Goddard IRAD Annual Report 2023

About the Cover: English scientist Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the

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shoulders of giants.” Here at Goddard, we

Message from the Chief Technologist

recognize that many of our accomplishments benefit from a legacy of creative inquiry and a

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culture of innovation built by generations of sci-

FY23 Achievements at a Glance

entists and engineers in their passion to explore

Breakdown of FY23 IRAD and CIF Awards

the unknown. Technologies developed through

FY23 Agency New Technology Reports (NTRs)

research and development funding enable bold

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new missions and the data they return raises questions to be answered by technologies that don’t yet exist. That continuous cycle of inquiry,

The Best in Innovation – Kevin Denis and Antonia Gambacorta

innovation, testing, and data collection is crucial

FY23 IRAD Poster Session

to advancing NASA’s mission goals. Continuing this tradition of seeding new technologies en-

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ables tomorrow’s explorers to see further.

Showcase of FY23 Successes

w w w. n a s a . g o v / g o d d a r d / t e c h n o l o g y

One Traditions of Excellence I am continually impressed by the depths of talent and traditions of excellence we draw upon in fostering new technologies to empower tomorrow’s explorers. The innovations under development in this year’s portfolio benefit from a legacy of creative applications which enabled NASA to travel further, look deeper, and uncover more than before.

A creative spark, an idea scribbled in a notebook along the path to launch, may ignite an investigation enabling new missions to push beyond.

In the pages of this report, we highlight a select few of the Internal Research and Development, or IRAD, projects which hold the promise to expand our understanding of Earth, its solar neighborhood, and the universe beyond. Goddard’s strengths of diversity, collaboration, and encouragement leverage decades of innovation.

For example, numerous mentors helped a young scientist named James Garvin develop the first altitude-measuring lidars to image Earth’s topology from orbit. Today Garvin’s legacy lives in technologies improved upon by the engineers he and his peers mentored. Goddard’s revolutionary CASALS lidar system combines three separate lasers for velocity, range finding, and 3D imaging into a single provided by our commercial partners. CASALS’ tunable seed laser produces multiple frequencies which can be diffracted through flat-optics and targeted by steering mirrors, while flat-optic sensors provide a lightweight, portable receiver.

This array of options opens the power of lidar to almost any mission profile (Page 13).

Murzy Jhabvala led efforts to create high-resolution thermal imagers using atomic-level physics to interpret more spectra of light: from quantum well sensors through today’s strainedlayer superlattice sensors. The Compact Thermal Imager (CTI) changed the way we can detect forest fires in just a few short months on the International Space Station. Today, Tilak Hewagama continues that march of improvement with an improved CTI (Page 12), improving on both pixel resolution and infrared spectral resolution over existing technology.

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Eleanya Onuma’s photonics integrated chips (CuttingEdge, Fall 2021) radically improved by converting signals to information-dense infrared laser frequencies. Antonia Gambacorta’s ground-breaking hyperspectral microwave sensors (page 7) could integrate hundreds of Onuma’s chips, each providing data on thousands of individual frequencies.

Combined with sensors recording other areas of the spectrum, missions enabled by these hyperspectral sensors could improve atmospheric observations we currently make using a few dozen frequencies.

The pages that follow detail these and a small sampling of FY23 IRAD-fueled Goddard technologies. Each year’s porfolio continues a proud tradition that has yielded a harvest of new ideas and possibilities – ultimately published in New Technology Reports that make these innovations available to the world.

Each year that we continue to invest in these emerging technologies we literally benefit the world by sharing the view from our position standing on the backs of giants.

Peter Hughes Chief Technologist NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Two Breakdown of FY23 IRAD Awards Goddard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program nurtures seed technologies across the center’s strategic focus areas. These innovations enable new and future missions while attracting, retaining, and cultivating talented scientists

and engineers. This dual investment in workforce and technologies positions Goddard to continue winning new missions and instrument starts in areas important to NASA’s mission priorities.

