Description: Growing concern over global climatic and environmental changes and our urgent need to quantify track and understand their impact on our planet¿s atmosphere, oceans, and land surfaces have prompted the development of extremely sensitive and technologically sophisticated instruments. To meet the challenges of these next generation instruments, a new class of high performance electronics needs to be developed. In this SBIR Phase II proposal, Mosaix proposes to design and build two separate low power, and compact single board digital poly-phase Fast Fourier Transform spectrometer (FFTS) optimized for the back-end signal processing requirements of next generation instruments. These two spectrometer designs are targeted to meet different mission requirements and leverage a common FPGA based digital electronic design and spectrometer IP core. Whilst sharing a common architecture, the boards differ in the analog-to-digital (ADC) samplers used at the front-end of the spectrometer and the actual FPGA device used for the digital signal processing tasks. The first spectrometer design is for a 8 GHz bandwidth spectrometer targeted for earth observing (EOS) missions. The second spectrometer design is for a 750 MHz bandwidth spectrometer targeted for planetary radiometer missions. The spectrometers developed under this SBIR will be state-of-the-art spectrometers.

Benefits: Spectrometers are at the heart of all NASA missions, whether for planetary exploration or Earth observing missions. Our spectrometer would find applications on the following NASA missions/experiments: The Global Atmospheric Composition Mission (GACM) - a mission designed to study at high resolution the Earth's chemical-weather processes; The Airborne Scanning Microwave Limb Sounder (A-SMLS) - an experiment to test an airborne version of the GACM instrument that was specifically designed to mitigate the development risks of the GACM SMLS instrument; The Composition of the Atmosphere from Mid-Earth Orbit (CAMEO) - a mission similar to the GACM mission but with a new Earth orbit for composition measurement; the SOFIA Heterodyne Instrument - an instrument on board a Boeing 747 to observe the earth's atmosphere; The Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope (CCAT) - an instrument to fit on the back-end of the CCAT telescope; The Mars Volcanic Emission and Life Scout (MARVEL) - a Mars orbiter mission to analyze the Martian atmosphere for chemical traces of life or environments supportive of life; The Venus Sounder for Planetary Exploration Sub-millimeter Limb Sounder (VESPER) - a Venus orbiter mission to analyze the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics; The Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) - a mission to investigate the planets as an archetype gas giant; & The Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) - a mission to investigate Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus.

A number of commercial opportunities exist for our proposed wide bandwidth digital spectrometers. These include: Ground based receivers for radio astronomy applications; Aircraft and Balloon atmospheric research; Software Defined Radio (SDR); Satellite communication systems; Baseband communication transceivers; Imaging arrays; Explosive detection; NMR and PET scan medical imaging equipment; Radar & radar jamming; Multi-channel digital receivers; Video image processors; Sonar image processor