NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 1

2021 NASA EPSCOR Rapid Response Research (R3)

Proposal Abstracts

Contents 

21-EPSCoR R3-0001...................................................................................................................................................................4

Appendix A: Cooperative Energy-aware Navigation of Hybrid Airships in the Atmosphere of Venus......................................4

21-EPSCoR-R3-0002 ..................................................................................................................................................................5

Enhanced weldability of next-generation refractory high entropy alloys (for Appendix I)...................................................5

21-EPSCoR-R3-0003 ..................................................................................................................................................................6

Conceptual Design and Analysis of Aerobot for Long-Endurance Mission on Venus (for appendix A) .................................6

21-EPSCoR-R3-0005 ..................................................................................................................................................................7

Appendix I - Machine Learning Accelerated Discovery, Testing, and Characterization of Light-weight Refractory High 

Entropy Alloys for Space Application....................................................................................................................................7

21-EPSCoR-R3-0009 ..................................................................................................................................................................8

Nano-based Ceramic-metal Composites to Support Planetary Agrosystems (Appendix D: Crop Plant Stress Tolerance for 

Space Exploration)................................................................................................................................................................8

21-EPSCoR-R3-0010 ..................................................................................................................................................................9

Thermophysical property characterization of aerospace alloys for modeling In-Space Manufacturing processes 

(Appendix I: Modeling of Manufacturing Processes in Micro and Reduced Gravity Environments) ....................................9

21-EPSCoR-R3-0012 ................................................................................................................................................................10

Wearable Sensors for Low-Power On-Demand Health Monitoring (Appendix B: Improvement of Space Suit State of Art, 

CSCO-2021-02) ...................................................................................................................................................................10

21-EPSCoR-R3-0013 ................................................................................................................................................................11

APPENDIX C: SMD EARTH SCIENCES DIVISION - ASSIMILATION OF SATELLITE DATA FOR PREDICTING CYANOHABS IN 

KANSAS...............................................................................................................................................................................11

21-EPSCoR-R3-0014 ................................................................................................................................................................11

Appendix E: KSC Exploration Systems and Development: Moon to Mars - Gas Separation Processes for High Purity 

Methane Production ..........................................................................................................................................................11

21-EPSCoR-R3-0016 ................................................................................................................................................................12

A flash co-sintering strategy for the fabrication of LiPON-based bulk-type solid-state lithium ion battery - Appendix G..12

21-EPSCoR-R3-0018 ................................................................................................................................................................13

Appendix D: Characterizing Stress Tolerance of Leafy Greens to CO2, Humidity, and Radiation ......................................13

21-EPSCoR-R3-0021 ................................................................................................................................................................13

Appendix A - An Aerial Platform to Navigate the Troposphere of Venus Enabled by New Cellular Materials - Gross .......13

21-EPSCoR-R3-0022 ................................................................................................................................................................15

Appendix D: Impacts of Gravity and Surfactants on Drainage Flow and Rheology of Wet Foams - Z.Li ............................15

21-EPSCoR-R3-0023 ................................................................................................................................................................16

Appendix E: Supercritical combustion reactor for water oxidation and recycling of non-edible biomass for long duration 

space flights - Farouk .........................................................................................................................................................16

21-EPSCoR-R3-0025 ................................................................................................................................................................17
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Appendix G: Rapid Laser Reactive Sintering of High-Performance Electrolytes for Additive Manufacturing of Solid State 

Batteries.............................................................................................................................................................................17

21-EPSCoR-R3-0026 ................................................................................................................................................................18

Appendix H: Characterization of the Intracranial Venous System following Spaceflight - Roberts....................................18

21-EPSCoR-R3-0027 ................................................................................................................................................................19

Appendix I: Advanced Machine and Process Architecture for Refractories via Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive 

Manufacturing ...................................................................................................................................................................19

21-EPSCoR-R3-0029 ................................................................................................................................................................20

Appendix I: Cryogenic Solid Particle Erosion of Advanced Materials for Lunar Mission Applications ................................20

21-EPSCoR-R3-0030 ................................................................................................................................................................21

Appendix D - Improved drought tolerance of mustard green with atmospheric pressure plasmas ...................................21

21-EPSCoR-R3-0032 ................................................................................................................................................................22

Appendix E: KSC Partnerships Office: Design and Manufacturing of a Seed Planter and Germination System for Space 

Crop Production..................................................................................................................................................................22

21-EPSCoR-R3-0033 ................................................................................................................................................................23

NASA EPSCoR R3 Appendix D (BPS): Comparison of stress-inducible sesquiterpene lactone profiles of lettuce cultivars 

grown on the ISS and on earth ...........................................................................................................................................23

21-EPSCoR-R3-0035 ................................................................................................................................................................24

Appendix G: (NASA ARMD Electric Aircraft Batteries & Crash Safety): Composite Materials Mechanical Property 

Characterization for LS-DYNA MAT213 Model...................................................................................................................24

21-EPSCoR-R3-0040 ................................................................................................................................................................25

Appendix EIII: Optimizing the bioconversion and recycling of inedible plant waste using mixed microbial cultures for 

long-term human habitation in space................................................................................................................................25

21-EPSCoR-R3-0042 ................................................................................................................................................................26

Appendix I In-Situ X-Ray and Thermal Monitoring of the Laser-Powder Bed Fusion Process: Determining Fusion 

Signatures Indicative of Part Quality..................................................................................................................................26

21-EPSCoR-R3-0043 ................................................................................................................................................................27

Appendix G -- Materials and Processes for All Solid-State Batteries for Electric Aircraft: Multi-Dimensional Networked 

Antiperovskite Electrolytes for All Solid-State Batteries for Electric Aircraft......................................................................27

21-EPSCoR-R3-0046 ................................................................................................................................................................27

Appendix F: NASA SMD Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO): A Meta-Learning 

Framework for Characterizing and Accessing Training Data for GLOBE Observer Mosquito and Land Cover Protocols...27

21-EPSCoR-R3-0047 ................................................................................................................................................................28

Appendix D: All-metal-oxide p-n photovoltaic junctions fabricated using materials abundant in the Martian regolith....28

21-EPSCoR-R3-0049 ................................................................................................................................................................29

Appendix F: Assessing Citizen Science Labeling to Improve Training Data Quality for Land Cover Protocols within the 

GLOBE Observer Community..............................................................................................................................................29

21-EPSCoR-R3-0051 ................................................................................................................................................................30
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Appendix D: Elucidation of stress resilience of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam) on Mars-like soil......................30

21-EPSCoR-R3-0052 ................................................................................................................................................................31

Appendix F (CISTO): Fault Diagnosis for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems using Reinforcement Learning ..................31

21-EPSCoR-R3-0055 ................................................................................................................................................................31

NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research: BDNN Hackathon: Uncertainty Aware Few Shot Learning from Citizen Science 

Data and Bayesian Deep Neural Network for Land Cover Image Classification.................................................................31

21-EPSCoR-R3-0056 ................................................................................................................................................................32

NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research: Multispectral and Hyperspectral Data Representation using Deep 

Autoencoders and Transfer Learning of BERT for Improved Detection of Harmful Algal Blooms......................................32

21-EPSCoR-R3-0058 ................................................................................................................................................................34

Hack the land out of them: Obtaining land cover classifications from GLOBE Observer photographs (for Appendix F). ...34

21-EPSCoR-R3-0062 ................................................................................................................................................................35

NASA EPSCoR R3 Appendix A (SMD): Material response of woven heat shield material in Venusian atmosphere ...............35

21-EPSCoR-R3-0064 ................................................................................................................................................................35

Stability and Distribution of Methane Clathrate Hydrates and Clathrasils on the Surface of Mars - Appendix B - Renewal 

80NSSC19M017 ......................................................................................................................................................................35

21-EPSCoR-R3-0065 ................................................................................................................................................................36

Study of Performance for Commercial Extravehicular Space Suit - Appendix B.....................................................................36

21-EPSCoR-R3-0066 ................................................................................................................................................................37

NASA EPSCoR R3 Appendix G (ARMD): Composite Solid Electrolytes for High Safety Lithium Metal Batteries.....................37

21-EPSCoR-R3-0069 ................................................................................................................................................................37

INE Proposal in Response to NASA EPSCOR Rapid Research Response Appendix A: High-Temperature 3-D SiC Integrated 

Circuit Chip Packaging for Venus Surface Exploration ............................................................................................................37

21-EPSCoR-R3-0071 ................................................................................................................................................................38

INE Proposal in Response to NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research Appendix D: NASA SMD Biological and Physical 

Sciences - Crop Plant Stress Tolerance for Space Exploration - Water Delivery and Gas Exchange Crop Stress Analysis for 

Space Exploration ...................................................................................................................................................................38

21-EPSCoR-R3-0074 ................................................................................................................................................................39

Appendix B. Renewal of Life on Mars Algae Cultivation for Long-term Food and Oxygen Production .................................39

21-EPSCoR-R3-0075 ................................................................................................................................................................40

Appendix D: Biomimicry of the Growth of a Desert Plant as an Approach for Extractions of Phosphorus and Minerals from 

Martian Regolith.....................................................................................................................................................................40

21-EPSCoR-R3-0078 ................................................................................................................................................................41

Appendix E: Thermophilic Biomass Recycling by Novel Chloroflexi to Support NASA Spaceflights.......................................41
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21-EPSCoR R3-0001

Appendix A: Cooperative Energy-aware Navigation of Hybrid Airships in the 

Atmosphere of Venus

NASA WV Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Majid Jaridi

Although the severity of the environment on Venussurface presents an enormous challenge for 

exploration rovers, in altitudes that range from 50km to 65km, the temperatures of the Venusian 

atmosphere are below 77 degrees Celsius, thus allowing the presence of flying robots, also known as 

aerobots. Among the initial concepts for aerial exploration are the hybrid airships, which rely on both 

buoyancy and aerodynamic lift to control their altitude and lateral position. This design allows the 

vehicle to use solar energy during the day to power a set of propellers and rise to altitudes close to 

60km, while at night it is unpowered and may sink to 50km. The vehicle may be lost if it drops below this 

altitude, where the high temperatures can damage its electronic circuits. In this project, we will address 

two important navigation problems to be encountered by groups of aerobots performing scientific 

missions in Venus: motion planning and localization. Motion planning is important from the scientific 

point of view, allowing the mission control to position the vehicles in specific latitudes, altitudes, and 

spatial distribution, and is fundamental to allow extended mission times, keeping the vehicles in a safe 

region (in terms of temperature and pressure) of the atmosphere. We propose an approach based on an 

online motion planner that will exploit the natural winds of the atmosphere and the 

vehiclesaerodynamics to control their altitudes using minimum power. Besides aiming at a smaller 

altitude variance, which would also reduce the temperature variance on the aerobot, using a 

combination of gliding, soaring, and powered flight, the planner would allow the vehicles to save energy 

during the day and use it during the night while meeting the science objectives. Thus, even without solar 

power, the vehicles would be able to react to situations of potential altitude loss caused by unpredicted 

turbulences, which would increase their robustness to adverse atmospheric conditions and 

consequently, their lifetime. As our second goal, we will use the cooperation of multiple aerobots for 

precise localization of each vehicle in Venusatmosphere. Within this approach, each aerobot will 

measure the relative inter-platform ranges and share other navigation data with nearby aerobots. 

Additionally, global intensity information (e.g., gravity anomaly or magnetic anomaly) previously 

mapped with an orbiter would provide an important information source for aerobot localization. Due to 

the limitation of communication ranges, the overall aerobot team will be considered as multiple 

subgroups with each aerobot as the information center of a sub-group. In each subgroup, a centralized 

cooperative localization estimation is performed to estimate each aerobots global pose (i.e., position 

and orientation) with the corresponding covariance matrices to represent pose uncertainties. We will 

consider motion planning and localization as complementary problems. While a group of aerobots can

be used to cooperatively estimate the natural wind flow of the atmosphere, thus allowing the execution 

of more intelligent motion plans for each vehicle, actively controlled aerobot motions may be used to 

drive down localization uncertainties during an extended mission duration. We will evaluate the 

developed algorithms through a series of simulations that will consider a variety of mission 

requirements and approximate models for the aerobots and Venusatmosphere.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0002

Enhanced weldability of next-generation refractory high entropy alloys (for 

Appendix I)

New Mexico State University

Dr. Paulo Oemig

Metals and alloys joining through welding is a critical dimension to consider for high-performance 

structural applications such as aerospace, power generation, and military. Although the refractory metal 

and alloys have shown favorable benefits for high-temperature applications in aerospace and nuclear, 

the challenges associated with conventional welding limits its applications. The conventional refractory 

alloys, due to well-marked ductile to brittle transition temperature (DBT), and high chemical activity 

towards the impurity element, particularly oxygen, yield the physical and metallurgical defects, 

therefore, exhibit limited weldability. A novel alloy with reduced sensitivity for the oxygen and a 

favorable welding approach is required to enhance the weldability of the refractory alloys. 

The proposed research is focused on the manufacturing of refractory high entropy alloys (RHEAs) based 

on molybdenum (Mo), niobium (Nb), tantalum (Ta), and tungsten (W). The study focuses on achieving 

high yield strength for structural integrity at high temperatures, increasing the room temperature (RT) 

ductility for ease of manufacturing, and reducing the sensitivity for the oxygen to increase weldability. 

This study aims at designing the grain boundaries (GBs) characteristics to minimize the concentration of 

the interstitial element of RHEAs to increase the toughness and ductility. A study indicates that the 

addition of titanium (Ti) and vanadium (V) in equimolar composition in the base alloy (MoNbTaW) might 

increase the ductility. Ti has been widely used as a getter element for interstitial elements. It is expected 

that Ti in the RHEAs matrix reduces the interstitial elements in the alloys. The getter elements selectively 

form carbide, nitride, and oxide in the presence of C, N, and O interstitial elements. These compounds 

will be distributed in the RHEAs matrix, which will increase high-temperature strength, ductility, and 

weldability.