FY23 IRAD Allocations Suborbital Platforms and Range Services 3% Strategic Center Investments 5%

Astrophysics 18%

Science SmallSat Technology 3% Communication and Navigation 9%

Planetary and Lunar Science17%

Heliophysics 11%

Cross Cutting Capabilities 19%

Earth Science 15%

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New Technology Reports (NTRs) Provide Benchmark for Gauging Success NTRs capture information about technical discoveries, improvements, innovations, and inventions so that NASA can disseminate these technologies appropriately under its

mandated technology-transfer program. Since many of these NTRs result from IRAD- or CIF-funded efforts, they also gauge the success of our research and development programs.

FY23 Agency NTRs SOURCE: GODDARD STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS OFFICE

336

Total NTR’s Small Businesses Colleges & Universities

258 233

167

153

140 110 72

52

30

13

4

ARC AFRC

GRC GSFC

HQ

JPL

JSC

KSC

LaRC MSFC

SSC

53 12

76 14

3 33

109 0

78 23

21 10

71 17

9 4

8 8

74 29

51 55

Three Sharing a Commitment to Excellence Innovator of the Year Goddard’s Office of the Chief Technologist named engineer Kevin Denis as the FY23 Internal Research and Development (IRAD) Innovator of the Year, an honor the office bestows annually on individuals who demonstrate the best in innovation.

Denis demonstrated persistence and innovation in developing micrometer-thin photon sieves to focus extreme ultraviolet light – a difficult wavelength to capture. Denis’s work will open new ways to study the Sun in better detail and understand its influence on Earth and the solar system.

His team developed new techniques to create larger, thinner wafers of silicon and niobium, etched with microscopic holes which diffract extreme ultraviolet light onto a distant receiver.

These photon sieves, created in Goddard’s Detector Development Laboratory, act similarly to a Fresnel lens used in lighthouses.

“It’s a sheer physical challenge to construct sieves with such precision,” Goddard heliophysicist Dr. Doug Rabin said.

“Their smallest features are a few microns across. Kevin has responded to that challenge with very creative solutions.”

Photo Credit: Christopher Gunn

Thin membranes matter for solar science, because these sieves transmit up to seven times more light than thicker materials. Denis’s sieves could eventually resolve features near the Sun’s surface 10 to 50 times smaller than the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s EUV imager can see.

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Photo Credit: Christopher Gunn

Kevin Denis holds a completed photon sieve showing a honeycomb pattern of thicker material meant to hold the fine membrane of the sieve together during etching. INSET: A closeup of a photon sieve shows the relatively large holes etched through the central hexagon. Holes continue smaller and smaller throughout the 3-inch disc, reaching sizes smaller than most bacteria toward the outer edge.

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IRAD Technology Leadership Award The Chief Technologist recognizes Earth science researcher Dr. Antonia Gambacorta with the 2023 IRAD Technology Leadership award for establishing NASA and Goddard as global pioneers in the use of integrated photonics for remote sensing.

Gambacorta demonstrated how hyperspectral microwave sounding could dissect Earth’s planetary boundary layer and conceptualized the microwave photonics radiometer instruments necessary to reveal this information.

This boundary layer is the part of Earth’s atmosphere people live in and have the most experience studying. It is also the hardest layer to measure from space due to the volume of air above it. Measuring this layer on a global basis will help better understand its connections to the rest of the atmosphere.

Gambacorta stepped up to lead Goddard’s hyperspectral microwave projects and became the face of the center’s Planetary Boundary Layer Decadal Survey Incubator (DSI) effort.

Through multiple IRAD grants, her team performed foundational research showing the effectiveness of hyperspectral microwave sounding – capturing thousands to millions of wavelengths – conceptualized a microwave photonics radiometer, and began developing a framework to integrate multiple sensors for boundary layer science observations.

Her cutting-edge innovations and research and collaboration with Earth science colleagues across NASA and in Europe built confidence in these technologies and earned support across NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Antonia Gambacorta developed technology to convert microwave signals, crucial to Earth observation and weather prediction, into infrared light.

This photonic integrated chip can differentiate hundreds of microwave wavelengths compared to much larger existing equipment that targets only a single wavelength.

