capabilities and mission success. These policies describe permitted, prohibited and required actions, mission priorities, and program standards. In order to effectively use this set of information for developing the intelligent onboard system, a knowledge capture system must be developed to assist the capturing of the operational knowledge for both human and automated reasoning systems.

Verification and Validation of the Intelligent Onboard Systems
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative techniques and tools for verifying and validating the intelligent onboard systems. The verification and validation objective is to allow the engineers who are responsible for developing the onboard system to use the tools routinely during design and development, and also during maintenance operations to check for critical system errors. As the onboard software becomes more complex and increasingly more autonomous, a guarantee of intelligent software and knowledgebase correctness becomes even more important and challenging. Example technologies that might be used for intelligent onboard systems are model-based reasoning, rule based systems, and adaptive learning systems.

Life Support System Intelligence
Proposals addressing this area may focus on developing innovative techniques and approaches for providing life support system intelligence for maintaining biological samples. This also involves continuous monitoring of environmental conditions and life support equipment, reprocessing and filtering of consumables, and autonomous management of the supply, control, and distribution of energy.

[back to top]

E3.02 Distributed Information Systems and Numerical Simulation
Lead Center: ARC
Participating Center(s): GSFC

This subtopic seeks advances in tools, techniques, and technologies for distributed information systems and large-scale numerical simulation. The goal of this work is to create an autonomous information and computing environment that enables NASA scientists to work naturally with distributed teams and resources to dramatically reduce total time-to-solution (i.e., time to discovery, understanding, or prediction), vastly increase the feasible scale and complexity of analysis and data assimilation, and greatly accelerate model advancement cycles. Areas of interest follow below.

Distributed Information Systems

  • Core services (autonomous software systems) for automated, scalable, and reliable management of distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous computing, data, and instrument resources. Services of interest (which may be based on Open Grid Service Infrastructure [OGSI]) include those for authentication and security, resource and service discovery, resource scheduling, event monitoring, uniform access to compute and data resources, and efficient and reliable data transfer.
  • Higher level services, including those for job management, resource brokering, workflow management, portlet (i.e., application-specific graphical user interface [GUI]) building, and collaboration.
  • Services for management of distributed, heterogeneous information, including replica management, intuitive interfaces, and instantiation on demand or virtualized data. These services would be used, for example, to access and manipulate NASA's wealth of geospatial and remote sensing data.
  • Science portals for cross-disciplinary discovery, understanding, and prediction, encapsulating services for single sign-on access, semantic resource and service discovery, workflow composition and management, remote collaboration, and results analysis and visualization.
  • Tools for rapidly porting and hosting science applications in a distributed environment. These applications were written for an integrated, or workstation, environment using standard programming languages or tools such as Matlab, Interactive Data Language (IDL), or Mathematica.
Large-Scale Numerical Simulation
  • Tools for automating large-scale modeling, simulation, and analysis, including those for managing computational ensembles, performing model-optimization studies, interactive computational steering, and maintaining progress in long-running computations in spite of unreliable computing, data, and network resources.
  • Tools for computer system performance modeling, prediction, and optimization for real applications.
  • Techniques and tools for application parallelization and performance analysis.
  • Tools for effective load balancing, and high reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) in commodity clusters and other large-scale computing systems.
  • Novel supercomputing approaches using FPGAs, graphics processors, and other novel architectures and technologies.

[back to top]

A1.04 Automated Online Health Management and Data Analysis
Lead Center: DFRC
Participating Center(s): ARC

Online health monitoring is a critical technology for improving transportation safety in the 21st century. Safe, affordable, and more efficient operation of aerospace vehicles requires advances in online health monitoring of vehicle subsystems and information monitoring from many sources over local and wide area networks. Online health monitoring is a general concept involving signal-processing algorithms designed to support decisions related to safety, maintenance, or operating procedures. The concept of online health monitoring emphasizes algorithms that minimize the time between data acquisition and decision-making

This subtopic seeks solutions for online aircraft subsystem health monitoring. Solutions should exploit multiple computers communicating over standard networks where applicable. Solutions can be designed to monitor a specific subsystem or a number of systems simultaneously. Resulting commercial products might be implemented in a distributed decision-making environment such as onboard diagnostics and management systems, or maintenance and inspection networks of potentially global proportion.

Proposers should discuss who the users of resulting products would be, e.g., research/test/development; manufacturing; maintenance depots; flight crew; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Remotely Operated Aircraft (UAV/ROA) aircraft operators; airports; flight operations or mission control; or airlines. Proposers are encouraged to discuss data acquisition, processing, and presentation components in their proposal. Proposals that focus solely on sensor development should not be submitted to this subtopic. Such proposals should be addressed to sensor development subtopics such as the Flight Sensors, Sensor Arrays and Airborne Instruments for Flight Research subtopic.

