NASA SBIR 2009 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Starodub, Inc.
3504 Littledale Road
Kensington, MD 20895 - 3243
(301) 929-0964

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Nicolas Gagarin
nicolas.gagarin@gmail.com
3504 Littledale Road
Kensington, MD 20895 - 3243
(301) 929-0964

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 5
End: 8

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
The proposed innovative two-dimensional (2D) empirical mode decomposition (EMD) analysis was applied to NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission database in phase I in an attempt of extracting and revealing the finest details of regional and seasonal variations. The proposed innovation is a robust and adaptive data analysis method based on a 2D adaptive isotropic decomposition approach primarily for the GRACE orbital data. The phase-I effort included a research component to optimize the prototype 2D analysis developed by Starodub. Early results using the prototype algorithms have demonstrated great potential of extracting physical cyclic components in equidistant sinusoidal grids of variations of surface density generated using spherical harmonics coefficients of GRACE. The modes associated to noise and trends were estimated and removed adaptively in 2D. In phase II, The solutions for selected NASA applications in earth sciences, space exploration, and astrophysics will be defined both at the global and regional levels: For example, the regions of Greenland, the Gulf of Alaska glacier, and Antartica will be studied for the GRACE application. The technical development will include the following areas: detection, de-noising, spectral analysis, reconstruction, and registration, and comparison of result with principal component analysis. The anticipated increases in data resolution and understanding of sources of signal noise in gravity field combined to satellite or airborne laser/radar altimetry will benefit the estimation of the Earth's gravimetry, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and ocean science.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The analysis of simultaneous and complementary observations from near-Earth orbiting satellites of the gravity field and radar or laser altimetry data can be combined for the estimation of the gravimetry, hydrosphere, and cryosphere with increased resolution and accuracy in 2-D or 3-D for a greater understanding of the Earth's system. Other potential NASA applications of the latest 2D empirical mode decomposition technologies are cosmological gravity wave and planets hunting, global primary productivity evolution map from LandSat data, non-destructive evaluation for structural health monitoring, and vibration analysis of NASA equipment.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Starodub has an on-going project with FHWA on the correlation of tire-pavement interaction noise and pavement surface texture. This application will be considered as an application for the algorithm under development in the proposed project. Many Government agencies, in research, development, and operations, may benefit from this product with a reduced learning curve with the proper exposure to this technology. Since the initial collaboration between Starodub, FHWA, and Dr. Huang four years ago, FHWA has been supporting a theoretical effort at Princeton and a parallel applied research effort with Starodub. Its marketing effort to Government agencies and private entities shall be focused on illustrating the software with solutions from NASA applications output from this SBIR project and from a plethora of applications previously developed. The current list of potential non-NASA application areas includes non-destructive evaluation for structural health monitoring in highway infrastructure, vibration, speech, and acoustic signal analyses, earthquake engineering, manufacturing processes, bio-medical applications, and financial market data analysis

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING (NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.)

Portable Data Acquisition or Analysis Tools Software Development Environments Software Tools for Distributed Analysis and Simulation