Both Main Photo and inset, Credit: Christopher Gunn

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Photo Credit: Christopher Gunn Photo Credit: Christopher Gunn

The FY23 IRAD Poster Session provides a rich opportunity for PIs to learn about each other’s research, network, and make new connections. Internal Research and Development, IRAD, grants enable the technologies that fuel future exploration, and these innovators value the opportunity to learn from each other’s discoveries and successes.

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Four FY23 Highlights Astrophysics Developing the Next Generation Microshutter Arrays for Astronomy As the James Webb Space Telescope astounds with new views of the universe, engineers at Goddard are working to develop the next generation technologies to enable future space telescopes.

Larger format, electrostatically actuated and addressed with no external macro mechanical components, Next Generation Microshutter Arrays (NGMSA) will support the Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation program for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission. Smaller sized pilot arrays have been developed for the Far-UV Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy (FORTIS) and have been successfully demonstrated in the sounding rocket flight of FORTIS. Making connection across the science and technology fields, these arrays are also used in the Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) mid-infrared MKID detectors development.

in better detail. The multiple shutters allow scientists to obtain many spectra of these objects of interest, thus proportionally increasing the efficiency of conventional spectrometers which operate with a single slit.

Regis Brekosky leads the fabrication development of microshutter arrays, focusing on scaling production up to to 150mm substrates. In previous versions, progressive misalignments (up to about 5 µm) between individual shutter blades and supporting grid structures interfered with approximately 30% of the microshutter operations to varying degrees. Initially, the issue was attributed to wafer bowing, wax reflow, or oblique deepetched frames on the supporting grids.

Upon further investigation, the team discovered that the pressure from helium backside cooling during the deep reactive ion etching process could induce deformation of up to 1.3 mm

Photo Credit: Paul Scowen

A microshutter array is a 100µm thick perforated silicon frame with a thin, tightly packed grid of microscopic rectangular doors. These doors can be opened or closed to admit light through the array only from the objects of interest. By blocking the sky background, stars or other bright objects, data can be captured from dimmer This Big-theta microshutter assembly allows researchers to swap in as new arrays new techniques or more distant objects they wish to study for producing arrays improve their quality over time.

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Photo Credit: Paul Scowen

resulting in a lateral displacement of around 5 µm for the deepetched frame.

After Identifying the root cause, the team reduced helium pressure and enhanced the stiffness of the backing substrate.

This successfully improved the verticality of the silicon frames to 90°±0.5°, fabrication tolerances. Building on this breakthrough, Brekosky aims to achieve near-complete yield in the new batches, demonstrating performance that meets the requirements for the UV spectrograph instrument baselined by both the LUVOIR and HabEx studies for the future HWO Flagship.

Microshutter wells show the shutter assembly.

AstroPix – Launch Opportunity Astrophysicist Regina Caputo will test AstroPix, a pixelbased silicon gamma-ray detector, on the SubTEC-10 sounding rocket launch scheduled for 2025. The detector is a Complimentary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor, or CMOS, developed in collaboration with colleagues at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Argonne National Laboratory.

Astropix could someday monitor the sky for powerful gamma-ray events. These detectors have lower size weight and power requirements than existing technology.

Detectors like those flown on the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope depend on layers of overlapping strip detectors to monitor the sky, providing immediate notice of gammaray events which other telescopes can target for additional information in other spectra of light.

Photo Credit: NASA

This year’s project resulted in the design of their sounding rocket payload, called A-Step.

A Sub-Tech rocket platform very similar to the rocket image shown here will launch AstroPix in 2025.

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AMEGO-X tracker design Regina Caputo also advanced the AMEGO-X, All-sky Medium-Energy Gamma-ray Observatory eXplorer, concept by improving the tracker tray design for the gamma-ray detector. Caputo’s detector will identify gamma-ray events by tracking each ray’s path through layers of CMOS active pixel sensors.

AMEGO-X is a MIDEX explorer mission concept submitted in 2021 which implements the AstroPix detectors like A-STEP but on a much larger scale. A-STEP uses 12 AstroPix detectors,

and AMEGO-X will use 95 AstroPix detectors per tray and has 160 trays.

