NASA Offers Opportunity to Use Communications Testbed on Space Station

NASA is announcing opportunities for academia, industry and government agencies to develop and carry out research and technology demonstrations on the International Space Station using the newly installed Space Communications and Navigation (SCAN) testbed.

There are two announcements of opportunity. The SCAN Testbed Experiment Opportunity invites industry and other government agencies to enter into Space Act Agreements with NASA to use the space station’s SCAN platform. The SCAN Testbed Cooperative Agreement Notice invites academia to develop proposals to use the orbiting laboratory’s SCAN testbed research capabilities. NASA expects the first demonstrations by late 2013 or early 2014.

These opportunities will allow researchers to develop new software according to the Space Telecommunications Radio Standard (STRS) architecture for radios and reconfigure how radios communicate in space.

Experiments will provide waveforms and software components to the STRS waveform repository and enable future hardware platforms to use common reusable software modules. These new capabilities could enable greater scientific return from future NASA missions.

The SCAN testbed is a communications, navigation and networking demonstration platform based on the STRS. The experimental platform began its initial checkout activities on the space station Aug. 13 and will operate for as long as three years.

NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland leads the SCAN testbed multi-center team, which includes the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; and Johnson Space Center in Houston. General Dynamics of Scottsdale, Ariz., and Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., developed software-defined radios under cooperative agreements with NASA. The testbed is managed by the SCAN Program Office within the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For the SCAN Testbed Cooperative Agreement Notice and Experiment Opportunity, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/QLp37U

For more information about the SCAN testbed, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/QdpciB

For more information about the International Space Station research and technology, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station