Based on the equimolar composition of the Mo, Nb, Ta, W, V, and Ti, RHEAs will be developed. The 

RHEAs will be manufactured by powder metallurgy (PM) manufacturing technique. After achieving the 

bulk RHEAs with the desired composition, the bulk samples will be subjected to a range of 

characterization tools, including X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, and electron 

backscattered diffraction, for the microstructure and phase analysis. Following the microstructure 

analysis, tensile testing will be conducted to determine the strength and ductility of the novel RHEAs. A 

novel solid-state low temperature friction stir welding (LTFSW) will be performed on the PM RHEAs in a 

controlled atmosphere to determine the weldability of the alloy. The low-temperature welding ensures 

that no deleterious phases are being formed during the welding process. The post-welding 

characterization and mechanical testings of the welded RHEAs will be done to determine the 

characteristics of the welding of RHEAs. Based on the results obtained, the PIs will provide a 

recommendation to NASA on the novel refractory alloy development with enhanced weldability.
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Proposal Abstracts

21-EPSCoR-R3-0003

Conceptual Design and Analysis of Aerobot for Long-Endurance Mission on Venus 

(for appendix A)

New Mexico State University

Dr. Paulo Oemig

The harsh conditions on the Venus surface and the considerable uncertainty with regard to the 

atmospheric composition, chemistry, and physics provide motivation for the development of flight 

vehicles that can carry scientific instrumentation across different altitudes and latitudes. A wide variety 

of flight platforms such as fixed and variable altitude balloons, solar aircraft, and hybrid airships are 

being considered. While each platform has its merits and advantages depending on the mission 

scenario, this proposal is concerned with a hybrid vehicle (i.e. aerobot) that exploits both buoyancy and 

aerodynamic forces for good horizontal and vertical mobility while cutting down on power requirements 

and allowing for a robust and fail-safe operation. The vehicle will fly above the clouds, where the 

sulphuric acid content is lower and the direct and reflected solar irradiance can be tapped to recharge 

batteries, as well as inside and below the clouds. The vertical mobility will be achieved by adjusting the 

vehicles buoyancy. This one-year effort is concerned with the conceptual design (aerodynamic, 

propulsion, buoyancy and thermal analysis) and the vehicle optimization for relevant notional mission 

scenarios. Follow-up phases of the project will expand upon this initial effort by addressing other 

important aspects such as detailed design and testing, localization and control, and corrosion resistance.

Above the clouds, where the wind velocities can top 100 m/s and strong wind shear and turbulence are 

possible, vehicles with high aerodynamic efficiency and directional control are at an advantage. In the 

lower denser atmosphere, the buoyancy forces are larger and floating without power consumption 

becomes possible. The main objective of the proposed one-year initial effort is the conceptual design of 

a hybrid flight vehicle that can take advantage of both operating regimes. When deflated, the vehicle is 

to fit into a planetary entry shell. When inflated, the vehicle will have a shape with high aerodynamic 

efficiency that will allow it to efficiently change its latitude while providing sufficient agility to counter 

wind shear and turbulence. The buoyancy of the vehicle will be adjustable to allow for vertical mobility.

A two-pronged approach of theoretical and numerical analysis will be taken. The outer aerodynamic 

shape of the aerobot will be drafted on the computer. Computational fluid dynamics such as vortex 

lattice methods will be employed to investigate the vehicle aerodynamics. The differential gas pressure, 

which is limited by the material properties of the outer skin, and the vehicle weight and volume 

determine the buoyancy force. The buoyancy and propulsion requirements as well as the thermal 

balance for flight on the day and night side of Venus will be analyzed and optimized for relevant mission 

scenarios. For the analysis of the mission scenario, a parametric model of the Venus atmosphere will be 

integrated into an existing point-mass model simulation environment. The model will be expanded to 

include the vehicle power and thermal balance as well as the buoyancy force. The conceptual design will 

be optimized over several iterations.

The project will support two graduate students and strengthen aerospace and space exploration 

research in New Mexico which is an EPSCoR state. One of the graduate students will focus more on the 

conceptual design while the other student will mainly work on the simulation environment. The 
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Proposal Abstracts

expected outcome are a conceptual design and substantiated data sets that will provide the basis for a 

detailed design and eventually the development of a prototype."

21-EPSCoR-R3-0005

Appendix I - Machine Learning Accelerated Discovery, Testing, and Characterization 

of Light-weight Refractory High Entropy Alloys for Space Application

University of Alabama in Huntsville

Dr. Lawrence Thomas

The goal of this proposal is to accelerate the discovery of light-weight refractory high entropy alloys 

(RHEAs) with enhanced mechanical performances by integrating first-principles material simulations, 

data-driven machine learning (ML) models, and experimental validation. Advanced metals and alloys 

with superior mechanical properties at elevated temperatures remain in high demand for aeronautical 

applications. Recently, a new category of RHEAs has shown great promise as the potential materials for 

the high-temperature structural application. The RHEAs usually contain four or five elements from the 

nine elements in Group IV (Ti, Zr, and Hf), Group V (V, Nb, and Ta), and Group VI (Cr, Mo, and W) with 

the additions of non-refractory elements such as Al, Si, Co, or Ni. The refractory elements allow the 

RHEAs to function as load-bearing components at a temperature even higher than that for Ni-based 

superalloys. However, the traditional RHEAs suffer from limited room-temperature ductility and 

heavyweight, significantly hindering their manufacturing and applications. To design lightweight RHEAs 

with balanced specific strength and ductility is of urgency and yet poses remarkable challenges in the 

complex multicomponent system. Firstly, considering the potentially vast number of alloys with the 

complexity of compositional space, the typically used sequential trial-and-error experiments are 

daunting. Secondly, the feasibility of the empirical or semi-empirical rules developed for dilute alloys 

confronts fundamental issues due to unknown physics coming from many-body interaction. 

The proposed project will employ a computationally aided materials discovery (CAMDIS) approach, and 

deploy multiscale ML models to data-mine the connection between electronic and thermodynamic 

properties of multicomponent alloys with their mechanical properties for the rapid design of lightweight RHEAs. Specifically, we will explore the compositional space of Group IV, V, and VI 

multicomponent alloys using first-principles based density functional theory (DFT) calculations to 

compute the defect energetics and identify the alloy compositions that process intrinsic ductile 

propensity. Multiscale neural network ML models will be developed to integrate heterogeneous 

simulation and experimental data and learn features and representation in the scale of relevance. The 

parameters of ML models will be optimized to uncover physical-based mechanisms thus enabling 

decision-making capabilities in precision experimentation planning. The predicted alloys will be 

synthesized using high-throughput magnetron co-sputtering, and then characterized to obtain 

structural, chemical, thermal, and mechanical properties. The new experimental data will be supplied 

into the dataset to train next-generation ML models for accuracy improvement. ML approaches are well 

suited to this problem because they can (1) operate with an incomplete understanding of the underlying 

physics in the novel HEA alloys but still take chemical, physical, and thermodynamic parameters to 

accelerate learning; and (2) find patterns in observed data, making it possible to model relationships 

that are unavailable in theory. 
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We envision the proposed ML approaches will significantly accelerate the search of multiphase multiprincipal component alloys, providing novel alloy systems to tailor the mechanical performance. The 

created dataset and the developed ML will allow the promising alloy composition for future 

computational and experimental investigation towards the design of novel RHEAs for aeronautical 

applications.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0009

Nano-based Ceramic-metal Composites to Support Planetary Agrosystems 

(Appendix D: Crop Plant Stress Tolerance for Space Exploration)

Louisiana State University

Prof. T. Gregory Guzik

This proposal is in response to the FY2021 NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research Opportunity 

Appendix D: NASA SMD Biologicala and Physical Science: Crop Plant Stress Tolerance for Space 

Exploration.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small single-stranded RNAs with low protein-coding potential. miRNAs act as 

negative post-transcription regulators of their messenger RNA (mRNA) targets via mRNA degradation 

and translational repression. Although plant miRNAs target only a small number of mRNAs, these play a 

critical role in many plant developmental processes. Biotic and abiotic stresses result in tissue-specific 

changes in miRNAs' expression. Plant response to two different abiotic stresses is unique and different 

from stresses applied individually. Tolerance to a combination of other stress conditions, particularly 

those that mimic the field environment, is the focus of this research project. Metal nanoparticles (mNPs) 

can enhance crop production and mitigate the impacts of plant stressors. Ceramic-metal nanoparticles 

(cerametals), composites of mNPs, and halloysite nanotubes offer many advantages, including high 

surface area, stability, and biocompatibility. We propose that cerametals affect many aspects of leafy 

greens or tomato plant growth and enhance these plants' tolerance to many plant stressors.

Plants will be exposed to different combinations of stresses at the same time under field conditions. The 

relationship between cerametal addition, plant stress responses, and changes in miRNA expression will 

be studied. A proprietary predictive algorithm and machine learning will be used to analyze large data 

sets generated. In concert, the effects of stress (+/-) cerametals on plant germination, growth, 

propagation, plant structures, and functions will also be assessed. Improved sustainability, stress 

tolerance, and reducing the impact of plant pathogens is critical as we prepare for the exploration of the 

Moon and Mars. Nano-based ceramic-metal agrotechnology will be a cheap and efficient way to reduce 

water needs, use available soil, and produce plants for biogenerative life support systems in Lunar and 

Mars habitats.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0010

Thermophysical property characterization of aerospace alloys for modeling InSpace Manufacturing processes (Appendix I: Modeling of Manufacturing Processes 

in Micro and Reduced Gravity Environments)

Louisiana State University

Prof. T. Gregory Guzik

This proposal is in response to the FY2021 NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research Opportunity 

Appendix I: MSFC EPSCoR Research Areas, and Tasks: Modeling of Manufacturing Processes in Micro and 

Reduced Gravity Environments (EM04/Prater).

Several methods of additive manufacturing (AM) are currently under investigation for application in 

micro- and reduced-gravity environments including bound metal deposition (BMD), wire+arc AM, and 

laser-based fusion methods. All of these methods include either the generation of a melt pool or surface 

wetting of the metal alloy feedstock to facilitate generation of the desired geometry. The evolution of 

the liquid phase, in-turn, is influenced heavily by the gravitational field, with samples undergoing 

distortion relative to the gravitational environment. Studies of gravitational effects on liquid phase 

sintering of tungsten heavy alloys in microgravity (STS83 and STS94 missions) found that samples that 

distort in ground-based sintering also undergo distortion in microgravity, however, the samples tended 

to form spherical shapes. Efforts to model these manufacturing processes therefore rely heavily on 

available thermophysical, surface energy and interfacial energy property data. Given the availability of 

these difficult to measure data, the influence of the local gravitational field can then be predicted 

relative to: buoyancy effects; the formation of solid-liquid and liquid-vapor interfaces; microstructural 

segregation; particle agglomeration; and parts deformation.

The proposed project will support ISM modeling through the measurement of thermophysical (melting 

range, density, viscosity) and surface and interfacial energies of several aerospace alloys of interest for 

ISM applications, namely Al7075, Ti-6Al-4V, and SS316L. Measurements will be conducted via 

electrostatic levitation (ESL) and high temperature (up to 1800 C) contact angle measurements. In 

addition, we will use high-temperature differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)/thermal gravimetric 

analysis (TGA)/thermal diffusivity (Hyperflash), and dilatometry to measure specific heat, enthalpy of 

fusion, melting range, melting enthalpy, thermal conductivity, and thermal expansion coefficient for 

generation of a comprehensive data set.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0012

Wearable Sensors for Low-Power On-Demand Health Monitoring (Appendix B: 

Improvement of Space Suit State of Art, CSCO-2021-02)

Louisiana State University

Prof. T. Gregory Guzik

This proposal is in response to the FY2021 NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research Opportunity 

Appendix B: Improvement of Space Suit State of Art (CSCO-2021-02)

This technical proposal is submitted in response to the current call by the NASA Commercial Space 

Capabilities Office to improve the state of the art of space suits that improve the wearers performance, 

health and/or safety. The problem currently at hand is the obtrusive nature of on-suit electronics that 

aide assessing suited crewmembers health. The wired nature of communication between the sensors 

and the central suit avionics system presents challenges during don/doff, cause irritation during extra 

vehicular activity (EVA), and restricts the number and type of biomedical measurements. Astronauts 

work under tremendous stress, especially during EVA, and this can lead to head and neck injuries. Such 

injuries can be fatal and require serious attention for optimal performance by astronauts. Measuring 

head and body kinematics unobtrusively during planetary surface EVA is important in gauging 

ergonomics and guiding crew rehabilitation under weightlessness.

The overarching goal of this proposal is to initiate research within the EPSCoR state of Louisiana on the 

development of passive RFID biomedical sensors. In comparison to the sensors wired to the central suite 

avionics, the substantive benefit obtained using passive RFID biosensors include ability to read the 

sensor signal wirelessly and battery-free operation. This will allow placing the reader in the portable life 

support system (backpack) and applying the biosensor as a tattoo directly on the human skin. The 

specific objective of this proposal is to prototype a head kinematics measurement system using UHF 

RFID strain sensing tattoos. The proposed research builds on existing commercial UHF RFID tags, 

antenna, and reader, no new complex instrumentation will be developed. The proposed method builds 

on prior findings showing bending and rotation of a linearly polarized flexible RFID tag affects received 

signal strength indicator (RSSI) in horizontal and vertical planes. The proposed research will investigate 

application of such tags to the head-neck region and leverage ANOVA to predict the head pitch, yaw, 

and roll. 

