Metric Tracking of Launch Vehicles

NASA needs reliable, accurate navigation for launch vehicles and other missions. GPS is the best world-wide navigation system, but operates at low power making it susceptible to intentional and unintentional interference. Toyon proposes to develop an anti-jam front-end that uses Space-Time Adaptive Processing to suppress interference, and implement it in a compact, low-cost package. This design will work with any existing GPS receiver, although higher performance can be achieved by tightly integrating a GPS receiver module with the anti-jam functionality. Toyon's Miniature Integrated Direction-finding Attitude-determining Anti-jam System (MIDAAS(TM)) obtains position, velocity, attitude, and time (PVAT) measurements directly from GPS signals. The ultra-tightly coupled (UTC) navigation architecture fuses all sensor data. Integrating this system with the anti-jam module makes the system inherently robust to interference and the resulting position and attitude estimate more accurate.

The MIDAAS GPS-based attitude (GPS/A) sensor technology and inertial navigation system (INS) is applicable to a wide range of military and civilian applications including manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), micro air vehicles (MAVs), unattended ground sensors (UGS), handheld positioning units, recreational/virtual reality orienting devices, radio-controlled (RC) vehicles, ground vehicles, and far-target locators (FTL). The technology appeals to customers who desire robust position and attitude measurements for platforms that have stringent cost and size, weight and power (SWAP) constraints.

The anticipated benefits of this program include development of robust anti-jam navigation, jammer-aided navigation, and GPS spoofing signal detection and suppression, implemented as a compact, low-power, low-cost solution.

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.