This year her team redesigned the tracker and conducted a thermal analysis to ensure the detectors remained in spec as well as a structural analysis to ensure it would survive launch loads. Caputo’s IRAD success earned an Astrophysics Research and Analysis (APRA) Program grant to continue developing the mission prototype. She will seek further APRA funding for a balloon payload test of the detector.

Photo Credit: Regina Caputo

Three generations of gamma-ray detector prototypes sit on a lab bench.

Earth Science Seeing Snow-Water Through the Trees

Repeated testing and analysis allows the team to expand their understanding of the results: from teasing out snow signals hidden by evergreens, to distinguishing snow from vegetation, rocks, and other signals. They use ground sampling to train artificial intelligence tools to find patterns in the airborne instrument data.

Measuring the water stored in snow provides critical information for managing drinking water, hydroelectric power, and irrigation needs. Research Physical Scientist Batuhan Osmanoglu continued to refine data analysis techniques for his Snow Water Equivalent Synthetic Aperture Radar and Radiometer, or SWESARR, instrument, built to track the amount of water in those seasonal snowpacks from above.

Originally funded by Goddard’s Internal Research and Development, or IRAD program, SWESARR has drawn follow-on funding from both ESTO and the Snow Ex campaign. His team flew their instrument on a Twin Otter aircraft in 2020 and in spring and fall of 2023 while colleagues measured the snowpack on the ground.

Image Credit: Noah Molotch, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and JPL

This map shows how much water is contained in the Sierra snowpack on April 1, 2023. The snowfall accumulation was particularly high in the southern Sierras: four times the average for April 1.

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AI ‘Eye’ to Improve Robotic Data-Gathering Oceanographer John Moisan said artificial intelligence will direct his A-Eye, a movable sensor. After analyzing images his AI will not just find known patterns in new data, but also steer the sensor to observe and discover new features or biological processes.

When it comes to making real-time decisions about unfamiliar data – say, choosing a path to hike up a mountain you’ve never scaled before – existing artificial intelligence and machine learning tech doesn’t come close to measuring up to human skill.

This year’s project focused on scanning collected data in real time to look for significant features. With additional funding, Moisan hopes to add a steerable sensor to collect more data on those features, even collecting additional frequencies of light.

Faster, Cheaper, Better Infrared Spectrometers A new camera by Dr. Tilak Hewagama expands Goddard’s legacy of broad-spectrum infrared imagers by capturing more infrared wavelengths in an easy-to-reproduce format appropriate for multiple science applications.

The new camera’s expanded range enables a variety of missions, Hewagama said: measuring atmospheric trace gases, sea ice properties, infrared ocean color, analyzing vegetation, identifying and characterizing wildfires, mineral surveying, and studying how Earth’s atmosphere stores and emits heat.

Photo Credit: Tilak Hewagama

Using Goddard’s Type II strained-layer superlattice (SLS) detectors, Tilak’s imager will be able to resolve molecular spectral signatures in the infrared region (approximately 2 to 14 microns in wavelength) with accuracy and resolution to discriminate between species of molecules.

The innovative SLS detectors were developed at Goddard

by Murzy Jhabvala and his engineering team. Jhabvala spent more than a decade developing the cutting edge of IR cameras.

SLS detectors use atoms-thick matrices to interact with specific frequencies based on the size of their molecular lattice.

A new thermal imaging camera will improve both pixel-resolution and infrared spectral resolution, enabling a wide range of Earth-science applications.

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Legacy of Light: Goddard’s innovations in lidar Improving Lidars for Exploration Like a sonar using light instead of sound, lidar technology increasingly helps NASA’s scientists and explorers perform remote sensing and surveying, mapping, 3D-image scanning, hazard detection and avoidance, and navigation. Light detection and ranging, or lidar, uses pulses of light to calculate distances by measuring the time it takes the light to reflect to the lidar sensor.

