NASA Awards Brimrose for Sophisticated New Materials Sensing Instrument

Sparks, MD–NASA has again awarded Brimrose Technology Corporation (BTC) for innovative new technology that will help in NASA’s search for materials on the Moon and other planets.

This latest award continues a strong relationship Brimrose has had as a technology supplier to NASA for more than a decade. Recently, four of our spectrometers have been selected to search for water crystals on the Moon in upcoming Moon missions and we have been selected to grow crystals on the International Space Station.

The newest winning proposal is for development of CIMMOS, a compact, integrated, modular, multi-technology optical sensing instrument that can provide high spectroscopic information content. The instrument is seen as being particularly valuable in starting to evaluate icy worlds of the solar system, which represent a new hurtle for space exploration.

“CIMMOS is designed to probe the ice surface and shallow subsurface of icy moons,” says Brimrose Technology Principal Investigator Dr. Clayton Yang. “Deployed on an ocean world exploration lander, CIMMOS can rapidly characterize minerals, salts and organics deposited on the surface, as well as have the ability to resolve profiles greater than 1 centimeter beneath the surface to understand diagenetic alteration. In addition, CIMMOS is fully compatible with a lander or rover drill to probe at the bottom of a drilled hole and study deposits buried at up to 10 centimeters below the surface.”

This new instrument brings together five advanced optical spectroscopic technologies. These include 1) visible reflectance spectroscopy; 2) near-infrared (NIR) reflectance spectroscopy (expandable to MWIR); 3) Raman spectroscopy; 4) UV-visible-NIR (UVN) laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS); and 5) LIBS with the additional groundbreaking capability of mid-IR LIBS emission spectroscopy.

The novel CIMMOS system has the potential to offer a rapid, comprehensive, and robust chemical characterization of ocean world surface targets from 1-7 meter standoff distances. The modular design implementation permits configuration of different spectroscopy subsystem assemblies tailored to the application with a high degree of cost-efficiency, resulting in a versatile instrument that can be optimized for size, power, and science objective requirements of a broad variety of ocean world missions such as icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, according to Dr. Yang.

For additional information about the award or Brimrose Technology, please contact David Chaffee at 410-472-7070 or davidc@brimrose.com.