NASA Relaunches Mentor-Protégé Program to Fill Supply Chain Gaps

In an effort to grow new commercial markets that support the future of space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research, NASA is preparing to relaunch its Mentor-Protégé Program for contractors on Friday, Nov. 1.

The program originally was launched to encourage NASA prime contractors, or mentors, to enter into agreements with eligible small businesses, or protégés. These agreements were created to enhance the protégés’ performance on NASA contracts and subcontracts, foster the establishment of long-term business relationships between small businesses and NASA prime contractors, and increase the overall number of small businesses that receive NASA contracts and subcontract awards.

“The NASA Mentor-Protégé Program is a critical enabling tool that allows experienced companies to provide business developmental assistance to emerging firms,” said Dwight Deneal, assistant administrator for NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP). “The program enables NASA to expand its industrial base of suppliers, as prime and subcontractors, to assist in executing the mission and programs throughout the agency.”

The program’s relaunch follows an assessment of its policies and procedures by OSBP to ensure it continues to support NASA’s missions and addresses any supply chain gaps at an optimal level.

To provide more information about the program and its relaunch, OSBP will host an online lunch and learn event on Thursday, Nov. 7, at 1:00 p.m. EST. The event is open to all current and potential mentors and protégés who want to learn more about changes in the program, qualifications to participate, and how to apply.

“We are excited about rolling out the enhanced NASA Mentor-Protégé Program,” said David Brock, lead small business specialist for OSBP. “The program’s new focus will allow large businesses to mentor smaller firms in key areas that align with NASA’s mission and opportunities within the agency’s supply chain.”

One key change expands eligibility to all small businesses, in addition to minority-serving institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Ability One entities. This expansion enables the program to support an inclusive environment for more small businesses and underserved communities to interact with NASA and its contractors.

The program also will focus on engaging businesses within a select number of North American Industry Classifications System (NAICS) codes and specific industry sectors, such as research and development and aerospace manufacturing. These adjustments will allow the program to better support NASA’s long-term strategic goals and mission success.

The program is designed to benefit both the mentor and the protégé by fostering productive networking and contract opportunities. In a mentor-protégé agreement, mentors build relationships with small businesses, developing a subcontracting base and accruing credit toward their small business subcontracting goals. In addition, protégés receive technical and developmental assistance while also gaining sole-source contracts from mentors and additional contracting opportunities.

NASA is responsible for the administration and management of each agreement. The OSBP oversees the program and conducts semi-annual performance reviews to monitor progress and accomplishments made as a result of the mentor-protégé agreement.

To apply to be a mentor, companies must be a current NASA prime contractor with an approved small business contracting plan. Companies also must be eligible for the receipt of government contracts and be categorized under certain NAICS codes. Potential protégés must certify as a small business within NAICS size standards.

Find more information about participating in NASA’s Mentor-Protégé Program at:

https://www.nasa.gov/osbp/mentor-protege-program

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Tiernan P. Doyle

New NASA Instrument for Studying Snowpack Completes Airborne Testing

Summer heat has significant effects in the mountainous regions of the western United States. Melted snow washes from snowy peaks into the rivers, reservoirs, and streams that supply millions of Americans with freshwater—as much as 75% of the annual freshwater supply for some states.

But as climate change brings winter temperatures to new highs, these summer rushes of freshwater can sometimes slow to a trickle.

“The runoff supports cities most people wouldn’t expect,” explained Chris Derksen, a glaciologist and Research Scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. “Big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles get water from snowmelt.”

To forecast snowmelt with greater accuracy, NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) and a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are developing SNOWWI, a dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar that could one day be the cornerstone of future missions dedicated to measuring snow mass on a global scale – something the science community lacks.

SNOWWI aims to fill this technology gap. In January and March 2024, the SNOWWI research team passed a key milestone, flying their prototype for the first time aboard a small, twin-engine aircraft in Grand Mesa, Colorado, and gathering useful data on the area’s winter snowfields.

“I’d say the big development is that we’ve gone from pieces of hardware in a lab to something that makes meaningful data,” explained Paul Siqueira, professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and principal investigator for SNOWWI.

SNOWWI stands for Snow Water-equivalent Wide Swath Interferometer and Scatterometer. The instrument probes snowpack with two Ku-band radar signals: a high-frequency signal that interacts with individual snow grains, and a low-frequency signal that passes through the snowpack to the ground. 

The high-frequency signal gives researchers a clear look at the consistency of the snowpack, while the low-frequency signal helps researchers determine its total depth.

“Having two frequencies allows us to better separate the influence of the snow microstructure from the influence of the snow depth,” said Derksen, who participated in the Grand Mesa field campaign. “One frequency is good, two frequencies are better.”

_{The SNOWWI team in Grand Mesa, preparing to flight test their instrument. From an altitude of 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), SNOWWI can map 100 square kilometers (about 38 square miles) in just 30 minutes.}

As both of those scattered signals interact with the snowpack and bounce back towards the instrument, they lose energy. SNOWWI measures that lost energy, and researchers later correlate those losses to features within the snowpack, especially its depth, density, and mass.

From an airborne platform with an altitude of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers), SNOWWI could map 40 square miles (100 square kilometers) of snowy terrain in just 30 minutes. From space, SNOWWI’s coverage would be even greater. Siqueira is working with Capella Space to develop a space-ready SNOWWI for satellite missions.

But there’s still much work to be done before SNOWWI visits space. Siqueira plans to lead another field campaign, this time in the mountains of Idaho. Grand Mesa is relatively flat, and Siqueira wants to see how well SNOWWI can measure snowpack tucked in the folds of complex, asymmetrical terrain.

