inside ONE - Message from the Chief Technologist: Investing in NASA’s Future 2 Through Innovation and Collaboration TWO - Where Success Begins: 4 Aligning Investments to Goddard’s Lines of Business • Breakdown of FY16 Awards THREE - The Best in Collaboration and Infusion 6 • FY16 IRAD Innovators of the Year: NavCube Team • FY16 IRAD Honorable Mention: George Suarez and Team FOUR - The Year’s Notable Achievements: 9 Investment in Innovative Technologies Reaps Rewards • Award of New Instruments, Sounding-Rocket Missions, About the Cover Aircraft Campaigns, and Capabilities Pictured are just a few of • Technology Infusion and Demonstrations the technologists who are • Follow-On Funding to Advance Technology-Readiness Levels either pursuing or imple- • Mission Preparation and Completed Instruments menting new technologies. • Critical Support Capabilities • Patents From left, moving clockwise: technologists John 18 FIVE - A Focus on CubeSats/Smallsats: The Pursuit of Reliability Kolasinski (left), • New Missions Ted Kostiuk (center), and • Upcoming CubeSat Missions Tilak Hewagama; • Critical Support Capabilities Goddard scientist Al • Technologies to Watch Kogut; technologist Michael Krainak; FY16 24 SIX - Rising Stars: Technologies to Watch Innovators of the Year • Astrophysics Jennifer Donaldson, • Communications and Navigation Monther Hasouneh, and • Crosscutting Technology and Capabilities Dave Petrick; and • Earth Science technologists Murzy • Heliophysics Jhabvala and Anh La. • Planetary Science • Suborbital Platforms and Range Services 30 SEVEN - Ending the Year with Celebration: Scenes from the FY16 IRAD Poster Session 35 EIGHT - A Beautiful Mind: A Tribute to Richard G. Lyon (1958-2016) 1 Message from the Chief Technologist: Investing in NASA’s Future Through Innovation and Collaboration At the end of each year, we evaluate Maybe even more exciting for the team the effectiveness of the center’s Internal was the announcement that the exist- Research and Development (IRAD) pro- ing Navigator GPS was included in the gram. We ask several questions, the most Guinness World Records for the highest- important being: are we truly advancing altitude GPS fix — a feat accomplished the technologies that NASA will need in by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale the future? mission. This high-profile mission uses Navigator to maintain the exacting orbit The take-away in 2016 was an emphatic of its four identically equipped spacecraft yes. Through innovation and collabora- now flying far above the GPS constella- tion, our impressive scope of Goddard tion of satellites. technologies is being infused into new missions and instruments. Just as exciting, Infusion in All Forms some of our technologies are being used to dramatical- Indeed, creating technologies that NASA needs is ly improve the performance of already highly successful a hallmark of the IRAD program. Although examples IRAD-supported capabilities. abound — some of which we briefly describe in this NavCube is the perfect example of this. report — I would be remiss in not highlighting the accomplishments of Goddard technologist George Created by the merger of two highly acclaimed, Suarez and his team. They have created, without much IRAD-supported technologies — SpaceCube 2.0 and fanfare, diminutive circuits that both enable high-profile Navigator GPS — NavCube will fly as an experiment missions and increase the reliability of CubeSat mis- on the International Space Station in 2018. There, it not sions — particularly important given NASA’s movement only will demonstrate its dramatically improved naviga- toward greater use of these platforms. tional capabilities, but possibly X-ray communications in space — a potential NASA first. In short, the teams I also would be negligent in not mentioning here the collaborated, blended their technologies, and created success of one of Goddard’s most prodigious scientists a capability that could extend the reliable use of the and innovators, Harvey Moseley. NASA awarded GPS signal to lunar orbits in the future. These successes him and his team millions of dollars to build the High- earned the NavCube team the FY16 IRAD Innovators of Resolution Mid-Infrared Spectrometer — an instrument the Year award (see page 6 for details). that employs a state-of-the-art, Goddard-developed 2 bolometer system as well as a Cornell University-devel- In this report, we highlight other notable achievements oped Fabry-Perot Interferometer. Through collabora- that underscore how Goddard, through its IRAD pro- tion, Moseley and his multi-institution team succeeded in gram, is seeding technologies that NASA needs. securing this important win. In closing, we are thrilled that our highly diverse Likewise, Principal Investigator Bernie Rauscher, who program is supporting the