Space-borne Antennas & Circuits for Condensed Radars and STEM (SPACERS)

The University of Oklahoma (OU) team’s partners at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) are currently designing “EcoSAR,” a new polarimetric, interferrometric, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system that will provide unprecedented two- and three-dimensional fine scale measurements of terrestrial ecosystem structure and biomass. The design of this radar was conceived in approximately 2010, with a vision that a terrestrial radar would be developed first, which would pave the way for the design of a space-borne radar in the future. A recent partnership between members of the OU team and GSFC resulted in the development of advanced digital radar techniques for EcoSAR. These techniques have enabled a new class of radar operations that improved science, enhanced system performance, facilitated a path for space-borne implementation, and pushed technology beyond the current state-of-the-art, while keeping the costs low. The goal of the proposed effort is to combine the recently developed digital radar techniques with new and innovative, adaptive radar hardware to help NASA move towards space-borne applications of new radar systems like EcoSAR. This will be achieved by splitting the effort into five tasks: 1) Transmit/receive module development. The transition from terrestrial to space-borne necessitates higher transmitter power levels, which will result in signal degradation due to non-linear behavior of the electronics as well as increased power consumption. These issues will be addressed by designing a new high-efficiency power amplifier with improved linearity from using digital predistortion. 2) Radar fairing design, flight experiments, and data collection. NASA’s Digital Beamforming Synthetic Aperture Radar (DBSAR-2) will be used to test engineering ideas and collect high quality radar datasets. In order to achieve that, DBSAR-2 needs to be prepared for flight. A fairing will be designed and flight experiments performed. 3) Space-borne antenna design. For any antenna to be deployed in space, its size and weight are major concerns. A new miniaturized antenna design will be pursued and an adaptive matching network will be designed and integrated. The purpose of the matching network is to increase the angular scanning capabilities of the radar. Scientifically, this will allow the radar to create imagery at wider angles. 4) Waveform optimization. The quality of the waveform used in the SAR algorithms will be analyzed and optimized. Mathematical optimization methods will be utilized to determine what kind of waveform is best-suited for optimal system performance. 5) Meteorological sciences. In this task, previously collected terrestrial data from surface, airborne, and current NASA space-borne remote sensing platforms will be analyzed. A key component of the work will serve to bridge the critical design elements and engineering requirements of the hardware design with the encompassing needs of the scientific community focused on ecosystem dynamics in relation to critical drivers including weather, climate, and available water resources. The students, who will be under the guidance of the OU team and the NASA mentors, are the common link between NASA and university education mission. By training students in the classroom and lab, they will learn about new technologies and go on internships at the GSFC. These internships are crucial to the success of this effort, as they are one of the primary mechanisms by which knowledge from OU is directly transferred to the labs at NASA. This directly supports the NASA 2014 Strategic Plan’s focus on the development of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The OU team is diverse, consisting of a mixture of assistant professors and full professors from three universities across the state of Oklahoma. World class facilities are available to the team both at the Advanced Radar Research Center in Norman, and the Unmanned Systems Research Institute in Stillwater.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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.