Cutting edge innovations by NASA researchers working with harware provided by small business and academic partners are refining lidars into smaller, lighter, more versatile tools for exploration. Lidar’s broad appeal across multiple disciplines is apparent by the different organizations and lines of business funding these investigations.

Ultralight Origami Sensors

The flat optics used in these origami panels employ new types of nano-structured materials to manipulate individual photons, Stephen said. These meta-materials allow thin, lightweight optics to perform the same functions as much larger and more expensive three-dimensional counterparts.

Under Cross Cutting Technology Capabilities, Mark Stephen worked with researchers at Brigham Young University and Penn State on a deployable origami-inspired telescope to capture lidar’s return signal at lower cost and improved efficiency. Size weight and power demands of modern lidars price the technology out of reach for smaller, lighter, more efficient missions.

Stephen previously used IRAD funding to explore AI-informed designs to reduce the mass of casings to hold his lidar technology, and he developed a rotating optics motor to replace bulky lenses with flat-optical refracting gratings.

Photo Credit: Brigham Young University / Larry L. Howell

A prototype origami-pattern deployment sequence is demonstrated by graduate students Brandon Sargent (left) and Carolina Wright (right) of Brigham Young University. It shows the large expansion capability and the flexibility in the overall architecture.

CASALS – Lidar Multitool Learns New Tricks In Earth Sciences, Guangning Yang is working with commercial laser labs Axsun Technologies and Freedom Photonics to develop a new fast-tuning laser in the 1035 nm infrared range.

While automotive lidars use 1550 nm lasers, wavelengths from 1035 to 1064 nm can provide more information about Earth’s atmosphere and vegetation. Yang is developing CASALS, the Concurrent Artificially intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System which shines a tunable laser through a prism-like

grating to spread the beam. Traditional lidars pulse a laser then split it into multiple beams with mirrors and lenses. In planetary applications, a CASALS system could cover more of the target in a wider swath than the lidars used for decades to measure Earth, the Moon and Mars.

Other engineers are capitalizing on CASALS to improve various applications of the lidar.

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Jeffrey Chen is working with Left Hand Laser Studio to develop a steering mirror for Communications and Navigation which can return range and velocity measurements at long ranges up to 60 miles (100 Km). Range and velocity are currently handled by two separate lasers. This mirror allows the same laser hardware to scan a landing site for 3D imaging and hazard detection rather than employing a third laser for this function.

Lidar technology used in LRO’s Lunar Orbiting Lidar Altimeter use solid-state lasers which pulse 140 times per second, Mazarico said. Scientists use LRO’s imaging technology to interpolate surface features in between laser pulses, which provides 16-foot (5 m) resolution per pixel, however, the interpolation introduces error. The move from a pulsed laser to a fiberamplified, tunable laser will allow several hundred thousand pulses per second, increasing actual surface measurements to less than one meter apart.

Engineers test a CASALS lidar setup on the roof of Building 33 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md.

Mazarico, a planetary scientist, is also interested in the knowledge this system could provide about the moon, including studying young volcanic and impact features in better detail and being able to tell how much the wobble in the Moon’s orbit causes tidal deformation of the satellite.

Photo Credit: Yuangning Yang

The team received Earth Science Technology Office funding to test CASALS in airplane flights next year.

Photo Credit: Yuangning Yang

Erwan Mazarico is further adapting CASALS for Lunar and Planetary Sciences to develop its landing-site imaging and hazard detection capabilities. Artemis-related missions will need immediate, higher-resolution 3D images of the Moon’s surface to facilitate landing. Erwan’s lidar can help by eliminating unsafe landing sites with sharper imaging than earlier lidars could resolve.

Jeffrey Chen peers through the targeting viewfinder to point the CASALS lidar at a water tower across Goddard’s campus during testing.

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Communications and Navigation Navigating Against the Stars Chris Gnam worked to expand the capabilities of the Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation, GIANT, toolkit for navigating through deep space by using the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and Sun as reference points.

He investigated machine learning techniques for finding and highlighting moving bodies against the background of stars.

Identifying these streaks and against a catalog of solar system bodies expected along the voyage will help future human and robotic missions accurately identify their place in our Sun’s neighborhood.