The innovation proposed here includes the following: a) Compared to conventional vision-aided 

solutions, the lack of prior work on measuring head kinematics using passive RFID shows it is a new 

concept. b) Unlike gyroscope-based measurements, the soft RFID tags can operate without battery, is 

skin conformable, and can withstand repeated mechanical bending. c) Compared to conventional 

method of locating tag resonant frequency for strain sensing in biomedical applications, the combination 

of ANOVA, RSSI and tag polarization will be relatively faster, portable and accurate. The proposed 

research will also systematically examine the effect of temperature, humidity, human skin contact, 

sweat, and antenna positioning on tag readout."
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0013

APPENDIX C: SMD EARTH SCIENCES DIVISION - ASSIMILATION OF SATELLITE DATA 

FOR PREDICTING CYANOHABS IN KANSAS

Wichita State University

Dr. Leonard Miller

Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) degrade water quality by producing harmful toxins and 

causing significant diel changes in water column pH and dissolved oxygen concentrations. The 

degradation of water quality caused by HABs disrupts food webs, and has negative ecological, social, 

recreational, and economic impacts. Given the ubiquity and impact of HABs in Kansas, there is a need for 

large-scale monitoring and prediction of HAB events. However, no clear indicator or predictor for HABs 

in Kansas has been established. In this work, we will assimilate satellite remote sensing data into a 1-D 

lake model in order to improve predictions of water quality and HAB events. This will be done by first 

identifying key relationships between satellite data and lake water quality. These relationships will then 

be used to do a simple assimilation of the relevant satellite data into a lake model. The assimilated state 

variables will then be used as initial conditions in a forecast system and will be evaluated over a number 

of sites across Kansas. The proposed work will provide a proof of concept for predicting lake water 

quality based on satellite remote sensing and will advance the current level of knowledge while 

providing the basis for future grant proposals and collaboration between the University of Kansas and 

Goddard Space Flight Center.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0014

Appendix E: KSC Exploration Systems and Development: Moon to Mars - Gas 

Separation Processes for High Purity Methane Production

Wichita State University

Dr. Leonard Miller

Development of extra-terrestrial propellant production processes is a requirement for NASAs Moon to 

Mars strategy and will rely upon the Sabatier Reaction for catalytic conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) 

to methane (CH4). The current proposal will develop gas separation technologies to provide purified 

methane appropriate for storage in the liquid state and for utilization in propulsion systems. The crossdisciplinary team, comprising mechanical and chemical engineers, will collaborate on thermodynamic 

and unit operation modeling of the process, as well as, experimental work demonstrating pressure swing 

adsorption (PSA) technology. The proposing team will leverage prior research expertise at KU including 

on-going NASA-funded thermodynamic modeling of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) on Mars for 

propellant manufacture and expertise in conventional natural gas purification by adsorption. KU is home 

to the most advanced gravimetric gas adsorption equipment in the US and will deploy its latest 

technology, the Multicomponent Adsorption Module (MCAM), to the project. This advanced instrument 

developed collaboratively with Hiden Isochema as the product of an NSF MRI grant has been operational 

since October 2020 and will provide thermodynamic adsorption data for gas mixtures simulating the 

Sabatier Reaction product stream. Additionally, KU has identified preferred adsorbents for removal of 
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carbon dioxide and nitrogen from natural gas streams and will utilize these preferred adsorbents in the 

proposed research program. The team will employ project management processes to guide the research 

to produce: (a) a thermodynamic model characterizing the required streams and energy flows in the gas 

separation process, (b) a technology design for water removal from the Sabatier Reaction product 

stream, (c) preliminary unit operation design for heat transfer within the process, and (d) experimental 

demonstration of gas purification via adsorption on solid oxide adsorbents.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0016

A flash co-sintering strategy for the fabrication of LiPON-based bulk-type solidstate lithium ion battery - Appendix G

North Dakota Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Caitlin Milera

Solid-state lithium ion batteries have long been expected due to their safer operation than the 

traditional lithium ion batteries, which use a liquid electrolyte that is flammable and may decompose 

and generate gases, causing a fire and/or explosion hazard. However, the development and 

commercialization of solid-state lithium ion batteries have been slow, primarily because of the lack of a 

perfect solid-state electrolyte and/or an efficient method to produce the electrolyte or manufacture 

solid-state batteries. LiPON (lithium phosphorus oxynitride) is so far the only solid-state electrolyte that 

can effectively suppress the lithium dendrite growth a phenomenon in lithium ion batteries that causes 

a short circuit to the anode and cathode, but the fabrication is based on vacuum sputtering, making the 

solid-state lithium ion batteries with a LiPON thin film highly priced. The proposed research is to explore 

an ammonolysis method for the synthesis of LiPON powder and a facile and scalable method for the 

fabrication of bulk-type solid-state lithium ion batteries with the LiPON powder. The method for the 

battery fabrication involves making battery pellets by consequently pressing anode material, LiPON 

powder and cathode material and then heating the pellets via flash sintering. The pressing way makes 

the manufacturing of batteries highly efficient, while the flash sintering that heat the pellet at a 

sufficiently high temperature but for a very short time (< 60 s) will result in batteries with a highly dense 

body and ideal interfaces between the solid-state electrolyte and active materials. It is expected that 

these structural advantages may facilitate the diffusion of lithium ions in the electrolyte and promote 

the intercalation/deintercalation reactions taking place in the anode and cathode, giving rise to batteries 

with a high power density and excellent cyclic performance. The proposed research also involves 

investigating the performance of the as-developed all-ceramic solid-state lithium ion batteries when 

operating at elevated temperatures up to 600 �C. This is of great significance to the need of NASA for 

safe and durable batteries that can withstand high temperatures and harsh environment during the 

space exploration.

The proposed research will advance the existing body of knowledge by revealing the feasibility and 

scientific challenges or technical difficulties of synthesizing LiPON powder and using it to fabricate bulktype solid-state lithium ion batteries. The propose work will also function to strengthen the general 

education and research at NDSU and, moreover, stimulate the establishment of a collaborative 

partnership between the PIs group and the NASA laboratory.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0018

Appendix D: Characterizing Stress Tolerance of Leafy Greens to CO2, Humidity, and 

Radiation

University of Delaware

Prof. William Matthaeus

Food crop production for space exploration depends on crop tolerance to environmental stresses unique 

in space, such as super-elevated CO2 levels and low relative humidity. Controlled-environment research 

on Earth has gained insights on crop responses to environmental factors under sole-source lighting. 

However, few studies have explored extreme parameter ranges typical in space or investigated how 

environmental stressors interact to influence growth and quality attributes of leafy greens.

The objectives of this research are to: 1) determine how the CO2 level and far-red radiation affect 

photosynthesis, yield, and size of red lettuce and mustard green; and 2) characterize how the CO2 level, 

relative humidity, and radiation spectrum influence photosynthesis, yield, size, and nutritional value of 

red lettuce.

For objective 1, we will grow Outrageous red lettuce and Amara mustard green in eight treatments [four 

CO2 levels (400, 1200, 2000, and 2800 �mol�mol1) � two radiation spectra with and without far-red 

radiation]. For objective 2, we will grow outrageous red lettuce in eight treatments [two CO2 levels (400 

and 2800 �mol�mol1) � two relative humidity levels (40% and 70%) � two radiation spectra]. We 

will conduct both experiments in four plant growth chambers capable of achieving target parameter 

levels, including 2800 �mol�mol1 CO2 and 40% relative humidity that are typical in the International 

Space Station cabin environment. 28 days after seed sow, we will collect and analyze data on crop 

photosynthesis, yield, size, and nutritionally important secondary metabolites.

The proposed research will: 1) create baseline data of crop stress tolerance for selection and breeding of 

cultivars suitable in extreme space environments; and 2) generate insights on how the CO2 level, relative 

humidity, and radiation spectrum influence space crop yield and nutritional value. This knowledge will 

advance the production of fast-growing and nutritious food crops to sustain long-term human space 

missions.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0021

Appendix A - An Aerial Platform to Navigate the Troposphere of Venus Enabled by 

New Cellular Materials - Gross

College of Charleston

Dr. Cassandra Runyon

Project Summary: Exploration of Venus may provide important insights regarding the future of Earth and 

the habitability of exoplanets. As a result, there is great interest to operate a long duration mobile 

platform on or near the surface of Venus. This would allow for a number of investigations identified as 

essential to reach NASAs objectives and goals for Venus exploration, such as identification of surface 

chemistry and mineralogy, exploration of chemical processes in the deep atmosphere, and 

measurement of seismic activity. The extreme environmental conditions at the surface of Venus make 
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long duration missions difficult, especially for missions that include instruments like camera systems, 

which cannot tolerate high temperatures and pressures. Floating vehicles have been identified as a 

promising option for these future missions, and here a vacuum airship is proposed as a synergistic 

solution to shield critical instrumentation from the harsh Venusian environment for long duration 

operation.

A vacuum airship is a theoretically possible, yet never realized alternative to buoyant gas filled balloons. 

Instead of being filled with a lifting gas, like helium, which is less dense than the surrounding 

atmosphere, a vacuum airship makes use of an envelope that is evacuated of gas to generate buoyancy. 

This concept has critical advantages over gas filled balloons, especially for operation near the surface of 

Venus. The vacuum envelope is an ideal location to house instrumentation that requires environmental 

protection. This dramatically reduces power and refrigeration requirements, which have remained major 

obstacles for missions to the surface of Venus. A vacuum airship can also operate for longer lengths of 

time since a reserve supply of lifting gas is not required and vacuum can be regenerated on an as needed 

with an electric pump. The pump also allows for nearly inexhaustible altitude control by managing a 

ballast of atmospheric gas. This enables the vehicle to ascend, travel with the wind, and descend to 

distant locations on the surface without large energy requirements or additional equipment for mobility. 

Long duration, high altitude ascents can be used for solar power generation and environmentally 

assisted cooling. 

Despite these remarkable advantages, the development of a vacuum airship has not progressed because 

an envelope that is both lighter than the gas it displaces and strong enough to resist collapse against the 

external pressure of that gas has never been constructed. Past attempts to realize such an envelope 

have been hampered by approaching it as a structural design problem, whereas this buoyant platform 

can more readily be realized by seeking cellular materials that can support a thin film envelope against 

external pressure. With this perspective, the challenge of designing a buoyant vehicle from an evacuated 

envelop is inversely proportional to the density of the fluid that the vehicle operates in. This is because 

the net external pressure that must be supported by the envelope and its allowable mass have a linear 

relationship with each other, yet the mechanical efficiency of cellular materials has a nonlinear 

relationship with its mass. This nonlinear relationship favors designs with higher mass, and is naturally 

compatible with the dense lower atmosphere of Venus. 

The goal of the proposed work is to design, fabricate, and test cellular materials that enable the 

construction of a vacuum airship to operate near the surface of Venus. Computational optimization will 

be used to minimize the mass of these materials. The optimized materials will be fabricated from 

alumina and sealed in a thin wall titanium envelope. The envelopes will be evacuated and tested in the 

Glenn Extreme Environments Rig to assess their performance in the lower atmosphere of Venus.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0022

Appendix D: Impacts of Gravity and Surfactants on Drainage Flow and Rheology of 

Wet Foams - Z.Li

College of Charleston

Dr. Cassandra Runyon

The objective of the proposed research is to investigate the dynamic and morphological evolution of wet 

liquid foams affected by the variations of surface tension and gravity. Foams comprised of polyhedral 

bubbles separated by thin films are widely used in many important industrial and commercial 

applications including cosmetics, dermal drug delivery, food industry, sealing and firefighting products. 

Liquid foams are intrinsically unstable because of their large interfacial energy, especially when the films 

connecting bubbles become thinner under the influence of the Earths gravity. Because most of the liquid 

in a foam is confined to the edges of polyhedral bubbles and connecting thin films, both the surface 

tension and the gravity play an import role in the formation of foam and its subsequent evolution or 

aging. Although the evolution of wet foams in microgravity has been recently studied by a FOAM-C 

experiment in the International Space Station (ISS), critical knowledge on multiscale features of foams is 

missing that would allow a full understanding of the foam evolution and stability, where the major 

challenge exists in how to best connect the multiple length scales coupling nanoscale thin films, 

mesoscale polyhedral structures, and bulk rheology of foams. We hypothesize that the evolution and 

aging of foams are induced by the drainage flow of confined liquid in the foam, which can be resolved by 

stabilizing the liquid films and reducing the fluid diffusion across the films between bubbles. We aim to 

use wet foams made of closely packed gas bubbles in a liquid, typically water with surfactant additives, 

to quantify the impacts of gravity and surfactants on drainage flow and foam rheology. 

A better understanding of the relationships between nanoscale fluid dynamics of thin films and the 

evolution of mesoscale polyhedral structures would have a crucial impact on connecting nano-to-meso 

scale features in wet foams, and this research thrust (RT) is listed as RT-1. Another scientific challenge 

for wet foams is to build the connection between the mesoscale polyhedral structures and macroscale 

rheology of foams, which is listed as RT-2. Based on the PIs preliminary innovation work on multiscale 

modeling of complex fluids and mesoscopic numerical methods, the PI will adopt multi-phase dissipative 

particle dynamics (DPD) models with different level of resolutions (different fidelity) to characterize the 

multiscale features of flow physics in wet foams. Specifically, high-resolution DPD models will be 

employed for RT-1 to investigate the impacts of surfactants and gravity on the rupture of thin films and 

aging of foams induced by drainage and gas diffusion. Low-resolution DPD models and a data-driven 

neural network approach will be used for RT-2 to study how foamsmicrostructure changes the bulk 

rheology properties of wet foams, where computed DPD results will be taken as training data for a deep 

operator network (DeepONet) model to learn the effective viscoelastic equations of wet foams. 

The proposed multi-fidelity framework can naturally incorporate the select-scale fluid physics into the 

multiphase models with consideration of intrinsic thermal fluctuations. Using this framework that tightly 

couples multiscale physics with state-of-the-art computational techniques, end-users of this modeling 

framework will be able to efficiently bridge the gap between nanoscale physics in thin films and bulk 

foam rheology, which will improve our fundamental understanding of the multiscale features in wet 

foams and help us create better foam microstructures for improved stability and lifetime of foam 

products. The multi-fidelity computational models for wet foams developed in this project will be 
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compatible for integration into NASAs ImMAC software design suite and will lead to new complex fluids 

applications to fulfill NASA missions.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0023

Appendix E: Supercritical combustion reactor for water oxidation and recycling of 

non-edible biomass for long duration space flights - Farouk

College of Charleston

Dr. Cassandra Runyon

A fundamental understanding of the dynamics and chemical kinetics of supercritical oxidation process 

will provide the foundational knowledge base which is currently limited. The fundamental knowledge 

base on this topic is also immensely important to understand supercritical water oxidation processes to 

advance solid waste treatment and or wastewater recovery and management, as well as allow recycling 

of non-edible biomass to value added chemicals for long duration space flights and advanced space 

exploration system. NASA's 2020 technology roadmaps include a wide range of pathways to advance the 

nation's current capabilities in space. Of the different space technology areas, Human Health, Life 

Support and Habitation Systems emphasizes development of technologies for waste water recovery and 

management. This multi PI team at the University of South Carolina aims to augment NASAs effort in this 

area in ground-based experiments and allow the development of the scientific understanding for future 

ground-based microgravity and/or International Space Station (ISS) investigations on supercritical 

oxidation. The proposed methodologies will provide fundamental and scientific understanding through 

developing the bench scale, ground-based experiments with advanced diagnostics and complementary 

hi-fidelity multi-physics modeling. Also, the overall effort will allow the development of a prototype 

compact supercritical reactor.

