NEAR SPACE CORP — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S3

Description

The proposed effort focuses on Deployment and Inflation, two critical Entry, Descent, and Flight phases required for successful Venus Aerobot missions.nbsp; While suitable platform designs must be optimized for the science portion of the flight, they must first survive both the deployment and inflation phases.nbsp; Phase I develops techniques for providing a controlled low g deployment and facilitating the inflation process by helping to align the multi-cell envelops to help mitigate potential damaged from excessive deployment shock loads or flagging during inflation.nbsp; Phase I culminates with hangar tests of off the shelf deployment hardware with representative Aerobot envelop configurations to help determine the feasibility of the approach.nbsp; Phase II will focus on creating mission specific prototype hardware and validating the techniques with a flight test.