Advancing Technology for Aeronautics

The future of flight looks very exciting, and the public is helping NASA see it more clearly. For more than a century, NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, have been the global leader in aeronautics research. NASA’s innovative contributions to aviation benefit the U.S. economy, air transportation system, aviation industry, and passengers and businesses who rely on flight every day. NASA is with you when you fly, and the agency continues to revolutionize research and development activities for the aviation industry of tomorrow.  

NASA’s public prize competitions, challenges, and crowdsourcing activities illuminate what is on the horizon for air and aviation on Earth. These research and development challenges yield innovative ideas, including future forecasts to inform strategies for the next era of aviation, algorithms to predict runway traffic changes at U.S. airports, and more. 

Future Forecasts to Prepare for the Next Era of Aeronautics

NASA’s vision for aeronautical research for the next 25 years and beyond encompasses a range of technologies for safe, efficient, flexible, and environmentally sustainable air transportation. To prepare for this future, NASA’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions project conducted a challenge that prompted the public to imagine the state of aviation in 25 years. 

NASA’s Future-Scaping Our Skies Challenge asked participants to predict and describe future aviation using timelines and storylines, including data sources, references, and multimedia illustrations when possible. The contest awarded $21,000 to nine top winners. Judges evaluated the contest submissions based on their descriptions of possible future scenarios and the key events and trends leading to the proposed outcomes. 

According to Team Sparkletron, which placed first in the competition, advanced computation and machine learning might be modeling changes in aviation and the future of aviation better than ever. Such models could apply to commercial and personal flying applications.

Ground Control Software for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

In 2021, more than 873,000 Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)—also known as drones—were registered to fly in the United States. With a host of potential applications, including delivery of products, search and rescue, and agricultural monitoring, drone numbers will likely rise.¹

Working in partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration for more than 25 years, NASA is researching technologies for traffic management of drones. A large portion of air traffic management is ground control, which manages aircraft on the runways. To help develop ground control software for small drones, NASA asked the public to modify and enhance an existing application through an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Ground Control Station Software Challenge series. During the course of about a year, a series of challenges received 92 entries from 58 countries. Altogether, NASA awarded a total of $30,700 to 47 winners for the development of ground control software for small drones.

Algorithms to Predict Runway Traffic Changes at U.S. Airports

The National Airspace System (NAS) is undergoing modernization to make flying safer, more efficient, and more predictable²—and NASA is involved in this transformation. The NAS is made up of more than 29 million square miles that include airspace, air navigation facilities, airports and landing areas, and more.

To enable more cohesive decision-making in current and future NAS operations, NASA is building a cloud-based Digital Information Platform (DIP) for advanced data-driven digital services. Through DIP, NASA identified a need for algorithms that can accurately predict changes in the configuration of runways at U.S. airports. Runway configuration, or the direction that traffic is moving on runways, can adjust multiple times per day and can significantly impact flight delays and decisions across the NAS.³

The goal of the Run-way Functions: Predict Reconfigurations at U.S. Airports Challenge was to design algorithms to automatically predict airport configuration changes from real-time data sources. Submissions tested using a mock data set of 10 airports, and judges scored the algorithms based on how the predictions compared to the ground truth. The top four solutions, which came from New York University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; University of Maryland, College Park; and Pennsylvania State University, State College, won awards totaling $40,000.

An App to Uncover How People Operate Autonomous Systems

Human-autonomy teaming (HAT) aims to understand how people work together with autonomous systems like drones. For example, how long can a person safely operate a drone piloted by remote control or onboard computers? Can one person effectively operate multiple autonomous vehicles at once? 

NASA opened the Human-Autonomy Teaming Task Battery (HATTB) App contest to develop software to run an existing battery of tasks that simulate pilot responsibilities during flight. The potential app could support researchers in evaluating the performance of research participants while participants monitored virtual autonomous machines and performed other tasks simultaneously. More than $160,000 was awarded to 33 contest winners. 

The HATTB app could help NASA and other researchers understand how well people and autonomous systems communicate and collaborate. The app is incorporated into a study by students at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, to examine the effect of time on HAT.⁴

A More Efficient Wind Tunnel Design to Minimize Downtime

NASA facilities are home to a variety of wind tunnels for testing aircraft and spacecraft. By simulating the movement of air around vehicles during flight, NASA uses wind tunnels to test new vehicle shapes, materials, and other design elements. 

The NASA concept study, “New Wind Tunnel Landscape,” aims to develop new options to support wind tunnel testing in the next 20-50 years. One opportunity for advancement is the test section—the area where researchers place the components, exposing them to airflow. When preparing the test section for a new model, the wind tunnel is unusable due to the time-consuming process.

