An on-board real-time structural health monitoring sensing system is required to increase aerospace vehicle safety and reliability while reducing the cost of inspection. Much of the research has been focused on the development of Bragg grating-based fiber optic sensors. This work addresses the difficulties and points to a practical solution for applications requiring small, lightweight, tunable lasers with a simplified design.

This invention disclosure deals with an effective approach for reducing flap side-edge noise. It involves the application of a proven passive control technique to the side edge, which leads to a significantly weaker side edge vortex via modification of the vortex initiation and roll-up processes.

The proposed innovation makes use of the passive cooler with a parabolic sun shade concept to achieve desired attributes. This cooler is lightweight, compact, scalable and can be easily adapted to many applications.

The solution provided with the Sample Caching System (SCS) is to store samples in sleeves and seal the sleeves in a container. Alignment of the sampling tool with the sample storage system is achieved by placing the sleeve in a compliant funnel which passively complies to the external sample acquisition tool and then separately complies to the SCS transfer arm.

The work described here produced extremely flat plasma profiles in the thruster that results in uniform erosion over the grids. This essentially doubles the thruster life compared to the state-of-the-art NASA NSTAR ion thruster at the same beam current level.