FOCUS_ECI_RFI_FY23 olh.pdf

NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) is hereby soliciting information from potential partners to participate in a proposal development activity that addresses the technical objectives, development, and demonstration of Formation-based Observations via Constellations of Unmanned Systems (FOCUS) in response to an Early Career Initiative (ECI) sponsored by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and released on April 7th, 2022. The deadline for partnering responses is April 21st, 2022.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) LaRC is seeking participation with this partnering synopsis from all interested U.S. and non-U.S. organizations, including educational institutions, industry, not-for-profit institutions, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as NASA Centers and other U.S. Government Agencies. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Other Minority Universities (OMUs), small disadvantaged businesses (SDBs), veteran-owned small businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, HUBZone small businesses, and women-owned small businesses (WOSBs) are also encouraged to apply.

Participation by non-U.S. organizations is welcome but subject to NASA’s policy of no exchange of funds, in which each government supports its own national participants and associated costs.

The Early Career Initiative is an internal NASA call for space technology development and demonstration proposals that foster the next step in the professional development of early career NASA technologists by providing cutting-edge hands-on space technology hardware development opportunities. This initiative promotes creative joint partnering within highly collaborative work environments between the best and brightest NASA early career innovators, while teaming with world-class industry, academia, and other government organizations.

Proposing teams will include a core team, including NASA and external partner members and at least half of the core team must consist of NASA early career employees. A NASA early career employee must lead the project (Project Lead) and shall engage an experienced NASA mentor, and a STMD mentor who will be identified after selection of the project. Other roles (e.g., Project Manager, Project Scientist) can be filled by team members from NASA or partner. The general approach will be to employ agile systems engineering methods emphasizing working products, collaboration, iterative, hands-on testing, and responsiveness to change rather than formal process and documentation with milestone-based assessments including a continuation review at the development site and a final presentation to NASA Headquarters. If a project wishes to involve a foreign organization, prior confirmation is needed.

Teams must propose innovative space hardware-focused projects lasting no more than 2 years and costing up to $1.25M per year in total for all cost including procurement and labor.

NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) is seeking partners to participate in developing proposals and collaborating on potential Early Career Initiative (ECI) projects. LaRC is pursuing several topic areas that align with NASA’s space technology priorities and involve a variety of technical areas that could benefit from partnering.

Project FOCUS will address the coordination problem arising from the expected increase in the potential number of ground-, air-, and space-based observatories supporting science missions in the coming decades. If this coordination problem is not addressed, it will likely create an environment of uncoordinated observatories with the potential to interfere with each other’s science and technology objectives. However, if observatories are actively and appropriately coordinated, not only can NASA reduce mission interference, but can also leverage these distributed sensors to bridge the gap between the required precision of future science and technology goals and the current state-of-art in observing technologies. In addition, such an ecosystem of heterogeneous sensors requires copious human resources to manage safely and efficiently. To alleviate this problem, autonomous management and control strategies that safely reduce the number of operators, as well as the operator’s workload is a key component to maintaining a scalable set of observatories. Possibly, lowering the cost and extending the lifetime of certain missions. As opposed to open-loop coordination, where each sensor simply attempts to point at a desired scientific target; distributed closed-loop coordination requires the sensing platforms to negotiate their positions and attitudes, as well as monitoring and adapting in real time to the errors incurred by the pointing devices of the cooperating observatories. Multiple missions of interest to NASA could benefit from the availability of distributed cooperative precision pointing technologies such as:

• Autonomous validation and verification of satellite data, such as in Operation Icebridge.

• Increased pointing precision for optical communications in the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC).

• The extension of aperture synthesis telescopes with spacecraft constellations for the observation of dim and distant objects of interest, such as the Event Horizon Telescope

(EHT).

• The coordination of a starshade and its observing spacecraft for direct imaging of exoplanets.

• The acquisition of correlated atmospheric data.

Project FOCUS proposes the development of online distributed time-critical coordination strategies for the formation and precise pointing of a constellation of small spacecraft, and a set of earth-bound platforms. The resulting technologies are intended to bridge the gap in precision between NASA’s science and technology goals and current observing and pointing capabilities, as well as find the conditions under which the distributed array of sensors can achieve its coordination goals over a lossy directed communication network.