development of innovative, partnered with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to strategically important technologies. We are thrilled develop a rad-hard single photon detector, achieved that our investments are reducing mission risk and, in all objectives in FY16 and NASA’s next-generation many cases, involving partnerships with internal and ex- Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope has begun sup- ternal groups, enabling a far greater cross-fertilization porting the technology-development effort. of ideas and capabilities. In short, we are delighted that we are fulfilling our mission as a science and spaceflight Along the same lines, the developers of Goddard’s center — developing the technologies NASA will need MUSTANG avionics technology showed the value to carry out mission science across all scientific areas. of their technology, and a high-profile mission and an instrument-development effort have committed to using and advancing the technology. Peter Hughes Chief Technologist Goddard Space Flight Center This is a portion of the spaceflight modem flying on NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration. A Goddard team plans to replicate this fiber-optic receiver, replacing portions of it with a next-generation circuit. 3 Where Success Begins: Aligning Investments to Goddard’s Lines of Business Year after year, our technologists continue to secure Lines of Business: At A Glance instrument and new mission starts as well as follow-on funding to further advance their technologies at levels Astrophysics that more than compensate for our initial investment in Focuses on missions and technolo- their technologies. gies enabling the study of galax- ies, stars, and planetary systems We believe the secret to our success for both God- beyond our own solar system. dard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) and Center Innovation Fund (CIF) programs is our method- ology — the focus and discipline we employ to identify Communications and Navigation investment priorities, unmet needs, and target Supports systems and technologies opportunities. needed for responsive communica- tions and navigation. Selection Criteria for IRAD and CIF Under the IRAD program, for example, we fund only those efforts that map to one or more of Goddard’s strategic lines of business. In addition, we adhere to Crosscutting Technology strict selection standards and require principal investi- and Capabilities Addresses capabilities applicable gators to compete for their awards. to more than one strategic line of business, everything from nanoma- For NASA’s CIF, we use slightly different criteria. terials and electronics to detectors NASA’s CIF is specifically aimed at advancing highly in- and system architectures. novative, potentially high-impact projects that are early in their development. Successful CIF proposals also must Earth Science demonstrate technical merit, feasibility, relevance, and Supports technologies and advanced science instruments value to NASA. Many also leverage partner resources needed to observe and understand and several have the potential to contribute signifi- changes in Earth’s natural systems cantly to national needs. and processes, including severe weather, the atmosphere, the oceans, sea ice and glaciers, and the land surface. 4 Heliophysics Suborbital Platforms Conducts research on the sun, its and Range Services extended solar-system environment Supports systems typically used (the heliosphere), and interactions to place payloads into subor- of Earth, other planets, small bod- bital attitude, including sounding ies, and interstellar gas with the rockets, balloons, and manned and heliosphere. unmanned aircraft. In recent years, the LOB has expanded to include CubeSat capabilities. Range ser- Planetary Science vices include assets for conducting, Supports technologies to explore launching, and operating missions. the solar system, particularly instruments for landers and orbiting spacecraft. Breakdown of FY16 Awards Goddard is a successful organization. It has proven adept at creating, fine-tuning, and adapting emerging technologies largely because the center focuses on strategic technological areas that match the skills of the workforce and the center’s identified needs. Here is the breakdown of our FY16 investments. 5 “We invest in R&D to create capabilities that NASA needs. NavCube, in particular, represents infusion at its best. The cross-pollination of the two technologies gives NASA another tool for carrying out a range of science missions. The possibility that it might help demonstrate X-ray communications in space — a technology in which we also have a vested interest — is particularly exciting.” — Goddard Chief Technologist Peter M. Hughes FY16 IRAD Innovators of the Year: The Best in Collaboration