Health-Enabled Smart Sensor Fusion Technology, Phase II

A long-term center goal at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC) is the formulation and implementation of a framework for an intelligent rocket test facility (IRTF). The IRTF is to provide reliable, high-confidence measurements for a variety of propulsion test articles. Smart sensor components play key roles in providing the distributed intelligence needed to perform diagnosis of its overall health and to further develop the Integrated System Health Management (ISHM), which has been identified as a key component to design exploration systems for the mission to go back to the Moon and explore Mars. Requirements to achieve this mission include improvements in safety, life-cycle costs, and autonomous operation of exploration systems. The objective of the Phase II effort is to complete the development of the sensor fusion based on the architecture that was presented in Phase I. Specifically, we intend to succeed in: (1) Providing health condition monitoring capability at the intelligent transceiver; (2) Providing analytic and diagnostic intelligence at the intelligent transceiver; (3) Enhancing IEEE 1451.x based standard for sensor data management and distributions; (4) Providing appropriate communications protocols to enable complex interactions to support timely and high quality flow of information among the system elements.

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.

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