Given the above background, the partners can propose to the technical challenges provided below:

• NASA is seeking academic partners to provide expertise in the design and autonomous control of small spacecraft equipped with cross and down-links, as well as scientific payloads. The design and autonomy of small spacecraft shall be supplemented with modeling and simulation environments that include orbital dynamics, communications among multiple spacecraft, as well as spacecraft and earth-based stations. Experience with the operation and development of optical terminals for communications will be preferred. Distributed collaboration, state estimation, and perception of autonomous systems that incorporate competency aware software, dedicated to ensuring a satisfactory interaction between the autonomous systems and their human supervisors will be needed. Academic partners shall participate in laboratory demonstrations by providing support for demonstration planning, execution, and data analysis. They may also conduct various proofs of concept and small demonstrations prior to and in support of project milestones.

• NASA is seeking industry partners to provide small and compact rotorcraft platforms with two concentric biaxial counter rotating rotors, where at least one rotor has a collective and cyclic control. The rotorcraft shall have the option to be equipped with a gimbal, a camera, and a LiDAR sensor. Industry partners shall also be familiar with software for autonomous path-following control, and commercially of-the-shelf navigation solutions. Industry partners are expected to collaborate with the NASA team in the development of these platforms and tailor hardware solutions to the distributed coordination problem being addressed.

The partner must provide expertise in at least one of the fields described above and must have the personnel and/or facilities required to perform any necessary software or hardware development and testing described within the partner’s proposal submission.

This partnering opportunity does not guarantee selection for award of any contracts or other agreements, nor is it to be construed as a commitment by NASA to pay for the information solicited. It is expected that the partner(s) selected would provide (at no cost to NASA) technical requirements, conceptual designs, technical data, proposal input, project schedules, and cost estimates. If the proposal is subsequently selected, NASA LaRC anticipates issuing contracts or other agreements to the selected partner(s) for the performance of the proposed tasks.

Partner selections will be made by LaRC based on the listed criteria:

1. Technical Qualifications and Expertise (40 points):

This criterion evaluates the technical expertise, and capabilities of the external partner in supporting and/or executing activities related to the topics above.

This criterion evaluates the technical expertise, capabilities, and innovativeness of the external partner in leading and/or executing activities related to the topics above.

2. Workforce and Cost (40 Points):

The proposer shall provide workforce and cost estimates for the support being offered. This shall include estimated number of participants, roles, and time commitment.

3. Facilities (20 Points):

This criterion evaluates the proposer’s facilities, tools, and supporting technologies (development, testing, and analyses) to conduct the development or demonstration of the proposed task. The proposer should discuss availability of facilities and/or tools and technologies.

No solicitation exists; therefore, do not request a copy of the solicitation. If a solicitation is released, it will be synopsized on SAM.gov. Interested firms are responsible for monitoring this website for the release of any solicitation or synopsis.

Interested firms having the required capabilities necessary to meet the above requirement described herein should submit a capability statement of no more than 5 pages indicating the ability to perform all aspects of the effort. The responses should use 12-point font for each technical area of interest (i.e. offerors responding to one or more of the mission elements may submit up to 5 pages per each element). Responses shall also address each of the evaluation criteria listed above.

Resumes of key personnel and a cover page that clearly identifies the topic area addressed by the response do not count against the total allocated page count. Please advise if the requirement is considered to be a commercial or commercial-type product. A commercial item is defined in FAR 2.101.

All responses shall be submitted electronically via e-mail to Octavia Hicks at octavia.l.hicks@nasa.gov and to Benjamin N. Kelley at benjamin.n.kelley@nasa.gov no later than 4:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time April 21st, 2022, All procurement questions should be directed to Octavia Hicks.

This synopsis is for information and planning purposes only and is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government nor will the Government pay for information solicited.

Respondents will be notified of the results of the evaluation. Respondents deemed fully qualified will be considered in any resultant partnering selections for the requirement.

mailto:octavia.l.hicks@nasa.gov mailto:octavia.l.hicks@nasa.gov mailto:benjamin.n.kelley@nasa.gov mailto:benjamin.n.kelley@nasa.gov