Goddard's IRAD program is managed under Goddard's Office of Chief Technologist. Activities are coordinated in collaboration with the Sciences and Exploration Directorate; Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate; Flight Projects Directorate; Wallops Flight Facility; New Opportunites Office; SBIR/STTR program; Goddard Strategic Partnerships Office; and the Export Compliance Office.
IRAD provides"seed funding" to develop concepts, reduce technology risk, and advance human capital and technological capabilities. The program is highly competitive, opportunity-driven, and 100% strategically aligned with NASA's and GSFC's strategic priorities. A significant portion of the program is focused on Early Stage Innovations for high-risk, strategically aligned, potential high-payoff technologies that are longer-term or lower TRL.
","parentProgram":{"ableToSelect":false,"acronym":"IRAD","isActive":true,"programId":87,"responsibleMd":{"canUserEdit":false,"locationEdit":false,"organizationRolePretty":"","organizationTypePretty":""},"title":"Center Independent Research & Development","acronymOrTitle":"IRAD"},"parentProgramId":87,"programId":153,"responsibleMd":{"organizationId":4910,"organizationName":"Mission Support Directorate","acronym":"MSD","organizationType":"NASA_Mission_Directorate","canUserEdit":false,"locationEdit":false,"organizationRolePretty":"","organizationTypePretty":"NASA Mission Directorate"},"responsibleMdOffice":4910,"title":"Center Independent Research & Development: GSFC IRAD","acronymOrTitle":"GSFC IRAD"},"acronym":"","description":"We propose to enhance GSFC’s interplanetary mission design capability by designing a fully automated multi-spacecraft multi-objective interplanetary global trajectory optimization transcription. Advanced trajectory design technologies including the ability to design Distributed Spacecraft Missions (DSMs) are attracting increased interest but no mission design tool is currently capable of performing mission and systems design/optimization for an interplanetary DSM. This effort will deliver a software prototype capable of building the optimal design of a DSM-class mission where multiple spacecraft depart to the heliocentric regime from the same launch vehicle to perform coordinated science. This new capability will lay the groundwork for a follow-on proposal to implement this new capability into NASA Goddard's Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) where it will enable new announcements of opportunity for Distributed Spacecraft Missions.
","benefits":"Multi-spacecraft mission and systems optimization cannot currently be achieved using any current known mission design tools. Using current techniques, any multi-vehicle mission design and optimization is approximated with laborious iterative design of separate single-vehicle mission designs that require significant, expensive human-in-the-loop effort, and considers very little of the overall design space.
This effort will provide a robust software prototype that fully automates the mission and systems optimization of interplanetary multi-vehicle missions, which will both reduce the cost of the design process and dramatically improve the performance over any design found using traditional methods—providing GSFC a capability possessed by no other institution in the world. The result will bring new work to GSFC by providing highly competitive design solutions for any mission proposal involving ride-share and multiple spacecraft.
As an Early-Stage Innovation, the development of this capability will not only be tied to one mission, but rather enable an entirely new class of missions. The capability to rapidly design optimal multi-spacecraft missions will strengthen GSFC’s foothold to lead more planetary science missions- making it a leader in the development of distributed spacecraft missions. Among other applications, this multi-spacecraft mission and systems optimization tool will provide new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) class ride-share opportunities. We expect future funding to come from planetary science, heliophysics, and/or astrophysics mission studies using distributed spacecraft to demonstrate this technology over the next five years.
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