Tiny Open-Loop Atmospheric Sensing Technique, Year 2

We will design and fabricate a circuit card capable of retrieving real-time ionospheric and atmospheric refractivity from a low Earth orbit platform. The design must use less than 3 Watts orbit average power and process GPS signals as they rise through the lower troposphere. These data must be accompanied by post-processed orbit data with errors less than 2mm/sec velocity and 20 cm positioning. This design will form the basis of a cube-sat sized 3 Watt radio occultation sensor for LMR-sat.

High-precision orbit determination, ionospheric profiling and atmospheric profiling from very small, satellites such as cubesats. By deploying the low-power, low-cost sensors on a commercial constellation such as Iridium-NExT, a continuous, global, synoptic view of the Earth's troposphere and ionosphere can be obtained. These observations have very low latency, merely seconds old, allowing rapid assessments of significant space weather events and giving weather centers hundreds of globally distributed refractivity profiles every hour. A low-cost, low power and highly accurate RO instruments provides many more opportunities.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 4) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.