Volume 5, Number 2     March/April 1997

  Small Business/SBIR

NASA Partners With Small Business
for New Space Science Initiative

ASA AND 10 SMALL COMPANIES are working together to generate many of the innovations that will make space interferometry a reality.

NASA awarded Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research and development contracts in interferometry to establish the feasibility of the companies' proposed innovations (see the box below). Successful Phase I contractors will compete for Phase II contracts to develop these innovations. These companies will work the Interferometry Program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop their innovations for future space interferometry missions.

Space interferometry will more accurately measure the distance to stars, generate higher resolution images and, for the first time, see planets around another sun or star. The first planned Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will measure the location of stars with an accuracy comparable to measuring the thickness of a quarter on the Moon.

Artist's conception of a 10-meter baseline SIM spacecraft in Earth orbit that will measure the positions of stars in the sky and their distances with a precision that far exceeds ground observations.

Space interferometers use more than one mirror to collect light from stellar objects. This multi-use of mirrors overcomes the limitations of current launch systems, which keep mirror size to approximately three meters. The distance light travels from separate mirrors must be the same for the light to be successfully combined into an image. This extremely demanding requirement means mirror location must be accurate to approximately tens of nanometers; otherwise, each mirror's light waves cancel each other rather than build a stronger image.

Space interferometers take advantage of this nulling effect. Light from locations other than the interferometer's focus hits the mirror at various distances, canceling each other out. Thus, a star's blinding light can be canceled by the nulling effect. Astronomers then can see much fainter objects, such as planets around stars and a planet in another solar system.

SIM is the first of several planned space interferometry missions. It will provide more accurate information on the location of stars and evidence of the existence of planets around stars other than our Sun.

SBIR Phase I Interferometry Projects Comapny Proposed Innovation Digital Optics Corporation An optical encoder to precisely sense the location of segmented mirror elements Garman Systems A solid-state electric actuator for vibration isolation and attenuation Intelligent Automation Inc. A passive damping system that does not require power controls Meadowlark Optics A liquid beam steerer to align accurately laser beams for precise distant measurement (metrology) Pixel Vision A 20,000-frame-per-second light sensor for capturing the laser light signal Payload Systems A low-cost nanometer accuracy measurement system to deploy the elements on an interferometer Schwartz Electro-Optics An ultra-stable, solid-state laser suitable for precision metrology SciMeasure A sensitive high-frame-rate, solid-state camera for image generation Vibro-Acoustic Sciences An integrated engineering design method for investigating the structural dynamics at the nanometer level of complex systems, such as a space interferometer Xinetics A deformable mirror for fine-tuning the image captured by mirrors