Photo Credit: Chris Gnam

Autonomous navigation software uses artificial intelligence tools to identify streaks like this – from asteroids, comets, planets or other bodies moving against background stars – to accurately locate a spacecraft within the solar system.

Cross-Cutting Technology and Capabilities AI Bones – Evolved Structures for Future Exploration Engineer Ryan McClelland continued to advance techniques for developing spacecraft hardware using AI-designed 3D models. Spacecraft and mission hardware designed by an artificial intelligence may resemble bones left by some alien species, but they weigh less, tolerate higher structural loads, and require a fraction of the time parts designed by humans take to develop.

Photo Credit: Henry Dennis

Photo Credit: Henry Dennis

These evolved structures save up to two-thirds of the weight compared to traditional components, he said, and can be milled by commercial vendors. “You can perform the design, analysis and fabrication of a prototype part, and have it in hand in as little as one week,” McClelland said. “It can be radically fast compared with how we’re used to working.”

(ABOVE) Ryan McClelland displays a structural mount made of 3D-printed titanium.

(LEFT) Ryan McClelland designed an aluminum scaffold for the back of the EXCITE telescope balloon test mission. The curved, criss-crossed reinforcing structures were designed to resist significant off-centered forces.

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Goddard, Wallops Engineers Test Printed Electronics in Space Beth Paquette and Margaret Samuels conducted a successful first flight of their 3D-printed electronics in April from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia.

Today’s small spacecraft pack sensors, guidance and control, and operating electronics into every available space. Printing electronic circuits on the walls and structures of spacecraft could help future missions do more in smaller packages.

Electronic temperature and humidity sensors printed onto the payload bay door and onto two attached panels monitored the entire SubTEC-9 sounding rocket mission, recording data that was beamed to the ground.

They worked with colleagues at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who developed the humiditysensing ink. Partners from the University of Maryland’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) created the circuits.

Photo Credit: Berit Bland

A closeup shows hybrid printed electronic circuits that flew into space aboard the SubTEC 9 sounding rocket mission from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

In other efforts, they successfully printed ultraviolet sensors on flexible materials and demonstrated printing on structures with different angles.

Photo Credit: J. Camp

Vivek Dwivedi’s latest atomic-layer deposition (ALD) achievement involves bonding nickel and carbon onto glass substrates, improving their ability to properly reflect and focus lower-energy or soft X rays onto a receiver. As Dwivedi refines new techniques to improve ALD coatings, more applications for science come into focus.

This scanning electron microscope image shows a manmade microchannel plate designed based on the structure of a lobster’s eye. The individual pores in the grid can reflect X-rays at shallow angles, gathering light from multiple angles onto a single sensor to provide a wide field of view.

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Dwivedi used ALD to enhance commercially produced lobster-eye optics, which mimic the structure of the crustacean’s eyes. Composed of glass formed into long, narrow cells, they provide a wide-angle view, as each cell funnels a tiny amount of light from a slightly different angle toward a sensor. Lobster optics can focus difficult wavelengths like X rays, which only reflect at very shallow angles.

Photo Credit: Chris Gunn

Atomic-Layer Deposition – One Element at a Time

Vivek Dwivedi displays his reaction chamber where nickel and carbon atoms are coaxed to layer onto glass.

Heliophysics

Photo Credit: Michael Giunto

Measuring Helium in the Exosphere

The engineering unit of the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) is identical to the instrument currently orbiting Mars aboard the MAVEN spacecraft. In the lab are (left to right) planetary scientist Mehdi Benna, heliophysicist Hyunju Connor, and engineer Juan Raymond.

When solar weather reaches Earth, it heats gases in the outer atmosphere, or exosphere, which can increase drag against satellites and other spacecraft in orbit. To better predict these effects of space weather, Goddard Heliophysicist Hyunju Connor is adapting an instrument developed for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission to study the extreme upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. This thin realm starts above 310 miles (500 km), and Connor specifically wants to measure helium in the area from 430 to 930 miles (approximately 700 to 1500 km).