To address the downtime, NASA called on the public through the New Transonic Wind Tunnel Test Section Challenge. This $7,000 competition sought new designs for a wind tunnel facility with test sections capable of efficient, rapid reconfiguration. 

Winning designs addressed the inefficiency of data and instrumentation system connections that delay reconfiguring the test section, ground-level carts to simplify transferring models to and from the test section, and modular test section containers that include everything needed for a quick swap. 

Endnotes

[1] https://www3.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/utm-factsheet-11-05-15.pdf

[2] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

[3] https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/89/competition-nasa-airport-configuration/

[4] https://sites.google.com/odu.edu/odu-reu-transportation/research-projects

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Inspiring the Next Generation with Student Challenges and Learning Opportunities

Creativity and curiosity are strongly tied to NASA’s missions and vision. Many of the agency’s public opportunities foster these traits by engaging students and educators. Participants of all ages and levels, from kindergarten to college, used their imaginations and enthusiasm to solve open innovation challenges related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in fiscal years 2021-2022.

Advancing and Encouraging Aerospace Careers

Multiple NASA programs partnered with Starburst Accelerator in Los Angeles to launch the 2022 Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) Space Accelerator Competition. This opportunity set out to engage underrepresented academic communities and help NASA make advancements in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the development of autonomous systems.  Three selected winning teams received $50,000 prizes and were enrolled in a 10-week accelerator program, operated by Starburst, to help them prepare to commercialize their proposals. The winning teams also participated in trainings with mentors at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern, California.

“The goal is not only to invest in the best ideas from MSIs, but to diversify our supplier base in the long term,” said former NASA Associate Administrator for Technology, Policy, and Strategy Bhavya Lal.

The 2021 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concept Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition asked undergraduate and graduate teams to develop new, innovative concepts that could improve our ability to operate in space. The themes ranged from designing a habitat that can support a crew for 30 days at the lunar South Pole, to developing a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) concept that can deliver a crew from the surface of Mars to a low Mars orbit, to designing architectures to visit Venus and Ceres.  

Based on concepts outlined in their technical papers, fourteen university teams were selected to present at the 2021 RASC-AL Forum, receiving a $6,000 stipend each to help fund participation. The winning teams from the forum, University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez and University of Texas at Austin, received an additional travel stipend to present their respective concepts, Discovery and Endeavour – Ceres Interplanetary Pathway for Human Exploration and Research (DECIPHER) and Regolith-Volatile Extraction and Return Expedition (ReVERE), at the AIAA ASCEND aerospace conference. 

Students in grades 6-12 participated in NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge, in which teams worked together to design and build science and technology experiments ahead of suborbital flight tests. In the first challenge, students submitted ideas for experiments that would work on a suborbital rocket with a few minutes of microgravity or a high-altitude balloon with exposure to Earth’s atmosphere and planetary views. In the second challenge, the teams focused solely on high-altitude balloon experiment ideas. Across both years, 117 teams of approximately 1,100 students total were selected to win the challenge, which offered hands-on insight into the design and test process used by NASA-supported researchers.

Artemis Student Challenges

The annual Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS) Challenge asks U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to design and create spacesuit information displays within augmented reality (AR) environments. During a moonwalk, astronauts will rely on a variety of assets, including their spacesuits, life support systems, geology tools, power systems, and more. An AR display as part of the spacesuit could transform astronauts’ ability to live and work in space by providing data on their assets, potentially enhancing performance, workload, and situational awareness. The students’ contributions will aid the work of NASA’s Human Interface Branch, which supports the agency’s human spaceflight programs, including Artemis, the International Space Station, and commercial partner programs. 

The Lunabotics Challenge is an opportunity for teams of U.S. university students to engage with the systems engineering process by designing, building, and operating a lunar robot. The teams also conduct public outreach, submit systems engineering papers, and demonstrate their work to a NASA review panel. This challenge is designed to pursue innovations that could be applied to future NASA missions, including Artemis. Awards include scholarship funds, with the top prize of $5,000 awarded to the University of Alabama team in 2022.  