For Derksen, who spends much of his time quantifying the freshwater content of snowpack in Canada, having a reliable database of global snowpack measurements would be game-changing.

“Snowmelt is money. It has intrinsic economic value,” he said. “If you want your salmon to run in mountain streams in the spring, you must have snowmelt. But unlike other natural resources, at this time, we really can’t monitor it very well.”

For information about opportunities to collaborate with NASA on novel, Earth-observing instruments, see ESTO’s catalog of open solicitations with its Instrument Incubator Program here.

Project Leads: Dr. Paul Siqueira, University of Massachusetts (Principal Investigator); Hans-Peter Marshall, University of Idaho (Co-Investigator)

Sponsoring Organizations: NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), Instrument Incubator Program (IIP)

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Gateway: Centering Science

Stephanie Dudley sits at the intersection of human spaceflight and science for Gateway, humanity’s first lunar space station that will host astronauts and unique scientific investigations.

Gateway’s mission integration and utilization manager, Dudley recently posed for this photo in a high-fidelity mockup of the space station’s HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), where astronauts will live, conduct science, and prepare for missions to investigate the lunar South Pole region. Dudley works with NASA’s partner space agencies and academia to identify science opportunities on Gateway.

HALO will host various science experiments, including the Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite, led by NASA, and the Internal Dosimeter Array, led by ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The heliophysics experiment will fly on HALO’s exterior, and the dosimeter will be housed inside Gateway in a series of racks, mockups of which are shown to the right of Dudley in the image above. Both experiments will study solar and cosmic radiation to help the science community better understand how to protect astronauts and hardware during deep space travels to places like Mars.

“We are building [Gateway] for a 15-year lifespan, but definitely hope that we go longer than that,” Dudley recently said on Houston We Have a Podcast. “And so that many years of scientific study in a place where humans have never worked and lived long-term, Gateway is going to allow us to do that.”

Dudley pulls double duty as a deputy director for the Exploration Operations Office within NASA’s Moon to Mars Program, a role that connects her to Artemis science beyond Gateway, including science investigations on the Orion and Human Landing System spacecraft and lunar terrain vehicle.

“My work…is helping to make sure that across all of the six [Artemis] programs, including Gateway, we’re all focusing on utilization in the same way,” Dudley said.

Dudley’s team coordinates science payloads for Artemis II, the first mission to send humans to the Moon since 1972, and Artemis III, the first landing in the lunar South Pole region that is of keen interest to the global science community.

Gateway’s HALO will launch with the space station’s Power and Propulsion Element ahead of the Artemis IV mission in 2028, the first lunar mission to include an orbiting space station.

“Gateway sounds so science fiction, but it’s real,” Dudley recently said. “And we’re building it. And in a few years, it’s going to be around the Moon and that’s when the real work, the fun work in my opinion, is going to begin and science will never be the same.”

Gateway is humanity’s first lunar space station as a central component of the Artemis campaign that will return humans to the Moon for scientific discovery and chart a path for the first human missions to Mars.

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Sols 4345-4347: Contact Science is Back on the Table

Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 25, 2024

The changes to the plan Wednesday, moving the drive a sol earlier, meant that we started off planning this morning about 18 meters (about 59 feet) farther along the western edge of Gediz Vallis and with all the data we needed for planning. This included the knowledge that once again one of Curiosity’s wheels was perched on a rock. Luckily, unlike on Wednesday, it was determined that it was safe to still go ahead with full contact science for this weekend. This consisted of two targets “Mount Brewer” and “Reef Lake,” two targets on the top and side of the same block.

Aside from the contact science, Curiosity has three sols to fill with remote imaging. The first two sols include “targeted science,” which means all the imaging of specific targets in our current workspace. Then, after we drive away on the second sol, we fill the final sol of the plan with “untargeted science,” where we care less about knowing exactly where the rover is ahead of time. A lot of the environmental team’s (or ENV) activities fall under this umbrella, which is why our dedicated “ENV Science Block” (about 30 minutes of environmental activities one morning every weekend) tends to fall at the end of a weekend plan. 

But that’s getting ahead of myself. The weekend plan starts off with two ENV activities — a dust devil movie and a suprahorizon cloud movie. While cloud movies are almost always pointed in the same direction, our dust devil movie has to be specifically targeted. Recently we’ve been looking southeast toward a more sandy area (which you can see above), to see if we can catch dust lifting there. After those movies we hand the reins back over to the geology team (or GEO) for ChemCam observations of Reef Lake and “Poison Meadow.” Mastcam will follow this up with its own observations of Reef Lake and the AEGIS target from Wednesday’s plan. The rover gets some well-deserved rest before waking up for the contact science I talked about above, followed by a late evening Mastcam mosaic of “Fascination Turret,” a part of Gediz Vallis ridge that we’ve seen before. 

We’re driving away on the second sol, but before that we have about another hour of science. ChemCam and Mastcam both have observations of “Heaven Lake” and the upper Gediz Vallis ridge, and ENV has a line-of-sight observation, to see how much dust is in the crater, and a pre-drive deck monitoring image to see if any dust moves around on the rover deck due to either driving or wind. Curiosity gets a short nap before a further drive of about 25 meters (about 82 feet). 

The last sol of the weekend is a ChemCam special. AEGIS will autonomously choose a target for imaging, and then ChemCam has a passive sky observation to examine changing amounts of atmospheric gases. The weekend doesn’t end at midnight, though — we wake up in the morning for the promised morning ENV block, which we’ve filled with two cloud movies, another line-of-sight, and a tau observation to see how dusty the atmosphere is.

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University

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