The scientific goals of this one-year project are:

1) characterization of phase change and transport processes associated with injection of subcritical fluid 

into an environment in which it is supercritical,

2) characterization of ignition process and the conversion of hydrocarbon and oxygenated 

fuels/materials at supercritical water conditions, and

3) analyses of experimental results using coupled multi-physics mathematical modeling frameworks.

The fuels to be investigated will encompass test fuels that are miscible (i.e. methanol) and immiscible 

(i.e. n-heptane) in water and/or additional fuels/materials (to be tested) in discussion with Glenn 

Research Center (GRC) and Kennedy Space Center (KSC) scientists which might be part of future NASA 

test matrix and target studies. Advanced diagnostic techniques, such as backlight and planar laser 

induced fluorescence imaging as well as high-speed imaging will be applied to characterize the transcritical/supercritical mixing as well as ignition of hydrocarbon/oxygenated fuels at supercritical water 

conditions. The proposed research thus will provide insights into the physicochemical dynamics of 

supercritical oxidation. The visualized and quantified experimental results will be used as benchmarks to 

further refine/validate models. The acquired fundamental knowledge of supercritical oxidation will 

provide guidelines for NASA in developing technology for solid waste management, wastewater 

recovery and recycling of non-edible biomass for long duration space flights and advanced exploration 

systems."
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0025

Appendix G: Rapid Laser Reactive Sintering of High-Performance Electrolytes for 

Additive Manufacturing of Solid State Batteries

College of Charleston

Dr. Cassandra Runyon

State-of-the-art solid state battery (SSB) processing technique based on tape-casting and co-firing 

techniques limits the further improvement of energy density and power density because the single cells 

need thick component layers to provide mechanical strength. Furthermore, each component layer's 

different heat processing conditions make it impossible to manufacture the high-density high-compact 

multilayer (HCML) SSB using the rapid additive manufacturing (RAM) technique. Therefore, the project is 

to develop a new processing method for fabricating SSB electrolyte thin films with well-controlled 

composition, crystal structure, microstructure, and thickness to achieve high-performance battery 

electrolytes to enable the RAM of HCML-SSBs.

The project's overarching goal is to improve the battery's essential properties of energy density, power, 

packaging design, safety, and scalability to help NASA's all-electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles 

(eVTOL) technology. The project is to serve as a bridge to establish a partnership between NASA LaRC 

and Clemson University based on the research area of Appendix G: NASA ARMD Electric Aircraft 

Batteries & Crash Safety Research-Materials and Processes for All-Solid-State Batteries for Electric 

Aircraft. The project technical objective is to develop a rapid laser reactive sintering method for 

fabricating fully dense SSB electrolyte (e.g., doped Li7La3Zr2O12) thin films with well-controlled 

thickness, composition, crystal structure, and microstructure to achieve high-performance SSB 

electrolytes, providing a prerequisite knowledge for rapid additive manufacturing of practical HCMLSSBs.

By leveraging our RLRS method for the controllable-processing of protonic ceramics, we designed the 

RLRS experiment for processing doped LLZO thin films with the desired properties. The RLRS method 

consists of three steps: 1) preparation of paste/slurry, 2) 3D printing of thin green films, and 3) CO2 laser 

scanning to achieve final films. The printable pastes or slurries of doped LLZO precursors can come from 

the cost-effective raw materials of oxides and carbonates through conventional ball-milling and vacuummixing. The 3D printing techniques based on microextrusion (ME) and ultrasonic spray coating (USC) can 

deposit doped LLZO green films with designed thickness. The CO2 laser scanning on the top of the 

electrolyte precursor green films can achieve the final electrolyte thin films on the pre-selected 

substrates. The optimization of organic additives and sintering aid to electrolyte precursor mixture and 

the optimization of laser sintering parameters allow us to achieve electrolyte thin films with the desired 

thickness, crystal structure, microstructure, and complete density. The additional thermodynamic 

driving force of the chemical reaction and the liquid sintering due to proper sintering aids are the two 

factors that ensure crack-free electrolytes and complete dense film with the desired microstructure. 

The proposed technology has several advantages. 1) To start from raw materials of oxides and 

carbonates decreases the materials cost and simplifies the processing. 2) The ME and USC-based 3D 

printing can manufacture thin green layers with the desired thickness, and geometry complexity can 

directly contribute to the RAM of SSBs. 3) The rapid and facile laser scanning combines phase formation, 

chemical reaction, densification, microstructure control, and geometry adjustment in one facile laser 

scan step. 4) The selective laser sintering processes green films with precise in-plane (X-Y) and out-of-
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plane (Z) position to achieve well-distributed structures. 5) The rapid in-situ consolidation of green 

ceramic layers makes it possible for rapid additive manufacturing of SSBs. 6) The large adjustment 

window of material additives and laser processing parameters allows the control of the ceramic oxide 

relative density and morphology, extending the application to the porous electrode for SSB 

manufacturing.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0026

Appendix H: Characterization of the Intracranial Venous System following 

Spaceflight - Roberts

College of Charleston

Dr. Cassandra Runyon

We have previously shown that astronauts of long-duration missions aboard the International Space 

Station (ISS) experience an upward shift of the brain, compression of cortical veins, and crowding of 

eloquent brain tissue at the vertex along the superior sagittal sinus (SSS). We hypothesize these 

anatomical changes may impede venous outflow from the cranium resulting in decreased blood flow 

through the internal jugular veins (IJVs.) Supporting this hypothesis, there have been recent reports of 

astronauts experiencing abnormal venous outflow from the head and in at least one case, an astronaut 

was found to have asymptomatic IJV thrombosis.

In addition, increased intracranial pressure (ICP) and papilledema have also been documented in NASA 

astronauts following long-term missions aboard the ISS months to years after spaceflight which NASA 

has named the Spaceflight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS). Some researchers have 

hypothesized that venous outflow obstruction may play a role in the development of SANS.

Here, we aim to characterize the response of the intracranial venous system to spaceflight, evaluate for 

any evidence of venous congestion or brain edema post-flight, and correlate those findings to 

intracranial pressure at spinal tap in astronauts with and without SANS. The study will include a total of 

12 astronauts: (1.) six astronauts with documented signs of SANS, and (2.) 6 astronauts without signs of 

SANS matched for gender, approximate age, and approximate mission duration will serve as controls.

This proposed study directly addresses a significant health risk that was recently identified in ISS 

astronauts (abnormal venous blood flow and IJV thrombosis). This study will also provide evidence 

concerning the role intracranial venous physiology may play in the develop of SANS in susceptible 

astronauts.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0027

Appendix I: Advanced Machine and Process Architecture for Refractories via Laser 

Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing

College of Charleston

Dr. Cassandra Runyon

Refractory metals and alloys, e.g., tungsten and its alloys, have exceptionally intrinsic properties, 

including ultra-high melting temperature, low thermal expansion, high thermal conductivity, low 

sensitivity to hydrogen and low neutron yield. These properties make them top candidates for a wide 

range of high-temperature applications. Enabled by additive manufacturing (AM), the design innovation, 

and ability to integrate systems, coupled with the potential to circumvent time-consuming powder 

metallurgy and subtractive machining processes, will promote disruptive technologies such as fusionpowered spacecraft and advanced thermal management systems to advance NASAs space exploration 

initiatives. 

Laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (LPBFAM) process is one of the preferred AM 

technologies to produce tungsten parts with fine feature resolution. To date, approximately 98.5% of 

theoretical density has been achieved in LPBFAM for tungsten. However, microcracks are consistently 

observed as a result of the high ductile-to-brittle transition temperature and the high residual stress 

during fabrication. In this project, the University of South Carolina (UofSC) proposes to explore an 

ultrasound-assisted machine and process architecture based on LPBFAM to increase the printability of 

tungsten. This project will integrate unique capabilities of a customized open-architecture LPBFAM 

machine, established multiscale computational models, and advanced ultrasound technologies at UofSC 

to: 1) Pioneer a customized LPBFAM process that incorporates in-situ ultrasound processing with 

applications of advanced laser scanning strategies; and 2) Initiate an integrated numerical solution that 

optimizes local thermal history and global residual stress for defect-free microstructure of tungsten. The 

impact of ultrasound on rapid solidification and the defect formation will be investigated via printing of 

single tracks and cubic samples. Thin wall structures will be demonstrated at the end of this project to 

identify potential challenges and pathways to further improve the current technology. 

This study will pioneer an architecture of in-situ ultrasound processing in LPBFAM. Continuing the 

current research, a comprehensive process-structure-property relationship can be investigated towards 

manufacturing large and complex geometries with fine features for refractory metals and alloys. The 

system and methodology developed here are expected to be applicable to other refractories and other 

difficult-to-process alloys in AM, such as high-strength Al alloys and Ni-based superalloys. The successful 

development will not only enable a novel method to increase the printability of materials, but it will also 

induce potential fine/fully equiaxed grains for superior homogeneous mechanical properties. This will 

further extend the applications of AM and materials selection for NASAs diverse applications.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0029

Appendix I: Cryogenic Solid Particle Erosion of Advanced Materials for Lunar 

Mission Applications

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Dr. Denise Thorsen

NASA is developing new generation of advanced structural materials, coatings, and adhesives (hereafter 

materials) for construction of spacecraft and vehicles for lunar mission applications. These materials will 

be subjected to the extreme temperatures that range from boiling hot to freezing cold, depending on 

the Moons position relative to the sun. In addition to fluctuating temperatures, these materials are 

subjected to a wear and degradation through a process known as solid particle erosion (SPE). Solid 

particle erosion is a dynamic wear process in which material is removed from a target surface due to 

impingement of high-speed solid particles. This wear process causes surface degradation and reduction 

in functional life of a structure/component of spacecrafts and vehicles made of these materials. Rocket 

nozzles during landing and takeoff, Lunar Rover Vehicles (LRVs), photovoltaic (PV) modules deployed on 

the Moon are subject to SPE wear under these fluctuating temperature conditions. Information and data 

on SPE wear of structures/components at elevated temperatures is available. However, information and 

data on the cold temperature SPE is almost non-existent. Our aim is to predict how 

structures/components made of these newly developed materials degrade when they are subjected to 

SPE under cryogenic temperature conditions. Therefore, both experimental and theoretical studies of 

material degradation due to SPE under cryogenic temperature conditions will be performed. We will 

design and construct experimental setup to conduct experiments of solid particle erosion (SPE) under 

cryogenic temperatures. In order to facilitate cryogenic temperature, the experimental setup will 

provide a liquid nitrogen (LN2) stream that is injected into particles jet and as well as floods and cools 

the target. The temperature at the surface will be regulated by regulating the LN2 flow rate. The 

temperature within the LN2-cooled jet at the surface of the target will be monitored. We will identify 

the dominant mechanism through which materials degrade due to cryogenic SPE. We will identify 

whether the material degradation under cryogenic SPE is due to large scale deformation, fracture, 

cutting, or a combination of these. This will help in the development of new cryogenic SPE wear resistant 

materials in the future. 

The project is significant because it will generate new data and knowledge on the cryogenic SPE wear of 

materials used in the construction of spacecraft, vehicles, and PV modules. The data generated will be 

useful in ranking and selecting cryogenic SPE wear resistant materials suitable for lunar mission 

applications.

Appendix I: MSFC EPSCoR Research Area - Lunar Surface Sustainability Through Dust Resistance 

Materials
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0030

Appendix D - Improved drought tolerance of mustard green with atmospheric 

pressure plasmas

University of Alabama in Huntsville

Dr. Lawrence Thomas

"As NASA advances human space exploration, crop plants will play an important role in sustained human 

presence in space, on the moon, and on Mars. Crop plants such as leafy greens and fresh vegetables 

provide nutrients, varied texture, and flavor, and contribute to astronautsmental health. However, 

growing plants in the engineered environment of space habitats can introduce multiple abiotic stresses 

that can impact the plants growth and nutritional value. Drought stress is one of the important abiotic 

stresses. This project aims to study drought stress on Amaramustard greens and if and how treatment 

with atmospheric pressure plasma (APP) can improve the plants drought tolerance. 

In plants, water deficiency can impair seed germination, crop yield, and the resulting nutritional content. 

Plants can naturally produce antioxidants and enzymes to combat the oxidative stress caused by 

drought. Research has shown that plasma treatment can further increase a plants production of 

enzymes and proteins associated with combatting oxidative stress. This project seeks to study the effect 

of room-temperature APP on Amaramustard greensdrought tolerance and nutrition. This project will be 

a collaboration among investigators at University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), Alabama A&M 

University (AAMU), and Alabama State University (ASU). The team combines expertise and lab 

capabilities in plasma science and technology (UAH), agriculture (AAMU), and microbiology and genetics 

(ASU). The project is relevant to NASAs Space Biology Program and Human Exploration Program. 

