NASA SBIR 2010 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Qualtech Systems, Inc.
99 East River Drive
East Hartford, CT 06108 - 3288
(860) 257-8014

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Sudipto Ghoshal
sudipto@teamqsi.com
99 East River Drive
East Hartford, CT 06108 - 3288
(860) 761-9341

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 2
End: 3

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Modern space systems such as the International Space Station (ISS) and the proposed Constellation vehicles and habitats are complex entities with hundreds of thousands of individual telemetry items. Monitoring the health of these systems, troubleshooting their faults, developing maintenance plan and schedule, and aiding to restore system functionality are key tasks that flight controllers must perform. The current suite of tools for assisting with these tasks is not tightly integrated with the telemetry stream, the commanding process or other tools that flight controllers use. In the proposed effort, Qualtech Systems Inc. in collaboration with TRACLabs Inc. will develop an advanced health monitoring, capability assessment, and opportunistic maintenance planning tool that tightly integrates with the future mission control telemetry stream and displays. Our tool will be a plug-in to the future Mission Control Technology display software that will be deployed over the next several years in NASA's Mission Control Center (MCC). As such it will share capabilities and features with all of the other MCT applications such as plotting, procedure execution, commanding and evaluators (comps). The benefit to NASA will be a fully integrated health monitoring, capability assessment, and maintenance planning tool that reduces flight controller workload by sharing information with other MCC applications. This tool will also be vital in enhancement of safety, mission success probability and freeing up crew and controller time that is currently dedicated towards performing unscheduled maintenance/repairs.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The technology proposed for development in this Phase I and a subsequent Phase II effort will result in a novel software solution that can utilize, in real-time, sensor data from telemetry streams, from data repositories or simply from files; generate a comprehensive health assessment of the system; provide relevant condition assessment information to the user instead of inundating the user with too much data; allow the user to execute procedures for further troubleshooting or generating more detailed health assessment, and finally use the health assessment and mission requirements information to develop and display mission satisfiability metrics to the appropriate user for improved mission control.

NASA's current vision to enhance the level of autonomy for vehicle health management and mission planning makes the proposed effort worthy of funding from several branches within it. Clearly establishing the technology and the software so that it readily operates as part of NASA's next generation Mission Control Technology allows NASA, primarily Johnson Space Center, which is in charge of Mission Control Center, to utilize the continuous health assessment and mission satisfiability information from our tool for improved mission execution and re-configuration while improving safety, mission success probability and reducing flight controller and crew workload.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Among the other agencies, DoD and Air-force and Navy are the most potential customer for the resulting technologies. Large scale military systems (systems of systems) such as NORAD, Space Command ground segments, the Joint Strike Fighter fleet, the Navy shipboard platforms, Submarine Commands and ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems can be potential areas to field the proposed technology. In addition, UAVs, UMGs and other unmanned submersible vehicle markets could also be potential target for the proposed technology. The product is also expected to be of commercial value to the manufacturers of DoD and military's remotely guided weapons and reconnaissance systems.

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.)

Autonomous Control (see also Control & Monitoring) Condition Monitoring (see also Sensors) Data Acquisition (see also Sensors) Diagnostics/Prognostics Intelligence Knowledge Management Quality/Reliability Recovery (see also Autonomous Systems)