Volume 5, Number 4     July/August 1997

  Small Business/SBIR

SBIR Company "Flies" with Contract

CCURATE AUTOMATION CORPORATION (AAC) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a member of the team selected by NASA to design and construct four Hyper-X research vehicles under a $33.4 million performanced-based contract.

The vehicles are to be tested at Mach 5, 7 and 10 at 100,000 feet altitude to validate airframe-integrated, dual-mode scramjet performance in flight. The Hyper-X program, conducted by Langley Research Center and Dryden Flight Research Center is projected to cost $166 million.

The absence of a test platform for scramjet-powered (supersonic-combustion ramjet) aircraft in flight has slowed development of hypersonic aircraft, an air-breathing economical alternative to rocket-propelled vehicles. Validity of scramjets testing to date has not been confirmed because it has occurred on the ground under simulated flight conditions. NASA has been working for several years to determine the appropriate airborne testbed needed to verify laboratory results.

Accurate Automation Corporation will help NASA design and construct four Hyper-X vehicles. AAC's expertise with sensor technology was developed via SBIR projects like LoFlyte.

The 12-foot long vehicles will be air-launched from a B-52 and boosted to hypersonic speeds with booster rockets. The first flight, at Mach 7, is scheduled for 1999 with about one flight each 10 months through 2001.

Developing an experimental aircraft in two years is unprecedented. "Most impressively, these flights will begin less than two years from now. Under old ways of doing business it might have taken ten years to reach flight tests," said NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin.

AAC will be responsible for the sensor suite and telemetry system for the Hyper-X aircraft. This $3.7 million portion of the program is very critical as each aircraft will collect scramjet data for only about five seconds. Fast and accurate data transmission and reception is essential for mission success since more than 300 telemetry parameters, including those needed for flight control, will be collected during the approximately 5- to 10-second data collection period.

AAC's expertise in sensor technology is a result of ongoing NASA and Air Force SBIR programs. The first is LoFLYTE, a joint program to develop a neural network flight testbed for subsonic speeds. The second is a NASA SBIR program to develop an air-data sensor subsystem that uses pressure-sensitive "smart skins" and neural networks to compute air data. This eliminates the need for pilot tubes, reducing the aircraft's drag and radar signatures. The third is a series of SBIR contracts involving sensor fusion, the combination and analysis of sensor data from multiple sources through the use of neural networks, to increase clarity and sensitivity while reducing errors in data received from single sensors.

For more information, contact Bob Pegg at Langley Research Center.
Call 757/864-3760 Fax: 757/864-8545

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