An ultrafast laser that fires pulses of light just 100 millionths of a nanosecond in duration could potentially revolutionize the way that NASA technicians manufacture and ultimately assemble instrument components made of dissimilar materials. A team of optical physicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is experimenting with a femtosecond laser and…
Next-Generation Photodetector Camera To Deploy During Robotic Servicing Demonstration Mission
Testing tools and technologies for refueling and repairing satellites in orbit won’t be the only demonstration taking place aboard the International Space Station during NASA’s next Robotic Refueling Mission 3, or RRM3. An advanced, highly compact thermal camera that traces its heritage to one now flying on NASA’s Landsat 8 has been mounted in a…
NASA’s Emerging Microgap Cooling To Be Tested Aboard Reusable Launch Vehicle
An emerging technology for removing excessive, potentially damaging heat from small, tightly packed instrument electronics and other spaceflight gear will be demonstrated for the first time during an upcoming suborbital flight aboard a reusable launch vehicle. The Blue Origin New Shepard launch vehicle is flying an experiment designed to prove that the microgap-cooling technology is immune…
NASA Eyes Highly Versatile Carbon-Nanotube Technology For Different Spaceflight Applications
An ultra-dark coating comprised of nearly invisible shag rug-like strands made of pure carbon is proving to be highly versatile for all types of spaceflight applications. In the most recent application of the carbon-nanotube coating, optical engineer John Hagopian, a contractor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Goddard scientist Lucy Lim…
Self-Driving Servicer Now Baselined For NASA’s Restore-L Satellite-Servicing Demonstration
One test changed the fortunes of an advanced 3-D imaging lidar system now baselined for NASA’s Restore-L project that will demonstrate an autonomous satellite-servicing capability. Officials with NASA’s Satellite Servicing Projects Division, or SSPD, have officially baselined the Kodiak system—formerly known as the Goddard Reconfigurable Solid-state Scanning Lidar, or GRSSLi—to provide real-time images and distance-ranging…
NASA Technology To Help Locate Electromagnetic Counterparts Of Gravitational Waves
A compact detector technology applicable to all types of cross-disciplinary scientific investigations has found a home on a new CubeSat mission designed to find the electromagnetic counterparts of events that generate gravitational waves. NASA scientist Georgia de Nolfo and her collaborator, astrophysicist Jeremy Perkins, recently received funding from the agency’s Astrophysics Research and Analysis Program…
NASA Builds Unusual Testbed for Analyzing X-ray Navigation Technologies
Pulsars have a number of unusual qualities. Like zombies, they shine even though they’re technically dead, and they rotate rapidly, emitting powerful and regular beams of radiation that are seen as flashes of light, blinking on and off at intervals from seconds to milliseconds. A NASA team has built a first-of-a-kind testbed that simulates these…