Examples of desired solutions targeted by this subtopic follow:

  • Real-time autonomous sensor validity monitors;
  • Flight control system or flight path diagnostics for predicting loss of control;
  • Automated testing and diagnostics of mission-critical avionics;
  • Structural fatigue, life cycle, static, or dynamic load monitors;
  • Automated nondestructive evaluation for faulty structural components;
  • Electrical system monitoring and fire prevention;
  • Applications that exploit wireless communication technology to reduce costs;
  • Model-reference or model-updating schemes based on measured data, which operate autonomously;
  • Proactive maintenance schedules for rocket or turbine engines, including engine life-cycle monitors;
  • Predicting or detecting any equipment malfunction;
  • Middleware or software toolkits to lower the cost of developing online health monitoring applications; and
  • Innovative solutions for harvesting, managing, archival, and retrieval of aerospace vehicle health data.

[back to top]

B3.02 Space Human Factors and Human Performance
Lead Center: JSC
Participating Center(s): ARC

The long-term goal for this subtopic is to enable planning, designing, and carrying out human space missions of up to 5 years with crew independence, without resupply and without real-time communications to Earth. Specifically, this subtopic's focus is the development of innovations in crew equipment; and the development of technologies for assessment, modeling, and enhancement of human performance; and the development of design tools for engineers to incorporate human factors engineering requirements into hardware and software.

Proposals are solicited that seek to develop technologies that address these specific needs:

  • Monitoring and maintaining human performance nonintrusively. Specifically, minimally invasive and unobtrusive devices and techniques to monitor the behavior and performance (physical, cognitive, perceptual, etc.) of individuals and teams during long-duration space flights or analog missions. Technologies to track locations of individuals within habitats, and report on physiological or other state information. Methods and models for human performance prediction, including physical performance, as affected by encumbrances of clothing, space suits, etc.
  • Predictive modeling of effects on the crew due to potential spacecraft environments and operational procedures. Develop computational models of the crew environment and of human performance and behavior to simulate the effects of factors that contribute to (or degrade) long-term performance capabilities. Such models of the environment, individual, and group behaviors and performance can be used to simulate and explore the conditions that influence human performance (e.g., fatigue, noise, CO2, microgravity, group dynamics, etc.). Such capabilities would include digital models of human operators and routine and emergency tasks that interact in the context of the long-duration human exploration environment.
  • Tools to aid in design and evaluation of human-system interfaces for speed, accuracy, and acceptability in a cost-effective and reliable manner: Automated analysis of computer-user interfaces for complex display systems to conduct objective review of displays and controls, and to determine compliance with guidelines and standards. Quantitative measures of the effectiveness of user interfaces to be used for task-sensitive evaluations.
  • Tools that facilitate the user interface design for human computer interfaces, and for facilitators, such as procedures, labels, and instructions. Tools should assist the designer in incorporating contextual information such as the user's task, the user's knowledge, and the system limitations.
  • Tools to build just-in-time system and operational information software to aid human users conducting routine and emergency operations and activities. Such tools might include effective and efficient job aids (e.g., "intelligent" manuals, checklists, warnings) and support for designing flexible interfaces between users and large information systems. Methods for development of facilitators' (procedures, labels, etc.) adapted for the development of space vehicle and payload applications.
  • Rapid don/doff launch-and-entry and survival suit: a personal ambient environment and individual health and safety protective garment system with antigravity protection, metabolic-cooling and heating, breathing air, thermal protection, zero-atmospheric pressure protection, land and water survival gear, etc. An integrated suit (providing all desired protective functions), as well as a modular suit (allowing user to select ahead of time any of the array of required protection and survival subsystems) approach should be considered. The emphasis for this innovation should be to achieve the desired levels of protection for space travel, as well as for survival on Earth after landing at an unplanned site all while affording rapid donning in microgravity through one-gravity (1g) environments on the order of 60 s and rapid doffing on the order of 300 s or less. Include accommodation for using the suit for ill, injured, or incapacitated crewmembers, meeting the don/doff goals while providing access for medical monitoring and ongoing treatment.