The research will use a low temperature APP to treat Amara mustard green seeds at different exposure 

times and different plasma gases. The longer exposures result in more plasma produced reactive species 

on the seeds, and the different gases (He and Ar) produce different amounts of reactive species. The 

treated seeds will then be observed for germination rate under drought and no-drought conditions to 

determine if the plasma affects the drought tolerance of the seed. After germination, the seeds will be 

plants and the resulting plant growth under drought and no-drought conditions will be studied. Physical 

and nutritional analyses including color, texture, nutrients such as ascorbic acid and carotenoids, 

antioxidant activity, and lipid oxidation will be done. Genetic analysis will be done to understand how 

the plasma changed the plant to produce different characteristics and nutrients. RNA will be extracted 

from the roots and shoot of the plant and processed to determine the gene expression of the control 

and treated plants.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0032

Appendix E: KSC Partnerships Office: Design and Manufacturing of a Seed Planter 

and Germination System for Space Crop Production

Iowa State University - Iowa Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Tomas Gonzalez-Torres

Crop growth will be important for supplementing packed food during future long-duration human 

exploration missions. Various supporting technologies on the ground and on the International Space 

Station (ISS) have been tested at NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC). There is a critical need for the 

development of seed handling technologies, approaches, and increased knowledge to advance the 

development of future crop production systems. NASA has identified gaps in the area of seed handling 

to support space crop production for future long-term exploration missions. Growing plants in the ISS to 

provide diversified, balanced, and healthy diets to crewmember is a common vision. The complex 

challenges for crop production in space include: 1) It is tedious and time consuming for maintenance of 

seed germination system and transplant of germinated seed after nursery in space. 2) The germination 

rate is relatively low when planting in space under microgravity and radiation. 3) The types of plants and 

crops are limited, because they must thrive under the harsh conditions of microgravity while providing 

various food and psychological benefits at the same time. To our understanding, controlling the 

orientation of seed using a customized seed container with a microgravity compatible design has the 

potential to improve the germination rate. In this study, we propose to use a 3D printed sacrificial seed 

tray coupled with an automated seed planter to improve germination rate with less labor involved 

during the nursery process. 

In this proposal, we are responding to the NASA Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN) EPSCoR R3 

announcement NNH21ZHA002C, focusing on the research project of Seed Handling Approaches for 

Space Crop Production. Our team has been in communication with Drs. Raymond Wheeler, Ralph F. 

Fritsche, and Gioia Massa from NASA KSC for technical guidance. Our goal is to fill in the gaps of seed 

handling to support space crop production for future long-term exploration missions. The objective of 

this study is to fabricate sacrificing seed containers for different crops using additive manufacturing 

technology to fit the need of controlling germination orientation in international space stations. The 

specific aims are: 1) select the food safe, biodegradable hydrogels that can be 3D printed into sacrificial 

array tray to provide hydration, anchorage, and nutrients for seed nursery; 2) fabricate the germination 

array tray with customized array patterns using 3D printing technology to fit the need of guiding the 

orientation of selected seeds, i.e., lettuce, tomato, alfalfa, and soybeans; 3) investigate the effect of 

hydrogel firmness, hollow size, and pattern of the array tray on the seed orientation and germination 

rate/time using automated image analysis under microgravity environment. 

The Sc-I Dr. Hantang Qin has a long track record in 3D printing process control, process optimization, and 

new material characterization. Previously, he has led two NASA projects to develop an in-space 3D 

printer. He has successfully customized the lab-built 3D printer for fused deposition modeling (FDM) and 

extrusion-based 3D printing. He will carry out Task #2 and Task#3 to implement 3D printing to 

manufacture seed planters and germination trays. The Co-I Dr. Xiaolei Shi has expertise in food 

production, bio-material development and 3D printing of biodegradable materials. Her work has been 

published in several journals ranging from material science to food and pharmaceutical applications. She 

has also held a US patent of Cellulose Derivative Based Sacrificial Support Structures for 3D Printing. She 
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 23

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will supervise Task #1 and Task #3 in the proposed research. The PhD students will be co-advised by Dr. 

Qin and Dr. Shi. The NASA PI Tomas Gonzalez-Torres will supervise and ensure the progress of the 

project. He will also promote the idea with other NASA colleagues. Our team will continue the 

collaboration with NASA KSC for this study if funded.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0033

NASA EPSCoR R3 Appendix D (BPS): Comparison of stress-inducible sesquiterpene 

lactone profiles of lettuce cultivars grown on the ISS and on earth

University of Kentucky

Prof. Alexandre Martin

Kentuckys NASA EPSCoR jurisdiction solicited proposals from university-led research teams in Kentucky 

to address NASA research needs listed as tasks for the FY2021 NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research 

(R3) announcement (NNH21ZHA002C). The NASA Kentucky EPSCoR program collaborated with 

responding faculty researchers to develop and submit relevant proposals that address R3 task 

objectives. The proposed work is in response to the task of Crop Plant Stress Tolerance for Space 

Exploration in R3 Appendix D, NASA SMD Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS).

The Biological and Physical Sciences division within the Science Mission Directorate of NASA has 

identified the need for a better understanding of the sustainability and durability of plant propagation as 

a part of NASAs Artemis and Gateway missions in anticipation of long duration human space travel to 

Mars. As described in appendix D of funding announcement NNH21ZHA002C, NASA is requesting 

proposals addressing crop plant responses to space travel exposure that include changes in their innate 

chemical composition. The extensive efforts of NASA Kennedy Space Center plant biology scientists in 

developing and deploying hardware (Veggie chambers) for growth of crop plants aboard the 

International Space Station, ISS, has now led to successful missions focused on documenting the growth 

of lettuce species, identification and quantitation of the bacteria and fungi associated with these ISSgrown plants, and an assessment of their contents associated with oxidative stress. These developments 

have resulted in unprecedented opportunities to explore more broadly the stress responses of ISSgrown lettuces, which will have significant implications for the reliable deployment of plants for the 

human nutritional needs necessary for long-term space exploration and extraterrestrial colonization. 

The primary objectives of the current application will be to establish a standardized protocol for 

qualitative and quantitative assessment of stress-inducible sesquiterpene lactones, which will then be 

applied to profiling the sesquiterpene lactones in lettuces grown on the ISS in comparison to matched 

earth-grown samples. The data generated will provide NASA with information essential to fully assess 

the biological safety of plants grown during space exploration and extraterrestrial colonization for 

human consumption. And, if new sesquiterpene lactone chemical entities are identified, opportunities 

for future therapeutical applications and screens will be availed. The team assembled for this project 

represents expertise in metabolomic profiling of plant natural products engaged with very experienced 

NASA Kennedy Space Center scientists addressing high priority objectives in pursuit of NASA missions for 

supporting long-term human space travel and exploration.
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 24

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21-EPSCoR-R3-0035

Appendix G: (NASA ARMD Electric Aircraft Batteries & Crash Safety): Composite 

Materials Mechanical Property Characterization for LS-DYNA MAT213 Model

Iowa State University - Iowa Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Tomas Gonzalez-Torres

A university-NASA partnership is being developed to provide technical and experimental support for the 

development of numerical predictive models for the design and analysis of advanced polymer-matrix 

composite materials under extreme loading conditions. The mechanical behavior of composite material 

structure is not easily predicted because of the great complexity of the failure mechanisms that occur 

within the material, and is further complicated with the geometric structure details. 

The scope of this work is to perform a full experimental calibration of a hybrid weave composite material 

for implementation into LS-DYNA MAT213, focusing on the deformation module calibration. Three 

objectives are targeted in this work. First, we will provide the experimentally required stress-strain 

curves and the associated material constants for the calibration of the MAT-213 material model. Fullfield displacement measurements by digital image correlations (DIC) and global coordinate axial strains 

measurements by non-contact video extensometer will be employed in all mechanical tests. Mode-I and 

Mode-II fracture experiments will be carried out for interlaminar characterization of failure modes. The 

proposed experimental protocol will facilitate large sample set testing, data collection and statistical 

analysis of the needed material parameters. The experimental framework will accelerate the testing 

protocol and might facilitate the study of one or more material systems. 

Second, we propose to utilize the measured incremental plastic strain field in the calibration/verification 

of the modeling framework, represent on the reduced Moher strain-plane. This is a comprehensive way 

to relate the full-field incremental strain measurement by DIC to a numerically estimated strain-field

derived around a stress concentration feature (e.g. 2D indentation or offset double-notched tensile 

(ODNT) configuration). We will interactively assess the experimentally observed deformation and plastic 

flow characteristics, and the incremental strain trajectories against those predicted by the numerical 

framework, and thereby provide a comprehensive model calibration and verifications for the examined 

hybrid composite system. 

Third, in collaboration with the project manager, Dr. Goldberg, NASA Glenn, we will employ simplified 

2D cylindrical indentation which is amenable to provide strain rates in the range of (0.001 to 10 /S ) and 

ODNT configuration. The merit of these loading configurations are in providing (i) a stable deformation 

path for in situ monitoring of the microscopic evolution and propagation of a highly heterogeneous 

deformation field, and (ii) a well characterized stress state to examine individual events of increased 

plastic strain increment within localized deformation band(s) after reaching the peak stress; a precursor 

for transverse-shearing and lamina-bending failure modes. The proposed methodology is expected to 

overcome current limitation in the numerical framework of MAT213, by providing detailed mechanistic 

view of post-peak stress degradation response. 

The EPSCoR-R3 funding will nourish the university-NASA Glenn and Langley partnership to develop the 

supporting experimental framework for further development of the composite material models and 

their implementation into computational frameworks. Dr. Bastawros and two Aerospace Engineering 

graduate students will execute the experimental testing and analysis plan to calibrate the model 

parameters for the NASA-provided hybrid weave composite panels. The established partnership with 
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NASA will enable the development of the future workforce through educating young engineers and 

scientist, with further global impact on reliability of transportation systems by ground, sea, air, and 

beyond, while influencing the environmental and industrial practices.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0040

Appendix EIII: Optimizing the bioconversion and recycling of inedible plant waste 

using mixed microbial cultures for long-term human habitation in space

Montana Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Angela Des Jardins

Plants play a crucial role in bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs) for long-term human habitation 

in space, due to their potential to revitalize the atmosphere (e.g., O2 production and CO2 removal) while 

producing edible biomass. Plant cultivation in BLSSs will require a continuous supply of nutrients and will 

result in the production of inedible plant wastes that still contain valuable nutrients and carbon that 

could be reused, recycled, or upcycled for other purposes. In this funding announcement, Appendix EIII

(Spaceflight-compatible Recycling of non-edible Biomass, Space Crop Production Gap 1.D.1.0.1), NASA 

recognizes the need for alternatives to improve processes that can convert plant waste (lignocellulosic 

biomass, LCB), into value-added materials and recycle resources to achieve a higher degree of selfsustainability in BLSSs. The microbial conversion of LCB into value-added products is a natural process 

suitable for long-term human habitation in space and a promising alternative to existing physicochemical

methods. Typically, LCB bioconversion is performed using pure cultures or communities of either fungi 

or bacteria; however, the use of mixed microbial communities, particularly fungal-bacterial cultures 

(e.g., biofilms), has not been widely explored. In nature, LCB degradation is performed by communities 

of diverse microbes that metabolize LCB in a synergistic, dynamic, and time-dependent fashion. 

Importantly, mixed cultures typically display improved adaptability and substrate utilization compared to 

monocultures. Thus, we hypothesize that mixed microbial communities will be more efficient at utilizing 

and converting LCB into useful products. Based on our hypothesis and experience establishing mixed 

fungal-bacterial biofilms, we are proposing to use and engineer (through culture conditions) mixed 

cultures of LCB-degrading organisms (Phanerochaete chrysosporium, Pleurotus ostreatus, Trametes 

versicolor, Pseudomonas putida, Bacillus subtilis) to improve LCB bioconversion to further close the 

plant/food production loop in BLSSs. Specifically, we aim to use mixed cultures (e.g., biofilms) to 

transform plant waste (lettuce, tomato) to value-added products (e.g., nutrients, ethanol, fungal-derived 

bioplastics for 3D-printing), and even fungal biomass that could be used as an alternative food source. 

We aim to do this by optimizing the microbial growth, interactions, substrate utilization, and enzyme 

production in LCB-degrading mixed cultures to promote microbial synergisms and improve LCB 

bioconversion. The specific tasks proposed are: (1) establishing LCB-degrading mixed cultures and 

characterizing their potential synergistic interactions; (2) optimizing culture conditions to establish 

mixed cultures for LCB bioconversion; and (3) developing bioreactor designs that can provide the 

required growth conditions to maintain mixed cultures and enhance LCB bioconversion. The completion 

of this study will provide foundational knowledge and reactor designs for converting LCB into valueadded products and recover & recycle resources from LCB to close the plant/food production loop in 

BLSSs (addresses Appendix EIII), while decreasing the costs and dependency on resupplying resources 

from Earth. This project is synergistic with current efforts on LCB waste transformation (i.e. 
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Proposal Abstracts

physicochemical pretreatment) by NASAs Kennedy Space Center, and could be relevant to Human 

Health, Life Support and Habitation Systems Technology Areas. We have had conversations with NASAs 

scientists Aubrie O'Rourke and Ralph Fritsche at Kennedy Space Center, who have expressed their 

excitement regarding our project proposal and their willingness to guide our overall efforts. Moreover, 

optimizing the LCB bioconversion can help achieve a more sustainable agriculture system, which could 

also be relevant to other agencies (e.g., recently signed -Dec 2020- NASA-USDA agreement to improve 

Agricultural, Earth Science Research) and the general public.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0042

Appendix I In-Situ X-Ray and Thermal Monitoring of the Laser-Powder Bed Fusion 

Process: Determining Fusion Signatures Indicative of Part Quality

Wichita State University

Dr. Leonard Miller

A NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research Project is being proposed by Kansas State University (KSU; the 

Offeror located in an EPSCoR state) in response to Research Request Number EM21 AM In-Situ 

Monitoring Data Analysis and Correlation for NDE of Part Qualityfrom NASAs Marshall Spaceflight Center 

(MSFC). The proposed research will aid the MSFC by providing valuable experimental data 

representative of quality fusion signaturesobtained via in-situ X-ray imaging and thermal monitoring of 

the laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF) additive manufacturing (AM) of a high-priority/program-aligning 

material. Quality fusion signatures are a key part to qualification and certification of L-PBF processes as 

dictated by NASA MSFC-STD-3716/17; thus, this Project focuses on correlating direct and salient thermal 

responses of the L-PBF melt pool and/or heat affected zone (HAZ) with successful fusion (i.e. no lack of 

fusion or pore generation). The experiment is unique in that it will be performed at the Stanford 

Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), a division of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, using a 

custom-designed L-PBF system with an infrared (IR) camera, two-color pyrometer and high-speed visual 

camera. Various specimens will be built within the X-ray hutch at SSRLcollecting various images detailing 

melt pool formation and solidification along with pore-generating phenomena such as vapor recoil 

(keyholing) and spatter ejection. The X-ray data will be labeled for position and time and then correlated 

with IR/pyrometer image data. The goal is to predict the type and amount of porosity based on 

measured temperature response characteristics. This will be accomplished via deep learning and 

leveraging an L-PBF thermal process model. A Post-Doctoral Associate will be hired to solely work on the 

proposed project to ensure its success. Due to the novelty of the proposed experiments, at least two 

high-impact journal publications are planned.
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0043