Two Lunabotics Jr. Challenges also took place in 2022 with separate divisions for grades K-5 and grades 6-12. One national winner from each grade division was selected from approximately 2,300 submitted designs. The prize for the two winners was a virtual discussion for their classrooms with Janet Petro, the director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

The Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge taps into the ingenuity of undergraduate and graduate students to help advance capabilities and technologies that could support future NASA missions. Students gain real world experience by incorporating their coursework into aerospace design concepts and working in a team environment. In 2021, teams tackled the challenge of lunar dust and designed, built, and tested their solutions in a simulated lunar environment using nearly $1 million in funding across all teams from NASA and National Space Grant College and Fellowship consortia. The top prize Artemis Award went to Washington State University, whose concept uses a liquid cryogen spray bar and a handheld sprayer to clean dust from spacesuits. 

Every fall, NASA’s Student Launch accepts proposals from U.S. students from middle school to higher education to participate in a hands-on competition to design, build, launch, and fly payloads and components on high-power rockets in support of NASA research. The challenge that launched in Fall 2022 concluded in April 2023 with the launch of more than 40 rockets, each carrying a scientific payload nearly one-mile-high above ground level. 

“As a young woman, it’s important to be seen leading a team, managing resources, and meeting critical deadlines with NASA,” said Sindhu Belki, an aerospace engineering major from the University of Alabama. “I’m glad NASA provides this opportunity to be a role model to girls and women interested in space exploration.” 

Both high school and higher education students participated in the Human Exploration Rover Challenge, an annual competition that asks students to engineer and test human-powered vehicles designed to drive on otherworldly surfaces. Teams competed based on navigating a half-mile obstacle course, conducting mission-specific task challenges, and completing safety and design reviews with NASA engineers. The 2023 competition, which opened in August 2022, included student teams from 16 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as several international teams. Escambia High School of Pensacola, Florida, and University of Alabama in Huntsville placed first in their divisions. 

“By operating within real-world constraints, students gain authentic knowledge to better imagine and develop innovative technologies which could be used in future NASA missions,” said Kevin McGhaw, Director, NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Southeast Region. 

Storytelling for Science and Space

The NASA Earth Science in Action Comic Strip Contest invited high school students and the general public over 18 years old to use their artistic abilities to tell Earth science success stories from three story prompts. Each of the prompts highlighted how NASA’s satellite data supported communities and ecosystems at risk. The contest was designed to inspire participants and readers to learn how NASA Earth science makes a difference to communities around the world. The winners received publicity and recognition from the SciArt Exchange and NASA. 

The future of space exploration is in good hands.”

Mike Kincaid

Associate Administrator for the NASA Office of STEM Engagement

The first and second Power to Explore Student Writing Challenges were open to K-12 students in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 to encourage students to learn more about Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS). The first challenge asked students to learn how RPS provide power at the extremes of our solar system, then to celebrate their own unique power, with 30 total winning essays. The second challenge asked students to dream up a new RPS-powered space mission based on their research. Out of 45 semifinalists, three finalists in each grade category (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) were invited to discuss their mission concepts with a NASA scientist or engineer during an exclusive virtual event. From the finalists, three winners were selected from each category. 

The Artemis Moon Pod Essay Contest sought creative concepts from K-12 students describing an imagined journey to the Moon – including their crew and the technology they would leave on the lunar surface to help future astronauts. Nearly 14,000 students competed, with three grand prize winners in each of the grade categories (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) winning a trip to view the Artemis I launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

“I can’t tell you how inspiring and energizing it’s been to read these essays and see the students’ enthusiasm and creativity in action,” said Mike Kincaid, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of STEM Engagement. “The future of space exploration is in good hands.” 

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Collaborating with Public Innovators to Accelerate Space Exploration

With the successful launch and landing of Artemis I in 2022, NASA set the stage for a new era of space exploration. Together, NASA and its partners will lead humanity to the Moon and prepare for the next giant leap: human exploration of Mars.

To address the multitude of challenges that come with planning for this new era, NASA is calling on individuals and teams from the public to develop new and innovative approaches. Some of the topics addressed through NASA-sponsored contests, challenges, and competitions include waste management and sustainability in space, astronaut health and wellness, and a host of advanced technology needs for long-term space exploration.

Sustainability and Waste Management

A round-trip visit to Mars is estimated to take two to three years. During this adventure, astronauts will need abundant supplies with minimal waste. To be as efficient and self-sufficient as possible, they must recycle, repurpose, or reprocess what they have and make what they need. Thanks to NASA competitions, innovators devised ways to manage ash created from trash in microgravity, reuse materials for growing plants, eject waste from a spacecraft, and recycle orbiting space debris.  