[back to top]



T9.02 Integrated Life-cycle Asset Mapping, Management, and Tracking

To support NASA's need for reliable and low cost asset management in all of its programs including Earth-based activities, robotic and human lunar exploration, and planning for later expeditions to Mars and beyond, the Earth Science Applications Directorate at Stennis Space Center seeks proposals supporting NASA's requirements for asset management. With proper physical infrastructure and information systems, identification tags should allow any item to be tracked throughout its life cycle. When combined with Earth and Lunar GIS, and related supporting documentation, any significant asset should be located, through time and space, as well as organization. Starting with programmatic requirements and design data, assets would be tracked through manufacture, testing, possible launch, use, maintenance, and eventual disposal. Innovative technology and information architectures should integrate and visually map infrastructure, assets, and associated documentation with the ability to link to program structure, budget, and workflow. Innovative solutions will facilitate information flow between the various NASA Centers and Programs. The system must maintain signature authority and restrict unauthorized moves. Ideally, if fully implemented, any remote item could be actively located throughout the NASA system with minimal delay. Any tagged item should be able to be queried at its location to retrieve associated records, e.g., maintenance, inspection, configuration management, chain-of-custody, engineering specifications, etc. A simple operator interface would provide finger tip knowledge about the asset. It should be possible to provide secure access to this information for both domestic and international partners. The proposed solution will minimize capital cost and human work effort required for inventory and tracking of nonconsumable assets, while exceeding the performance of current systems. Note that tagged assets may be subject to extreme environments in space and on Earth.

The innovation may eventually interoperate with a holistic information system, and may not preclude other uses for a terrestrial and lunar GIS such as:

  • Operational infrastructure support AM/FM (automated mapping / facilities management)
  • Asset and resource management, including waste disposal.
  • Lunar landing and facility site selection, and optimization
  • Conceptual site infrastructure and layout design\
  • Surface navigation
  • Emergency response information
  • A comprehensive portal for Earth and lunar mapping data, both image- and vector-based.

[back to top]

B2.02 Biological Instrumentation
Lead Center: ARC
Participating Center(s): JPL

The Fundamental Biology (FB) Program is the Agency lead for biological research and biological instrumentation and technology development, and focuses on research designed to develop our understanding of the role of gravity in the evolution, development, and function of biological processes. Increasingly, the research thrusts are directed at incorporating the most advanced technologies from the fields of cell and molecular biology, genomics, and biotechnology, to provide researchers with the most up-to-date methods to conduct their biological research. For these requirements, the capability to perform autonomous, in situ acquisition, and preparation and analysis of samples to determine the presence and composition of biological components is a highly desired objective. As the size of flight payloads becomes increasingly smaller, and information technologies permit smarter and more independent payload and device control and management, the realization of completely autonomous in situ biological laboratories (ISBL) on spacecraft platforms and planetary surfaces will become more desirable.

Biological and biomolecular, microbiological, and genomic research is enabling unprecedented insight into the structure and function of cells, organisms, and subcellular components and elements, and a window into the inner workings and machinations of living things. Techniques and technologies, which have evolved from the microelectronics and biological revolutions, have permitted the emergence of a new class of instruments and devices. Many devices, techniques, and products are now available or emerging, which allow measurement, imaging, analysis, and interpretation of the biological composition at the molecular level, and which permit determination of DNA/RNA and other analytes of interest. Advances in information systems and technologies, and bioinformatics, provide the capability to understand, simulate, and interpret the large amounts of complex data being made available from these biological-physical hybrid systems. These synergistic relationships are facilitating the development of revolutionary technologies in many areas.

Biological instrumentation technologies to support FB objectives are grouped into the solicited categories below.

Biological Sample Management and Handling:

Technologies for remote, automated biosample and biospecimen collection, handling, preservation/fixation, and processing; and Modular, embeddable systems and subsystems capable of supporting a variety of tissue, liquid, and/or cellular specimens, from a wide range of biological subjects, including cells, nematodes, plants, fish, avians, mice, rats, and humans.

In situ Measurement and Control:
Technology development for sensors, signal processors, biotelemetry systems, sample management and handling systems, and other instruments and platforms for real-time monitoring and characterization of biological and physiological phenomena. Genomics Technologies:
Technologies to enhance and augment research in genomics, proteomics, cell and molecular biology, including molecular and nanotechnologies, cDNA arrays, gene array technologies, and cell culture and related habitat systems.

Bio-Imaging Systems:
Advanced, real-time capabilities for visualization, imaging, and optical characterization of biological systems. Technologies include multidimensional fluorescent microscopy, spectroscopy systems, and multi- and hyperspectral imaging.

Biological Information Processing
Capability for automated acquisition, processing, analysis, communication, and archival and retrieval of biological data, and interface and transfer to advanced bioinformatics and biocomputation systems.

Integrated Biological Research Systems and Subsystems
Integrated, experiment- and subject-specific biolaboratory modules and systems, providing complete flight prototype capability to support the above five categories.

[back to top]