Appendix G -- Materials and Processes for All Solid-State Batteries for Electric 

Aircraft: Multi-Dimensional Networked Antiperovskite Electrolytes for All SolidState Batteries for Electric Aircraft

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Dr. Edward Duke

High-performance solid-state batteries are highly demanded for the practical application of all electric 

vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOL). Recent studies have reported different solid-state 

electrolyte (SSE) such as garnet, lithium phosphorus oxynitride, etc. However, those existing SSEs have 

still suffered from their own limitations such as instability with alkali electrodes and severe decay of the 

performance due to moisture sensitivity. Herein, the overarching goal of this project, for the first time, is 

to develop a new SSE based on multi-dimensional networked antiperovskite (AP) with unprecedented 

functions. A novel and scalable liquid-phase method will be used to break the thermodynamical 

metastability and fabricate the advanced SSE by manipulating the building blocks. To further improve 

the performance of AP based SSE, a nonflammable electrolyte will be designed and synthesized as a 

surface wetting agent in combination with the SSE. By assembling the full cells with the novel SSE, 

advanced anode, and cathode, it is expected to meet the requirement by eVTOL of the five key 

properties including safety, energy density, power, packaging design, and scalability. The proposed 

project is also aligned well with the research interests of NASA research centers, such as Glenn Research 

Center. We plan to leverage this project to strengthen the collaboration with research scientists at NASA 

to improve research infrastructure and capability in South Dakota. By conducting the research activities 

in this proposed project, it also has the potential to develop local workforce and boost technology 

transfer in the field by collaborating with local companies and/or startups.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0046

Appendix F: NASA SMD Computational and Information Sciences and Technology 

Office (CISTO): A Meta-Learning Framework for Characterizing and Accessing 

Training Data for GLOBE Observer Mosquito and Land Cover Protocols

University of Wyoming

Dr. Shawna McBride

This proposal is in response to NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) Solicitation that is related to 

Appendix F: NASA SMD Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO) under 

the research titled Assessing and Qualifying Citizen Science Labeling for Training Data for GLOBE 

Observer Mosquito and Land Cover Protocols Improving Data Quality within the GLOBE Observer 

Community. An exponentially increasing number of geo-tagged field photos are being collected and 

shared with the public community, providing the exciting potential for human and environmental 

studies across different scales. However, labeling and featuring those labels is time-consuming and 

might be biased for scientific re-use. In this project, based on GLOBE Observer (GO) unique sampling 

protocols, we proposed to develop a meta-learning framework to label and qualify GO Land Cover and 
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Mosquito Habitat Mapper, and access the label qualities based on remote sensing imagery. This work 

will start to answer in which way we can use citizen science derived data for research purposes and how 

we should use those photos with extensive Computer Science and Geography knowledge to reestablish 

a solid citizen science field photo processing pipeline that can be used for other use cases.

The proposed work seeks to grow a research area crossing frontiers in citizen science, geography, spatial 

literacy, and machine learning and AI. Focusing on labeling, qualifying, and accessing the GO field photos 

for which few studies and literature exist, the work has the potential to advance knowledge and 

understanding across several related disciplines. Furthermore, this proposed work provides an 

opportunity to translate decades of traditional ways of experts collecting field data into the digital 

framework that can foster innovation in re-using citizen science data. 

The PI believes that the proposed work has far-reaching implications on science, education, and 

technology that will benefit citizen scientists, researchers, and the community. The broader impacts 

include: 1) Promote geospatial literacy and call for citizen science participation in the State of Wyoming, 

where has the least population but tourism is the primary driver of the local and regional economy. 2) 

Advances in cutting edge toolsapplications on citizen science data. 3) Linking local citizens, researchers, 

government agencies (NASA GO) together to improve science communications.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0047

Appendix D: All-metal-oxide p-n photovoltaic junctions fabricated using materials 

abundant in the Martian regolith

Montana Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Angela Des Jardins

We propose fabricating all-metal-oxide photovoltaic devices using materials that are abundant in the 

Martian regolith. We are applying under Appendix D: NASA SMD Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS). 

Specifically, the hypothesis motivating this proposal falls under the research focus section c. Studies of 

the extracted material to determine its properties or to investigate novel ways of utilizing it to support 

NASAs exploration goals. The long-range goal of this investigation is to develop a method for fabricating 

photovoltaic devices using minimally-processed in-situ resources available on Mars and fabrication 

techniques amenable to the Martian environment to support NASAs mission goals. To achieve our longrange goal, we will fabricate and characterize p-n homojunction photovoltaic devices using hematite (�-

Fe2O3) as the n-type semiconductor substrate and a recently discovered Fe0.84Cr1.0Al0.16O3 metaloxide alloy as the p-type semiconductor substrate. Hematite and the elements Fe, Cr, and Al are all 

abundant in the Martian regolith and will serve as the light-absorbing layers in the p-n homojunction 

photovoltaic devices.

The objective of this proposal is to characterize the n-type �-Fe2O3 and p-type Fe0.84 Cr1.0 Al0.16 O3 

materials and photovoltaic devices made from them. Specifically, we will quantify: optical properties, 

donor density, flat band potential, current-voltage characteristics, and incident photon conversion 

efficiency (IPCE). Our central hypothesis is that, once the properties of the individual metal oxides are 

known, p-n photovoltaic device architectures can be designed and fabricated to circumvent the 
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Proposal Abstracts

undesirable characteristics often encountered in all-metal-oxide photovoltaic devices such as: short 

carrier diffusion lengths, short excited state lifetimes, and the resulting low IPCE values.

Our preliminary data shows that solution-processed all-metal-oxide photovoltaics of n-type �-Fe2O3/ptype Fe0.84 Cr1.0 Al0.16 O3 do generate a photocurrent under white light illumination. Our proposal is 

focused on answering fundamental questions to provide insight into strategies for improving the 

efficiency of these photovoltaic devices and addressing the challenge of using minimally-processed 

Martian resources as the feedstock for fabricating these devices."

21-EPSCoR-R3-0049

Appendix F: Assessing Citizen Science Labeling to Improve Training Data Quality for 

Land Cover Protocols within the GLOBE Observer Community

University of Vermont

Prof. Bernard Cole

The proposed project aims to use hackathons as the enabling platform to label images collected through 

the Land Cover tool in the NASA GLOBE Observer app, the citizen science app of the GLOBE Program. 

The labeled images would be used to train, validate, and test machine learning algorithms in NASA Earth 

Science missions. GLOBE Observer has cataloged over 15,800 entries (up to 6 photos per entry) but only 

40% of entries are labeled, rendering their use and applications to be limited compared to their 

potential. The work efficiency will be maximized by leveraging the existing Land Cover Type classification 

systems for labeling scheme design and leveraging already labeled images for ground truth label 

generation. Labels will be structured in a modularized hierarchy, initially using Carbon Monitoring 

System as the application but extensible to other applications. Hackathon will run throughout the 

performance period marked by four meetings. Trainees will be recruited inclusively from diverse groups, 

and trained via computing platforms centered on Microsoft Teams at the University of Vermont and 

leveraging Amazon SageMaker services geared for efficient labeling of ground truth images. The quality 

of image labels generated through hackathon will be assessed using a direct measure (comparing with 

the ground truth labels) and an indirect measure (comparing the outputs from using multiple image 

classification models); and, additionally, image labelers will be assessed as well in conjunction with the 

quality of image labels they produce. Successful completion of this work requires multidisciplinary 

expertise spanning from data management, machine learning and data science to land-cover and landuse to workforce training and community development. The project team collectively covers all 

necessary expertise. The project outcome will include not only high-quality image labels but also 

assessment metrics for the quality of image labels and labelers. A success of this project would enable a 

longer-term vision to build a comprehensive, compact land-cover labeling system encompassing 

heterogeneous applications. Another vision would be to let the data deficiency identified during the 

hackathon engage citizen scientists to contribute data better customized to meet the need namely 

"hackathon-in-the-loop".
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0051

Appendix D: Elucidation of stress resilience of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) 

Lam) on Mars-like soil

NASA WV Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Majid Jaridi

Elucidation of stress resilience of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam) for Mars-regolith.

PROJECT SUMMARY: The recent advancement in space science and technology is one of the primary 

drivers of human exploration and exploitation of Mars. Several international space agencies have 

announced a crewed exploration of Mars in the near future. The innate ability of plants to consume 

carbon dioxide and release oxygen and recycle organic waste and water attributes them as a plausible 

part of a bio-regenerative life-support system for human life and facilitate the colonization of the red 

planet. However, plants will encounter hostile Martian environments and suffer severe abiotic stressinduced by several factors, including low-gravity, high radiations, high CO2 and low oxygen levels, low 

temperature, limited sunlight, and mainly unfavorable soil properties to support the plant life. The 

Martian soil contains mostly lots of minerals and chlorine in the form of perchlorates. Chlorine is toxic to 

plants directly affects plant growth and development. Moreover, the produce on the Mars soil will not 

be edible due to the accumulation of toxic metals such as Aluminum, Chromium, and possibly Arsenic, 

Lead, and Cadmium. The proposed research involves elucidating the physiological, biochemical, and 

molecular mechanisms underlying plant adaptation to simulated Mars-like environments and developing 

transgenic plants that selectively extrude toxic heavy metals to produce edible food. Understanding the 

molecular mechanisms of plant adaptability to the simulated extraterrestrial environment will help 

space biology researchers to develop and design solutions for the plant growth management system. 

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam), which shows considerable abiotic stress tolerance, low water 

requirement, and a relatively short life cycle, is one of the crop plants considered as a model plant for 

space biology research. This project will investigate sweet potato's efficacy and adaptability as a 

potential Mars-crop to generate the food crop habitable in the harsh extraterrestrial environment. The 

proposed research's overall objectives are to perform physiological and biochemical characterization of 

the sweet potato plants under a simulated Mars-like environment and thoroughly evaluate the major 

traits such as development, biomass production, photosynthesis (oxygen emission capacity), tuber 

quality, and abiotic stress tolerance. Additionally, the functional genomics approach will be employed to 

identify novel genes regulating the physiological and biochemical functions, followed by validating their 

role in sweet potato adaption to the simulated Mars-like growth conditions. We will analyze the profiles 

and content of heavy metals in leaves, stem, and tuber tissues to understand the uptake and 

accumulation of toxic metals in sweet potato grown on Mars soil simulant.

Further, the data will help develop transgenic stress-tolerant sweet potato plants in the future that 

selectively prevent heavy metal uptake. The proposed research project's outcomes will have broad 

societal relevance. The proposed project's long-term goal is to develop a sweet potato crop physiology 

program to generate cultivars plausibly habitable in harsh growth conditions. Our proposal's equally 

important objective is to educate, encourage, and engage the HBCU students in participating in NASArelated space biology research activities. The teaching modules will be developed to train undergraduate 

and graduate students in the research program. 
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21-EPSCoR-R3-0052

Appendix F (CISTO): Fault Diagnosis for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems using 

Reinforcement Learning

NASA WV Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Majid Jaridi

The overarching objective of the proposed research is to create and validate a principled and general 

framework for fault diagnosis of an autonomous system operating in a high-dimensional state/action 

space. The proposed research will frame the fault diagnosis problem of an autonomous system as a 

sequential decision-making problem in a reinforcement learning setting where the ultimate goal is to 

find a policy that maps states to those disturbances causing the system to fail. To identify the most likely 

failure paths in a simulated environment, the fundamental method developed in this research will be 

applied to a small satellite in a simulated suite developed by NASA. If successful, the proposed research 

will accelerate the safety verification of complex autonomous systems that minimizes the number of 

required computationally expensive validation experiments, while reliably reveals the most likely failure 

events.

The proposed research integrates with educational and training activities with a goal of exposing

underrepresented communities in the mid-Atlantic region to the problems important to NASA and 

facilitate future collaborations with NASA scientists. The participants will learn about the proposed 

solution of reinforcement learning and explore novel solutions to the problem-space. We will use 

webinars and Hackweek events to introduce and engage the underrepresented communities to the 

problem of Fault Diagnosis in Autonomous system, thereby increasing their competitiveness for future 

NASA opportunities.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0055

NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research: BDNN Hackathon: Uncertainty Aware Few 

Shot Learning from Citizen Science Data and Bayesian Deep Neural Network for 

Land Cover Image Classification

University of Puerto Rico

Dr. Gerardo Morell

The goal of this proposal is to apply Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigms for 

quantifying uncertainty in the Citizen Science image data, and train a Bayesian Deep Neural Network 

(BDNN) with few shot learning for prediction of classes and labeling of the images in the GLOBE 

database. The GLOBE database of color (RGB) images are taken by people worldwide, with different 

camera settings, lighting, acquisition parameters leading to uncertainty in predicting land cover classes 

and thereby labeling the images. A robust method that can account for the uncertainty in the mixed 

pixels found in the edges and corners of neighboring classes in the image is necessary for accurate 

prediction of land cover classes and labeling of the Citizen Science database of images. The other goal of 

this project is to organize a year-long multievent hackathon for capability building in ML and AI in 

underrepresented minorities. The objectives for this NASA Rapid Response Project are:
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Proposal Abstracts

1) Quantify uncertainty due to edge and boundary pixels in Citizen Science image data using uncertainty 

aware few shot learning method.

2) Develop a Bayesian Deep Neural Network (BDNN) with regularization of uncertainty for land cover 

classification of Citizen Science images.

3) Organize a year-long multi-event BDNN Hackathon for education and training in developing ML and AI 

approaches for land use classification of GLOBE images.

