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Enhancing the Utility of Hosted Payloads Using MOSA Approaches

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Air Force
Contract: FA9453-13-M-0165
Agency Tracking Number: F131-075-0676
Amount: $149,996.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: AF131-075
Solicitation Number: 2013.1
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2013
Award Year: 2013
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2013-09-18
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2014-06-19
Small Business Information
3921 Academy Parkway North, NE 3rd Floor
Albuquerque, NM -
United States
DUNS: 828367883
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Ken Center
 Software Director
 (505) 503-1563
 ken.center@pnpinnovations.com
Business Contact
 Jeremy Werderman
Title: Administrative Director
Phone: (505) 503-1563
Email: jeremy.werderman@pnpinnovations.com
Research Institution
 Stub
Abstract

ABSTRACT: Incorporating hosted payloads onto satellites deployed for other primary missions is an approach that has the potential to provide benefits to both the hosted payload user community and the host satellite providers. But getting rides to space and accommodation on a dedicated satellite bus in the current climate of shrinking budgets is becoming increasingly difficult. Opening up opportunities to occupy slots on commercial satellite busses is a practical possibility for these cases. On the other side, the owners of potential commercial hosting platforms may benefit financially from the revenue that can be collected from selling satellite bus"real-estate"available due to excess SWaP margin not allocated to the primary payload. PnP Innovations is proposing to leverage the SPA standards to create a Hosted Payload architecture that offers MOSA features to the potential user community. We will develop a Hosted Payload Interface Unit (HPIU) that standardizes the interface to payloads and offers a configurable daughter card option to handle the less malleable host side interface. SPA does not currently provide the features necessary to protect system users from unauthorized access to sensitive operational data. This research will address that concern by extending the SPA standards to include multi-layer security. BENEFIT: If space flight becomes more accessible because of the proposed hosted payload architecture technologies, there is broad appeal to a significant user community. The diversity of that community extends to government and military agencies, universities, and commercial companies. If an integration standard for payloads is agreed-to, it will be much easier to promote widespread use of the concept. Developers and integrators alike will enjoy the determinism associated with developing a flight experiment to a known interface. If the architecture is similarly well-defined, it will be easy for any of these users to interact with their deployed payloads from their own sites on the internet. Universities and commercial companies seeking space research options or qualification of hardware would have many more opportunities to access rides. A low-cost developer"s kit (which we would develop and commercialize in this SBIR track) would enable those users. Major government use cases include potential NASA experiments accommodated on commercial platforms, and military use of the secure architecture to host SSA sensors on commercial host platforms to provide more comprehensive and robust worldwide coverage to detect and respond to non-deterministic events. The standards extensions proposed in this SBIR to implement multi-layer security benefit SPA in any domain that it is applied to. As an optional feature of a plug and play system, it provides protection in cases where preventing unauthorized access to data in an open or loosely-regulated network is a user requirement.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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