LAser Navigation, Detection, and steering, LANDs

Exciting Technology is developing revolutionary optical beam steering technology that will make NASA lidars more capable, smaller, lighter, and cheaper. This technology can steer relatively large beams to wide angles without bulky hardware. Today’s optical beam steering technology for large apertures and wide angles is restricted to classic gimbals, which are expensive and bulky, or possibly Risley prisms, which can also be heavy with low optical quality. For precision landing and hazard detection, as well many other applications, such as terrain mapping, NASA needs capable, but affordable and compact, optical beam steering technology. Dr. Paul McManamon has been developing optical beam steering technology for > 4 decades. Since he founded Exciting Technology in 2008 the company has focused on furthering optical beam steering technology and has filed more than 20 patents. Many of the beam steering technologies we have developed can now be assembled after overcoming engineering challenges associated with implementing these new, revolutionary beam steering technologies. Exciting Technology LLC is working on both novel near-term mechanical steering technology, and longer term, full non-mechanical, optical beam steering technology. Our hybrid novel optical beam steering can be developed to provide ±25° optical beam steering in about 25msec mechanically, coupled with ~ ±0.1° in < 10 µsec non-mechanical beam steering with µrad accuracy. In this Phase I, the proposed innovation is a wide-angle mechanical steering device that can be demonstrated in the near-term, coupled with a non-mechanical steering device to improve speeds and accuracy. Exciting Technology plans to investigate the operation of both the mechanical and non-mechanical systems in space.

Exciting Technology is developing revolutionary optical beam steering technology to make NASA lidars more capable, smaller, lighter, and cheaper. We can steer large beams to wide angles without bulky hardware. Today’s optical beam steering technology for large apertures and wide angles is restricted to classic gimbals, which are expensive and bulky, or possibly Risley prisms, which can also be heavy with low optical quality. For precision landing and hazard detection NASA needs capable, but affordable and compact, beam steering technology.

DOD and ISR applications can also use this technology.This technology will be much smaller and point more precise than gimballed lidars. This technology can be scaled to large apertures, up to 50 -100 cm in diameter.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — 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.