The edge and boundary data points will be identified by checking for optimality of the estimated class 

boundary known as Bayes boundary-ness, which will be quantized using Shannon entropy. We will 

implement self-trained few shot learning that selects instances from the unlabeled pool of these data 

points for uncertainty awareness. The uncertainty estimates will be added to the objective function of 

the BDNN which will be solved to output predictions of land cover classes and generating labels for the 

images. We will characterize images from homogeneous regions to more complex heterogeneous 

regions using region, shape and texture based descriptors, to improve land cover class predictions. The 

final labeling of the image will be done by majority voting. We will apply the BDNN tool for assessing the 

impact of hurricanes in the country. An interdisciplinary year-long multi-event virtual BDNN Hackathon 

will be organized and conducted by the PI and Co-I. Collaborators of the PI and CO-I from UPR and other 

educational institutions will contribute to the ML and AI training and learning modules. Dr. Roberto 

Rivera and Dr. Fernando Vega leading faculty in ML and AI in UPRM will be providing education modules 

for the hackathon. It is expected that atleast one hundred students from UPR campuses and high school 

students will participate in the hackathon. The hackathon will provide a hands-on learning experience 

for students with the tools developed in this project. Dr. Peder Nelson, Science lead for the land cover 

tool in GLOBE will be collaborating on this project. He will provide guidance, and feedback during the 

Land Cover Classification (LCC). The year-long virtual BDNN hackathon will be directed towards 

education and training of underrepresented minority students to gain expertise in learning ML and AI 

methods and applying them to NASA datasets. The hackathon will be organized in UPR-Mayaguez, a 

Hispanic minority serving institution with 99% Hispanic students who will gain knowledge in the fields of 

satellite remote sensing, airborne hyperspectral imaging and Python ML and AI tool development 

through the Hackathon. The BDNN hackathon will also enable Hispanic minority students to take up 

internships with NASA, and add to the workforce development for future NASA missions.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0056

NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research: Multispectral and Hyperspectral Data 

Representation using Deep Autoencoders and Transfer Learning of BERT for 

Improved Detection of Harmful Algal Blooms

University of Puerto Rico

Dr. Gerardo Morell

The goal of this proposal is to apply artificial intelligence paradigms for developing a knowledge base of 

drivers of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) from multispectral and hyperspectral images, and train a 

Bidirectional Encoder Representation of Transformers by transfer learning to improve detection of HAB 

in Lake Erie. There has been drinking water risk due to the presence of Cyanobacteria Microcystis in 

Lake Erie, which is also affecting tourism, recreation, and fishing. The algal blooms show inherent 
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 33

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Proposal Abstracts

optical properties that have a high variability in spatial and temporal scales. Hence, satellite, and 

airborne remote sensing offers a viable solution to monitoring cyanobacteria HAB. In this project, we 

will develop and apply unsupervised data representation using autoencoders to accurately estimate the 

diverse bloom composition with variable absorption and backscatter properties. We will also process 

multispectral Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) using the trained BERT model to predict the class 

distributions of HAB constituents. The objectives for this NASA Rapid Response Project are:

1) Multispectral and hyperspectral image data representation of drivers of HABs by unsupervised 

learning using deep Autoencoders (AE) and creation of a knowledge-base of HAB drivers.

2) Train a deep Bidirectional Encoder Representation of Transformers (BERT) by transfer learning of 

the knowledge-base of drivers of HABs to improve their detection.

Multispectral images from NASAs Earth observing satellites such as Landsat 8, MODIS, and Sentinel 3 will 

be used in this project. Airborne Hyperspectral Imager (HSI 3.2) images with a meter spatial resolution 

and spectral bands ranging from 400 to 900nm will be provided by Glenn Research Center (GRC). Deep 

AE will be used for unsupervised feature extraction from these images to create a knowledge-base of 

novel drivers of HABs. The hidden layers of the AE will identify intrinsic structures in the image datasets, 

as well as produce a compressed representation of the multi-sensor image datasets. The BERT model 

consists of layers for pixel embedding, and self-attention feedforward sequence, and will be trained with 

the knowledge-base by transfer learning. The learnt BERT model will be used for improving predictions 

of HAB class distributions, and estimating fractional abundances of HABs in the hyperspectral images. 

The BERT trained model will be useful for supporting operational forecasting systems, and water quality 

management in Lake Erie. Eng. Roger Tokars, optics Engineer, GRC, NASA will collaborate in this project, 

giving important information on the pre-processing, and corrections done on the HSI 3.2 hyperspectral 

images. Dr. Jeffrey Luvall, GRC, NASA will also be collaborating in this project, and will provide guidance 

on the use of Ecostress and Desis images. The NASA collaborators will provide other available datasets 

and field measurements for validation of the results for quantifying drivers of HABs in Lake Erie and 

other aquatic regions. This project will be conducted at the Laboratory for Applied Remote Sensing, 

Imaging, and Photonics (LARSIP), ECE, UPRM. This project is conducted in a Hispanic minority serving 

institution with 99% Hispanic students who will gain knowledge in the fields of satellite remote sensing, 

multispectral and hyperspectral image processing and Python tool development. This project will 

directly support two graduate students in Earth science research, and involve many undergraduate 

students through course work and workshops. The PI will use the material from this project in the 

Remote Sensing, and Image Processing courses taught at ECE, UPRM. The students will be exposed to 

NASA Earth science related research. This project will also enable Hispanic minority students to take up 

internships with NASA, and add to the workforce development for future NASA missions.
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 34

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21-EPSCoR-R3-0058

Hack the land out of them: Obtaining land cover classifications from GLOBE 

Observer photographs (for Appendix F).

New Mexico State University

Dr. Paulo Oemig

A picture can be worth a thousand words and this describes the data necessary to identify and track 

global land cover change. Citizen science apps and social media are generating enormous amounts of 

data in the form of photographs uploaded to the cloud. Photographs submitted via the Globe Observer 

app provide the link between space and Earth, fostering an understanding of Earths physical processes 

and natural phenomenon. The volume of photographs is outpacing human ability to organize, 

characterize, evaluate and classify data for search, comparison, change detection, and prediction. 

This is where the hack comes in. We propose a year of activities to explore and create machine learning 

(ML) tools to segment, characterize, classify, and label components of land cover photographs from the 

GLOBE Observer (GO) land cover app. We propose to recruit a broad diversity of participants of New 

Mexican, American and international students, satellite images are already capable of being processed 

to classification standards by ML tools, providing the opportunity to prove the concept that similar 

approaches can be developed for photographs. In contrast to imagery analysts processing data on a 

computer, our approach includes outdoor observation and sampling of landscapes in situ, making the 

connection between the land, the human observers and machine learning palpable.

Designing a series of simultaneous virtual learning workshops will collate participants into teams, and 

facilitate engagement by introducing the shared languages of photos, land interpretation and code (-), to 

outline approaches and targets of the hackathon (1). Recruitment will focus on participants from across 

the Southwest. Targeted recruiting of female and Hispanic participants from New Mexico State 

University and the tribal colleges in New Mexico, in addition to programs associated with AmericaView 

will result in teams from locations across America. The online platform (Website) will allow participation 

from any location without time restraints. Packaging the invitation to those who embrace a sense of 

Earth stewardship will foster the creation and establishment of local service projects to perpetuate the 

networking and collaboration established in the hack environment. 

Data preparation chooses image replicates from the Globe Observer data set (e.g., download images, 

identify locations in close proximity over a range of ecosystems). Preparation of workshops includes 

designing outreach and application materials, and completing the IRB training. Designing workshops 

starts with preparing data and other resources for collaboration, practicing GO activities, recording video 

and creating homework assignments. Organizing data and sample locations will involve collaboration 

through Jupyter notebooks. Design of social components for daily schedules includes meet-and-greet, 

physical exercise, breaks, games, and meals.
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 35

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21-EPSCoR-R3-0062

NASA EPSCoR R3 Appendix A (SMD): Material response of woven heat shield 

material in Venusian atmosphere

University of Kentucky

Prof. Alexandre Martin

Kentucky s NASA EPSCoR jurisdiction solicited proposals from university-led research teams in Kentucky 

to address NASA research needs listed as tasks for the FY2021 NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research 

(R3) announcement (NNH21ZHA002C). The NASA Kentucky EPSCoR program collaborated with 

responding faculty researchers to develop and submit relevant proposals that address R3 task 

objectives. The proposed work addresses problems listed in the solicitation under Appendix A: NASA 

SMD Planetary Division, Extreme Environments Applicable to Venus, Io, Earth volcanoes. and deep sea 

vents.

The proposed work will build on previous work supported under the R3 program and shift focus to the 

development of reliable gas-surface interaction models for Venus atmospheric entry. The model 

development will be specifically designed for Thermal Protection Systems made of woven carbon 

preform. The effect of the TPS structure with the high-pressure high-temperature effects of the 

atmosphere will be studied, including the effects of radiation penetration, due to the expected presence 

of CN gas in the post-shock region.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0064

Stability and Distribution of Methane Clathrate Hydrates and Clathrasils on the 

Surface of Mars - Appendix B - Renewal 80NSSC19M017

University Of Arkansas at Little Rock

Dr. Mitchell Hudson

Methane has been first identified in the atmosphere of Mars by the Planetary Fourier spectrometer 

onboard Mars Express (Formisano et al., 2004). It was then confirmed by ground-based observations 

(Mumma et al., 2009) and later in situ by the Mars Science Laboratory s SAM instrument (Webster et 

al., 2018). Methane is a potentially significant resource for future human exploration of Mars, provided 

we can identify its sources, locations, and abundances. According to our current knowledge of the 

surface and subsurface environment of Mars, one of the main sources should be clathrates hydrates, a 

structure composed of water molecules cages entrapping other gas molecules, especially methane.
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 36

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21-EPSCoR-R3-0065

Study of Performance for Commercial Extravehicular Space Suit - Appendix B

North Dakota Space Grant Consortium

Dr. Caitlin Milera

In response to NASA EPSCoR Opportunity: FY 2021 Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN) Rapid

Response Research (R3), and within the scope of the Commercial Space Capabilities Office Appendix B. 

Commercial Space Research Request Number CSCO-2021-02, the following research; Study of 

Performance for Commercial Extravehicular Space Suit is proposed.

With the proliferation of commercial spaceflight, commercial activities beyond tourism are set to 

become a normative utilization of space. These activities will require the use of similar risk mitigations 

that non-commercial space entities currently require, to include Extravehicular Activity (EVA) space 

suits. These suits are a complex system of systems which provide the wearer with a semi-flexible 

enclosure and a self-contained life support system allowing them to perform tasks in a microgravity or 

other inhospitable environments such as a non-Earth planetary surface. The research proposed herein 

looks to ascertain the usability aspects of the Final Frontier Design (FFD) commercially designed EVA 

space suit through the utilization of human-centered usability methods and techniques to include 

Humans-in-the-Loop (HITL) testing. Anthropomorphic work envelope data collection will be performed 

within two conditions; human research subject without the pressurized outer garment, and human 

research subject with the pressurized outer garment with a Delta P of 3.5psid. In both conditions, the 

subject will be in a standing position equivalent to tasks performed in microgravity. Further data 

collection will include the use of an Activity Board device, which includes various connections, switches, 

and other activities equivalent to tasks performed within microgravity to supplement work envelope 

data with that of actual tasks and include dexterity of the EVA space suit gloves as part of the usability of 

the suit. This research is being conducted at a standard atmosphere and 1-g environment and will utilize 

a three-dimension full body motion capture system to measure and compare the data between both 

conditions while the research subject is performing the Activity Board tasks. Research subjects will be 

selected within the range of allowable operator height and weight of the FFD EVA space suit and within 

the 5th and 95th percentile for stature as required by NASA Man-systems integration standards Volume 

1 Section 3 (NASA-STD-3000). The research proposed herein will also utilize UND Human Spaceflight Lab 

(HSL) standards and processes (including Internal Institutional Review Board) for testing with human 

subjects as well as any NASA testing procedures that its standards and processes reference, such as 

NASA STD-3001 NASA Space Flight Human-System Standard and those of other U.S. Agencies such as the 

FDA and NIH.
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 37

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21-EPSCoR-R3-0066

NASA EPSCoR R3 Appendix G (ARMD): Composite Solid Electrolytes for High Safety 

Lithium Metal Batteries

University of Kentucky

Prof. Alexandre Martin

Kentucky s NASA EPSCoR jurisdiction solicited proposals from university-led research teams in Kentucky 

to address NASA research needs listed as tasks for the FY2021 NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research 

(R3) announcement (NNH21ZHA002C). The NASA Kentucky EPSCoR program collaborated with 

responding faculty researchers to develop and submit relevant proposals that address R3 task 

objectives.

The proposed work is in response to R3 Appendix G (ARMD) related to Electric Aircraft Batteries & Crash 

Safety. Batteries for electric aircraft are required to meet five key properties: safety, energy density, 

power, packaging design and scalability. Achieving high safety and energy density are challenging for 

state-of-the-art Li-ion batteries that contain flammable liquid electrolytes and graphite anode. In this 

work, we propose to develop inorganic-polymer composite solid electrolytes (CSEs) for solid-state Li 

metal batteries (SSLMBs) to achieve enhanced safety and increased energy density. The developed CSEs 

will combine the merits of high ionic conductivity of inorganic sulfides (lithium argyrodites) and 

flexibility/stability of polymer electrolytes. Using such CSEs, the fabricated solid-state Li metal batteries 

are able to achieve outstanding cycling performance on both energy density and C-rates. Solid-state Li 

metal batteries from this proposed work will advance the development of safe and powerful energy 

storage systems for electric aircrafts to meet NASA s specific needs. In addition, this project will 

establish a sustainable collaboration between University of Louisville in Kentucky (an EPSCoR state) with 

NASA research centers (i.e. Glenn Research Center and Langley Research Center).

21-EPSCoR-R3-0069

INE Proposal in Response to NASA EPSCOR Rapid Research Response Appendix A: 

High-Temperature 3-D SiC Integrated Circuit Chip Packaging for Venus Surface 

Exploration

University of Idaho

Dr. Matthew Bernards

The objective of this project is to investigate the three-dimensional (3-D) packaging of silicon carbide 

(SiC) integrated circuits (ICs) for high temperatures of about 465�C and high pressure of about 9.6MPa 

for Venus surface explorations, specifically to explore the SiC die attach, wirebonding, flip chip, 

microbump and through-substrate-via (TSV) formation materials and process technologies for 2.5-D chip 

packaging and 3-D SiC die stacks and integration to withstand the extreme environment on Venus 

surface. We propose to use 3-D IC stacks and integration to package significantly more SiC dies and GaN 

sensors in one package to save the already precious ceramic printed circuit board (PCB) space and 

improve electrical and mechanical performance of the chips and package. The developed 3-D SiC IC 

package will be subjected to a simulated Venus surface atmospheric environment to verify the thermal 
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Proposal Abstracts

and structural integrity. A thermal cycling test up to 500�C will be performed for electrical and 

mechanical failure analysis of the 3-D package including die shear test and wire pull test.