With no landfills in space, NASA is developing a reactor that uses thermal processes to turn trash into water, gas, and ash. To manage the ash produced by the reactor, the agency called on the public and awarded three teams a total of $30,000 as part of the Trash-to-Gas Ash Management Challenge. The first-place winner proposed using ultrasonic waves to automate ash removal from the Orbital Syngas Commodity Augmentation Reactor (OSCAR) system, a test rig designed to make use of trash and human waste generated during long-duration spaceflight.

Another way to handle trash in space is to reuse or recycle it. In the Waste to Base Materials Challenge: Sustainable Reprocessing in Space, NASA asked contestants of this competition to submit ideas to convert or repurpose waste into valuable materials like propellant or stock for 3D printing. A winner in the foam packing category proposed a method to recycle packing foam and urine for hydroponics; a winner in the trash category suggested clothing as a growing medium. All teams shared a $24,000 prize.

For the non-recyclable waste made during the journey to and from Mars, NASA sought concepts for a jettison mechanism to eject the material from the spacecraft under the Waste Jettison Mechanism Challenge. If not disposed of, the waste will take up crucial space, pose risks to the spacecraft and crew by creating hazards or contaminants, and decrease fuel efficiency. The agency awarded $30,000 for concepts including a scissor-spring-shot, a secure variable energy launcher, a CO2 trash launcher, and a spring-loaded ejection mechanism.

With more than 17 million pounds of space debris currently in orbit—sections of rockets and non-operational satellites made of aluminum, titanium, steel, plastics, ceramics, and more—the agency is exploring whether recycling the materials is more cost-effective than launching new materials into space. Through the Orbital Alchemy Challenge, NASA awarded $55,000 in prizes for proposals on how to recycle the objects in orbit.

Astronaut Health and Wellness

NASA is making plans to protect astronaut health and performance during long-duration space exploration as well as to develop countermeasures for potential problems during such travel. With goals to establish the first long-term presence on the Moon and send the first astronauts to Mars, NASA requested the public’s help to come up with ways to produce food, preserve the integrity of spacesuits, and monitor an astronaut’s cognitive state.

During extended space missions, astronauts may produce their own safe, nutritious, and appetizing foods. To devise ideas for novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that could feed astronauts during space travel, NASA held the Deep Space Food Challenge, awarding a total of $450,000 to eight winning U.S. teams. Winning technologies included a system and processes for turning air, water, electricity, and yeast into food and a solution that mimics photosynthesis to produce plant- and mushroom-based ingredients.

NASA needs to detect and reduce spacesuit injury risk, but current software solutions are limited. To develop a new solution, NASA conducted the Spacesuit Detection Challenge¹ to create software able to detect one or more spacesuits in various environments, discriminate between a person and a spacesuit, and extract suit postures from obscured images. There were five winning programs to label and identify spacesuit motions from video and photos.

As space missions move farther away from Earth, the responsibility for space operations shifts from mission control on the ground to astronaut crews in flight. To gauge astronauts’ ability to remember, make real-time decisions, and think several seconds ahead, NASA’s Cognitive State Determination System contest² asked participants to develop a biometric sensor suite using various inputs to predict cognitive state. Thirty teams received awards through this contest.

Managing Payloads, Deliveries, and Storage

Aside from managing a sustainable environment and maintaining astronaut health in space, NASA has a host of additional needs to enable future space exploration. Answering NASA’s calls for assistance through various competitions, the public helped devise a plethora of technologies for autonomous observation, nighttime precision landing, docking station flooring, risk prediction using artificial intelligence, advanced scientific sensors, software to analyze images, and programs for modeling shock.

With $2 million in total prizes, the Autonomous Observation Challenge No. 1 of the NASA TechLeap Challenge sought observation technologies to detect, track, and establish line-of-sight communications with a lander, rover, or other objects on the Moon’s surface. One of the winning technologies autonomously detects, tracks, and logs nascent wildfires and similar phenomena. Another winning design uses visible and infrared cameras to identify and classify plumes in Earth’s atmosphere using an advanced form of machine learning.

Even if the terrain is hazardous and lighting conditions are low, NASA needs to be able to land its spacecraft safely. NASA TechLeap’s Nighttime Precision Landing Challenge No. 1 worth up to $650,000 requested sensing systems to detect hazards from an altitude of 250 meters or higher and with the capability to process the data in real-time to generate a terrain map. One winning system leveraged a light projector to project a grid of reflective points visible to a camera, creating an initial geometry map. It then used light detection and ranging with advanced computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and computing to generate a map of the terrain.

A long-duration habitat for use on the Moon, Mars, and during deep space exploration must be capable of attaching to other modules such as pressurized rovers or an airlock. A docking system is needed to join these spacecraft elements even when they are not perfectly aligned, and NASA also needs flexible, strong flooring for use in gravity and microgravity environments. The Spacecraft Docking Adapter with a Flexible but Load-Bearing Floor competition³ awarded five winning designs. 

