RELATIVE DYNAMICS INC — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: H9

Description

Relative Dynamics Inc. will develop an Optical Communication Array Transceiver (OCAT) with capabilities required in NASA Subtopic H9.01: Long-Range Optical Communication.nbsp;nbsp;Telescope arrays have advantages of lesser cost, improved diffraction-limited performance, slighter gravitational effects, scalability, ease of maintenance, and redundancy in operations.nbsp; In addition,nbsp;the use of multiple apertures adds additional benefits such as the ability to mitigate atmospheric fading with spatial diversity, to use small aperture size to reduce or eliminate AO complexity, to increment ground station collection area over time, to reduce cost, to remove a single point of failure, and to enable support for simultaneous communications links by federating the array to multiple targets.nbsp;Our technical objective is to analyze and develop a monostatic duplex (transmit and receive) coherent transceiver arraynbsp;with new commercial coherent integrated photonics modems and mass production composite-structure telescope array elements.nbsp; The innovations in OCAT are for both spaceflight and ground systems and the array concepts can selectivity be applied tonbsp;coherent and direct detection systems.Our innovative Koesterrsquo;s prism precision wave-front and angular sensor enables closed-loop control ofnbsp;(1) transmitter collimation (receiver focus) and (2) fine-pointing.nbsp;nbsp;The prism sensornbsp;samples the edge of the beam.Carbon fiber composites have high stiffness, high tensile strength, low weight, high chemical resistance, high temperature tolerance and low thermal expansion. Continuous-carbon-fiber rivals beryllium in the key parameters of specific stiffness, and both transient and steady state thermal stability due to its much lower coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Our high-strength-to-weight ratio continuous carbon fiber structures will be manufactured bynbsp;a world-leader composites manufacturernbsp;that is leveraging a multi-million dollar 5-year DARPA-sponsored automated manufacturing project.nbsp;