The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument built by Goddard planetary scientists Paul Mahaffy and Mehdi Benna can accurately measure as little as 1,000 helium molecules per cubic centimeter, Connor said. Her proposal sought to adapt NGIMS to a small satellite spacecraft: something the size of a medium to large kitchen appliance.

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A Smaller, Simpler Mass Spectrometer for Exploration Measuring individual charged particles is no easy task, but a mass spectrometer being developed at Goddard may help identify a wide variety of particles present in Earth’s auroras, on the surface of the Moon, or coming in from interstellar space.

The instrument will fly on the Ground Imaging to Rocket investigation of Auroral Fast Features (GIRAFF) sounding rocket mission out of Poker Flat Alaska, planned for 2024.

Photo Credit: Ed Sittler

The Ion Velocity Mass Spectrometer being developed by physicists Ed Sittler and Robert Michell requires less power and is easier to build and operate than traditional mass spectrometers. It can provide a high angular resolution, enabling three-dimensional imaging of the local environment.

The IVMS test unit.

Planetary and Lunar Sciences Space Applications for Commercial CMOS Sensors The Compact Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (CUVIS) being developed for the DAVINCI mission to Venus adapts an electronic imaging chip like those that power highly sensitive scientific cameras to capture ultraviolet and visible light.

Aslam said the chip’s inherent radiation hardness, low readout noise, high quantum efficiency, and low cost make it an ideal candidate for image sensing and spectrometry in future planetary missions. Testing found the chip’s uniform light response and low size, weight, and power demands suitable for future small satellite, planetary and lunar missions.

Photo Credit: Shahid Aslam

Shahid Aslam and his team are working to find other uses for the image sensor technology in planetary exploration throughout the solar system. They expect the imaging chip can be adapted to cover the spectrum from deep-UV through visible and near-infrared light. This year they focused in on the deep UV range. Their work will strengthen the CUVIS development effort and reduce risk.

Custom Teledyne e2v back-illuminated CIS115 CMOS image sensor focal plane with fanout board designed and built under IRAD funding.

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Improved Estimating of Sample Mass by Piezo Impedance Sensing Whether it is Martian soil deposited in the Sample Analysis at Mars, SAM, chemistry suite aboard the Curiosity rover, Sample Tubes collected by Perseverance, or the sample recently recovered from asteroid Bennu, scientists want to know as soon as possible how much material they have collected.

In low-gravity environments of deep space, an explorer cannot put a rock on a scale to determine its mass. Currently there is no good way to make these measurements; OSIRIS-REx literally spun the spacecraft to estimate its mass change before and after taking a sample.

Photo Credit: Gerry Quilligan / Honeybee Robotics

Gerry Quilligan is developing a concept for measuring the mass of a sample during in-situ investigations on other planets or bodies by observing changes in the resonance/impedance of a piezo-electric actuator. Working with Honeybee Robotics, Quilligan is perfecting a piezo-impedance sensor for exploration. Collaborators on this project are Amy McAdam (Code 699), Terry Hurford (Code 690) and Hunter Rideout (Honeybee Robotics).

Piezo actuator and sample cup assembly.

Amelia Congedo led a project to identify and characterize the microbes found in Goddard cleanrooms to better target cleaning strategies, which could save resources and improve integration schedules for future missions assembled here.

Current agency standards call for counting, but not identifying viable microorganisms found on flight hardware, leading to what Congedo calls a one-size-fits-all approach to cleaning sensitive hardware.

Her project addresses a need detailed in the National Academy of Science’s 2022 Planetary Decadal Survey to culture and sequence the genetic material of microbes as a future standard of planetary protection. This will become especially important for life-detection missions and planetary landers.

Photo Credit: NASA / Jolearra Tshiteya / Chris Gunn

Better Defining the Burden of Planetary Protection from Earth Microbes

This IRAD advances Goddard’s ability to determine the biological burden of cleaning systems being built for future launch.

Goddard’s High Bay clean room welcomes the primary structure of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Clean rooms keep spacecraft clear of dust and contaminants, including biological matter.