NASA’s Game Changing Development (GCD) program advances space technology ideas that could lead to new approaches for future space missions. Wanting to identify project risks before they become actual issues, GCD held the Risky Space Business: NASA Artificial Intelligence Risk Prediction Challenge to design a project management tool that can extract past project risk information and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict risks on future projects. Three winners received a total of $50,000.

NASA’s Entrepreneurs Challenge seeks fresh ideas in technology that could lead to revolutionary science discoveries to explore and understand the solar system and beyond. In 2021, the program’s focus areas included small satellite technologies that can autonomously recognize scientific phenomena in space and respond as needed; sensors to detect and observe at dramatically reduced size, weight, power, and cost; and instruments to detect biomarkers. After a NASA judging panel selected 10 companies to receive a $10,000 award each, the winners refined their concepts, developed white papers, and gave presentations. The same panel selected seven companies to receive an additional $80,000 in prizes.

On a mission to improve understanding of the Moon over many decades—including changes to its surface—NASA held the Image Co-registration Code Challenge⁴ to devise the initial versions of the Lunar Mission Co-registration Tool. This tool will process lunar images captured under varying lighting conditions or with different spacecraft or camera characteristics and automatically co-register, color balance, and remove distortions. The images are then available to experts for comparison and examination to identify differences over the decades.

To reduce the risk of critical spacecraft component failure due to shock, NASA models the propagation of shock as closely as possible. While the agency created standards in the early days of spaceflight based on extensive testing across structures, today’s mathematical methods and high-performance computing tools can provide better models. The Aftershock: NASA Shock Propagation Prediction Challenge awarded four contestants a shared prize of $50,000, including a deep learning model that predicts shock response spectrum values connected to different frequencies and learns different connections and contexts between the input data points.

Endnotes

[1] https://www.topcoder.com/blog/nasa-spacesuit-detection-challenge/

[2] https://www.topcoder.com/community/nasa/cognitive-state

[3] https://grabcad.com/challenges/nasa-challenge-spacecraft-docking-adapter-with-a-flexible-but-load-bearing-floor

[4] https://www.topcoder.com/challenges/76c6fb0e-0de3-4d60-b472-37e238e14fc4

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NASA’s Lucy Surprises Again, Observes 1st-ever Contact Binary Orbiting Asteroid

It turns out there is more to the “marvelous” asteroid Dinkinesh and its newly discovered satellite than first meets the eye. As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft continued to return data of its first asteroid encounter on Nov. 1, 2023, the team was surprised to discover that Dinkinesh’s unanticipated satellite is, itself, a contact binary – that is, it is made of two smaller objects touching each other.

In the first downlinked images of Dinkinesh and its satellite, which were taken at closest approach, the two lobes of the contact binary happened to lie one behind the other from Lucy’s point of view. Only when the team downlinked additional images, captured in the minutes around the encounter, was the true nature of this object revealed.

“Contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system,” said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist, of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. “We haven’t seen many up-close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. We’d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!”

Lucy’s primary goal is to survey the never-before-visited Jupiter Trojan asteroids. This first encounter with a small, main belt asteroid was only added to the mission in January 2023, primarily to serve as an in-flight test of the system that allows the spacecraft to continually track and image its asteroid targets as it flies past at high speed. The excellent performance of that system at Dinkinesh allowed the team to capture multiple perspectives on the system, which enabled the team to better understand the asteroids’ shapes and make this unexpected discovery.

“It is puzzling, to say the least,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, also from Southwest Research Institute. “I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out.”

This second image was taken about 6 minutes after closest approach from a distance of approximately 1,010 miles (1,630 km). The spacecraft traveled around 960 miles (1,500 km) between the two released images.

“It’s truly marvelous when nature surprises us with a new puzzle,” said Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist from NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Great science pushes us to ask questions that we never knew we needed to ask.”

The team is continuing to downlink and process the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft. Dinkinesh and its satellite are the first two of 11 asteroids that Lucy plans to explore over its 12-year journey. After skimming the inner edge of the main asteroid belt, Lucy is now heading back toward Earth for a gravity assist in December 2024. That close flyby will propel the spacecraft back through the main asteroid belt, where it will observe asteroid Donaldjohanson in 2025, and then on to the Trojan asteroids in 2027.

Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built and operates the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information about NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/lucy

By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio

Media Contact:
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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