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The Future of Heliophysics Innovations 

The 2022 Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Selections were recently announced. The following selections are specifically focused on Heliophysics.  

HESTO manages Heliophysics technology investments and mission concept studies to advance them and increase the opportunity for infusion in these future missions.

Dragster: An Ensemble Assimilative Model for Satellite Drag  

Institution: Orion Space Research 

Artist concept showing orbital debris around the Earth
There are thousands of pieces of orbital debris (fragments of old satellites, old rocket bodies, or similar non-active objects).
NASA

With the decreasing cost of launching objects into space, the number of objects in Earth orbit has significantly increased. Over 27,000 Earth-orbiting objects greater than 10 cm are tracked by the Department of Defense’s Space Surveillance Network. Ensuring that these objects, which include operational satellites, don’t collide with each other or with any new satellites we launch into space is becoming increasingly difficult.  

Space traffic management relies on atmospheric density and drag models to predict the positions of these objects over time and generate collision alerts. Thanks to funding from the U.S. Air Force, Orion Space Research has developed a full-physics model of Earth’s upper atmosphere supported by data assimilation techniques, called Dragster, which enables satellite drag predictions from 30 to 1,000 km.   

The goal of this project is to migrate Dragster to work in a cloud-based computing environment, raising the NASA Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of Dragster from its current TRL 5 to TRL 8, making it accessible in a standardized way by multiple users, and providing a superior form of space-traffic management that would increase the safety and scale of the growing space-traffic management market.  

Enhancement of the Geomagnetic Cutoff Models inside SIRE2

Institution: Fifth Gait Technologies, Inc. 

A close up of a solar eruptive event, including a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection, and a solar energetic particle event.
An artist rendering depicts a solar eruptive event, including a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection, and a solar energetic particle event.
NASA SVS

The radiation environment in space is known to be filled with dangerous energetic particles and radiation that can damage or upset the operations of our space assets. Several tools currently exist such as CREME96, GEOSPACE, SPACERAD to predict the environment and its effect on space hardware. These existing models have limitations, though, that a newly developed Space Ionizing Radiation Environment and Effects (SIRE2) toolkit by Fifth Gait Technologies, Inc., is aiming to address.  

The goal of this project is the SIRES2 toolkit including providing over 30 years of historical data to calculate the peak flux, mission-integrated fluence, and flux time series from historical and damaging Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) events in addition to the ability to apply historical geomagnetic cutoff calculations to the environment calculations. This will, for the first time, enable users to benchmark spacecraft to historical SEP events or provide anomaly assessment to these historical storms to modern spacecraft.  

Solar-blind solid-state energetic particle detection for next-generation instruments  

Institution: Advent Diamond, Inc. 

An artificial diamond being grown in a lab at Arizona State University.
This photo shows an artificial diamond being grown.
ASU / Franz Koeck

Diamonds can be used as a semiconductor just like silicon, and just like silicon they have been used as radiation detectors. Diamond has a relatively large bandgap of 5.5 eV which makes it “solar blind” since this is larger than the energy of most solar ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. It also provides good radiation tolerance and fast response times. However, technical hurdles exist in the development of high-quality diamond detectors, which have limited their potential for use in space-based instrumentation.  

Advent Diamond and their collaborators at the Arizona State University Diamond Lab have recently demonstrated several new high novel diode-structured diamond components that show significant promise in enabling diamond detectors.  

The goal of this project is to develop a three-layer, mechanically thick diamond detector to enable a single chip energy telescope for heavy ion measurements with energies in the range of MeVs.  

Compact All Sky Interferometric Doppler Imager (CASIDI)

Institution: Atmospheric & Space Technology Research Associates, LLC 

This image shows ionospheric winds and the low-latitude geomagnetic field.
This visualization shows ionospheric winds and the low-latitude geomagnetic field. 
NASA SVS

Our neutral atmosphere and the ionosphere directly interact in complex and dynamic ways that are actively being studied. Dynamic events in each region impact other regions, while auroral electron precipitation increase the plasma density and conductivity in the ionosphere and heat the upper atmosphere.  

One way to characterize the dynamics of this system is by monitoring the wind fields in the upper atmosphere from the ground looking up with interferometric Doppler imagers. These imagers measure the airglow emission from a metastable state of oxygen at 6300 angstroms. First demonstrated in 1960, this approach has been used by multiple observers across geographically distributed sites to provide a global picture of our upper atmosphere.  

The goal of this project is to develop a next-generation Compact All Sky Interferometric Doppler Imager (CASIDI) capable of measuring a two-dimensional upper atmosphere wind field from the ground every few minutes, with very good precision. This will be achieved by innovating in two areas: super-polished flat optical elements, which are ideal for filtering the light, and a new compact design.  

These two innovations combined will yield a less expensive imager, which will enable it to be deployed to more geographically diverse regions and providing significantly better coverage of the global dynamics of our upper atmosphere.  

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Last Updated
Jul 28, 2023
Editor
Jennifer Brill

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