Aurora Flight Sciences and Harvard University have proposed the Airborne Stratospheric Climate Coupled Convective Catalytic Chemistry Experiment North America (ASC5ENA) mission to the NASA Earth Venture initiative. The ICOS instrument and the reel-down facility on the StratoCruiser are both centric to this study and represent the first path of commercialization for the proposed work. The ICOS instrument is broadly useful. The instruments versatility to detect a variety of compounds means it is useful for a large variety of climate studies but size is a limiting factor that drives up mission cost. The proposed SBIR effort will ensure the instrument is compatible with a variety of platforms including the WB-57, ER-2 but will also extend the instrument to smaller unmanned platforms. Expanding the ICOS suitability for other smaller platforms through SWaP reduction will enable lower-cost observation campaigns for a variety of scientific goals moving forward.
The primary application for the ICOS instrument is scientific studies of atmospheric chemistry and the climate. The primary non-NASDA avenues for commercialization will be to provide this miniaturized instrument to other researchers. That said the instrument is an excellent detector of a wide variety of compounds including HCl, NO2, CO, HDO, CO2, CH4, N2O, C2H6, H2, and O3. This makes it useful for applications including biomedical evaluations of breath. The team will explore these applications to determine the market for commercialization of a biomedical ICOS instrument.
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