Current Venus landers can only operate on the planet s surface for a few hours because the commercial 

electronics fail to work in the extreme Venus surface environment. NASA Glenn Research Center has 

recently demonstrated that a SiC integrated circuit with more than 100 transistors withstood the 

simulated Venus surface atmosphere environment for 521 hours. To successfully implement the data 

collection and telemetry tasks, the SiC integrated circuits need to be carefully packaged to be integrated 

to the Venus lander. Some preliminary research has been done for basic 2-D packaging of SiC chips 

including basic die attach and wirebonding. In comparison to millions to billions of transistors in a silicon 

integrated circuit, a SiC integrated circuit with only several hundreds of transistors need to be densely 

packed in order to save the precious PCB footprint and improve the electrical and mechanical 

performance. On the other hand, current advanced 3-D electronic packages are developed for working 

temperature less than 300�C. The widely used polymer materials in these 3-D package technologies 

will be burned to ashes on Venus surface. To make the 3-D packed chips and sensors work for an 

extended time (months), different, even new, materials together with new processes must be developed 

to build the 3-D packages to meet the needs of Venus surface exploration requirements.

The proposed research will make a significant contribution toward the high-performance 3-D packaging 

of SiC chips and sensors for high temperature, high pressure Venus surface exploration missions.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0071

INE Proposal in Response to NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research Appendix D: 

NASA SMD Biological and Physical Sciences - Crop Plant Stress Tolerance for Space 

Exploration - Water Delivery and Gas Exchange Crop Stress Analysis for Space 

Exploration

University of Idaho

Dr. Matthew Bernards

Growing plants in reduced gravity is essential for future long-term missions. Although plant growth 

modules for microgravity have been developed and tested for more than 40 years (Wheeler, 2017), 

creating optimal water-saturation conditions for plant growth in reduced gravity remains a significant 

obstacle (e.g., Hoehn et al., 2000; Zabel et al., 2016; Anderson et al., 2017). With the shift to capillarydominated fluid behavior, managing water, gas exchange, and the delivery of nutrients is challenging 

(Jones and Or, 1999; Steinberg et al., 2005). The discrepancy is mainly attributed to unexpected fluid 

distributions where the hysteresis in the soil-water retention properties appear to play an enhanced role 

compared to Earth which increases the risk of hypoxia and disruptions in water and nutrient supply to 

plant roots (Heinse et al., 2009, 2015b). The goal of this work is to enable productive space agriculture 

during spaceflight and lunar and planetary habitats by reducing these root-zone crop stresses. 

This proposal is responsive to determining how interrelated stress factors caused by challenges in 

providing balanced water, air, and nutrient delivery in reduced gravity impact plant production. We will 

(1) analyze existing root-zone data collected during the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) PH-01 mission (soil 

and crop water balance, soil water and oxygen) comparing water and nutrient delivery between groundbased and microgravity experiments, and (2) use numerical forward and inverse modeling in Hydrus 3D 
NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response Research (R3) 39

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Proposal Abstracts

to frame an optimization problem leading to candidate management strategies that minimize crop stress 

by providing balanced root resource fluxes and promote uniform root distributions. For the 

optimization, we will consider effective diffusivities, allowing a more accurate description of rootexperienced fluxes combined with root- and microbial requirements (similar to Heinse et al., 2009; Jones 

et al., 2012) considering amongst others the proposed plant pillow architecture for the VEGGIE missions 

(Massa et al., 2013, 2020; Morrow et al., 2016). The investigations into root-zone stress tolerances are 

essential for providing the root-zone management and design characteristics that are critical for reliable 

and up-scalable plant space agriculture.

The research described in this proposal will yield new knowledge and understanding about watering 

crops in reduced gravity. The combination of analyzing root zone data between 1g and microgravity 

together with numerical modeling of root zone performance allows us to better understand crop stress 

caused by water and nutrient delivery deficits and root zone hypoxia. Improving this understanding is 

crucial for predicting the efficacy of water and nutrient delivery systems in spaceflight, and lunar and 

planetary habitats. Thus, our work will contribute to how plant stress may be reduced during each 

growth stage by evaluating management set points and delivery strategies. The proposed application of 

media characterization, data analysis and modeling leading to the formulation of an optimization 

problem is innovative, and our focus on root-zone stressors caused by inadequate water delivery has 

been identified as a key limitation to plant-growth successes in space.

This project represents a training opportunity for an undergraduate student. The undergraduate 

student will be involved in the data analysis and laboratory experiments and is expected to complete a 

small independent project that will be presented at a subsequent conference. The student will also be 

encouraged to participate in scholarly publications as a co-author or potentially as a lead author. This 

project is of particular interest to the PI because it helps foster collaboration with NASA scientists, and 

harbors a vision of long-term contributions to successful bioregenerative life support systems in space.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0074

Appendix B. Renewal of Life on Mars Algae Cultivation for Long-term Food and 

Oxygen Production

Nevada System of Higher Education

Dr. Lynn Fenstermaker

Here we are proposing a renewal of our current grant entitled Life on Mars: Algae cultivation for longterm food and oxygen production. Long-term human exploration of Mars will require significant 

amounts of both oxygen and food, and the ability to grow photosynthetic organisms on Mars would 

contribute significantly to both of these needs. Algae, which produce much of the oxygen on Earth, have 

also adapted to extreme terrestrial environments. Some species of algae are also edible, and are 

increasingly utilized as food sources. Growth of such extremophilic and edible algae species, therefore, 

has the potential to provide both oxygen and nutrients for long-term Mars exploration.

As stated in the call for the original funding, Low pressure is being sought to reduce mass and volume 

of structures that would enclose the plant growth area and potentially enable use of transparent 

materials to utilize ambient light . However, other than our ongoing work, no prior studies have 

examined snow algae growth under low atmospheric pressure conditions relevant to growth on Mars. 

Our promising initial results show growth of algae under low pressure conditions (80 � 5 mbar). Despite 
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these promising results, however, significant questions remain. These include the lower limits of 

atmospheric pressure under which algae growth will occur, the impact of lowered light levels such as are 

expected on Mars, as well as the impact of Mars regolith.

We therefore propose a renewal to test additional relevant conditions. We will use a proposed new low 

pressure chamber to test algae growth at lower pressures of 30 mbar and 17 mbar. We will also examine 

light conditions relevant to Mars, which include a 50% decrease in light levels corresponding to levels on 

Mars, as well as introducing dark periods relevant to dust storms on Mars. We anticipate that snow 

algae, in particular, may be resilient to both lowered light levels, as well as periods of time with no light 

due to their life cycle, which includes a period of time in the soil beneath the snowpack. We will also test 

the impact of nutrient supply from Mars regolith on algae growth. We will both grow the algae in 

medium generated by reacting Mars regolith simulants with liquid water to determine whether 

adequate nutrients can be supplied, as well as testing the levels at which regolith become toxic by 

directly inoculating cultures with Mars regolith simulant. Our preliminary experiments show some 

successful growth on the Mars regolith simulant, but more work is needed to assess the constraints of 

using Mars regolith as a nutrient source. For each growth condition, we will measure cell counts, optical 

density by UV-VIS, and oxygen production using GC-MS. Finally, we will identify the genetic basis of 

adaptations in the algae species by differential gene expression studies.

We propose that our current team will continue working on this project, including UNLV postdoc Dr. 

Leena Cycil, Science PI Dr. Elisabeth Hausrath, NASA Scientist Dr. Doug Ming, who has extensive 

experience in Life Support, and consultant Dr. James Raymond, who is a snow algae expert. The 

proposed work has been discussed with Dr. Warren Ruemmele, and will fill important knowledge gaps in 

the production of oxygen and nutrients on Mars. The proposed work pursuing in situ production of 

oxygen and food on Mars would be an important step forward in the exciting field of human exploration 

of Mars.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0075

Appendix D: Biomimicry of the Growth of a Desert Plant as an Approach for 

Extractions of Phosphorus and Minerals from Martian Regolith

Nevada System of Higher Education

Dr. Lynn Fenstermaker

Robotic or human space missions are extremely costly. The cost associated with exploration of space 

missions can be curtailed by reducing the launch mass. This is possible by utilizing in-situ resources. 

Martian regolith is composed of iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, potassium, silicon, chromium, 

manganese, sulfur, phosphorus, and sodium, and has the potential to be an excellent in-situ source of 

minerals and nutrients to support human lives and activities. However, these elements exist in the forms 

of stable oxides and/or complexes rather than their elemental form. The processing of oxides and 

complexes to recover high purity elements is economically and technically challenging. Several desert 

plants, such as paloverde, grow on rocks in Nevada with limited water, similar to the conditions on Mars. 

This means that these plants are able to extract nutrients and minerals from desert rocks such as basalt. 

These plants survive by extending their roots deep, up to a few meters into basalt fractures. Being 

legumes, their nitrogen comes from nitrogen gas fixing bacteria living symbiotically in their root nodules. 

It is hypothesized that these plants have unique mechanisms for the extraction of phosphorus and 
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Proposal Abstracts

minerals. For example, they likely release biomaterials from their roots (acidic exudates) for the 

solubilization of phosphorus and minerals. The goal of this project is to deliver a safe and economical 

approach to extract phosphorus and minerals from Mars regolith via biomimicry of the growth of 

paloverde.

The main objectives of this proposed research are to: 1. Investigate phosphorus and mineral extraction 

biomechanisms utilized by paloverde to grow on basalt and Martian regolith simulant; and 2. 

Characterize biomaterials and their sources and rhizosphere microbial communities and their roles. We 

expect that the identified biomechanisms can be mimicked for the extractions of phosphorus and 

minerals from Martian regolith. We will conduct a detailed investigation on these extraction 

biomechanisms in a greenhouse using crushed basalt and Martian regolith like material (Mars Global 

Simulants) with no nutrient and mineral supplements. 

We will monitor minerals and phosphorus released by basalt and the simulant and uptaken by the plant. 

The investigation will elucidate the involvements of rhizosphere microorganisms and plant exudates in 

phosphorus and mineral dissolutions through several advanced analytical and molecular biology 

techniques. For example, we will examine the microbial community of the rhizobacteria using high 

throughput sequencing. We will chemically characterize the plant exudates by Fourier transform 

infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and chromatography and mass 

spectrometry. The vision of the project is not to grow paloverde on Mars but to characterize the 

biomaterials and biomechanisms which could potentially be adapted through biomimicry for the 

extraction of resources from Martian regolith and/or adopted through genetic engineering for growing 

other plants on Mars. 

Our investigator team, which consists an interdisciplinary team of qualified engineer and scientist, will 

collaborate with a well-respected NASA planetary scientist with expertise astrobiology and terraforming. 

Research results will lead to the developments of two main project deliveries: 1. A verified biobased 

approach (biomechanism) to extract phosphorus and minerals from Martian regolith and 2. Biobased 

material(s) for the extraction.

Research findings will generate a peer reviewed article in a respectable journal (impact factor > 5) and 

one or more proposals to major federal funding programs. The proposed project aligns with the goal of 

the NASA Physical Sciences Program research emphasis to develop and increase understanding of 

extraction techniques to generate useful materials from Lunar or Martian regolith.

21-EPSCoR-R3-0078

Appendix E: Thermophilic Biomass Recycling by Novel Chloroflexi to Support 

NASA Spaceflights

Nevada System of Higher Education

Dr. Lynn Fenstermaker

Lignocellulose is the structurally complex building block of all plants and would be the dominant waste 

from crop materials during spaceflight missions. NASA recognizes the complex and highly mission 

dependent nature of both the quality and quantity of lignocellulose wastes. As such, technologies for 

degradation of diverse lignocellulose waste streams depend on diverse organisms and enzymes 

regardless of the downstream application (e.g., soil formation, biofuels, specialty chemicals, etc.). To 

address this need, we propose to explore the ability of the novel bacterium, Kallotenue papyrolyticum,
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Proposal Abstracts

and its purified glycoside hydrolase (GH) enzymes to degrade a variety of polysaccharides under the 

broad hypothesis that this organism could be useful to degrade lignocellulose wastes during 

spaceflights. The proposal has two objectives. 

Objective 1 is to determine the functions of K. papyrolyticum GH enzymes. Codon-optimized genes will 

be synthesized, expressed in E. coli, and screened for activity against both defined and complex 

polymers. Enzyme kinetic parameters of promising GHs will be determined, particularly primary 

cellulases. The functional properties of individual GHs are foundational for understanding polysaccharide 

degradation and to establish the potential contributions of K. papyrolyticum enzymes to lignocellulose 

depolymerization during spaceflights.

Objective 2 is to determine the broader substrate range and degradation products of K. papyrolyticum. 

K. papyrolyticum will be screened for growth against a broad group of polymers. For a few 

polysaccharides, metabolic products will be quantified by untargeted gas chromatography/tandem mass 

spectrometry. Additionally, gas chromatography with flame ionization detection will be used to quantify 

volatile fatty acids and alcohols through time courses and to assess the effects of terminal electron 

acceptor availability (i.e., low or no oxygen) and simulated microgravity on production of chemicals of 

potential utility. Knowledge of the broader substrate range and products of polysaccharide degradation 

would be critical to assess biodegradation potential and direct production of biofuels or specialty 

chemicals.

This work directly addresses the R3 research objective defined in Appendix E under Research Project III: 

Spaceflight-compatible recycling of non-edible biomass. Although a variety of cellulolytic 

microorganisms have been described, the current cache of organisms and enzymes is insufficient to 

degrade the diverse and recalcitrant crop wastes necessary for long-term space flight and colonization. 

K. papyrolyticum is a member of the bacterial phylum Chloroflexi and is therefore unrelated to other 

well-described cellulolytic bacteria. By focusing on a highly cellulolytic organism from a poorly explored 

branch on the tree of life, this project has a strong potential to add to existing cellulolytic organisms and 

enzymes to address NASA s spaceflight needs and also provide a template to study other cellulolytic 

Chloroflexi.