AIST Investments

The AIST program uses the NASA Research Announcement (NRA) as its investment vehicle. NRAs are used for both short and long-term research activities. Links to the full solicitations and awards are listed in the table and a brief summary of each solicitation follows below.

Overview of Investments

Roses 2008 AIST NRA
20 proposals awarded for a total dollar value over a three-year period of approximately $25 million. The solicitation sought technology development activities leading to new systems for sensor support, advanced data processing, and management of data services to be developed in support of the Science Mission Directorate’s Earth Science Division.

Roses 2005 AIST NRA
28 proposals awarded funding totalling approximately $31 million. Investigators hail from 16 states.This research opportunity focused on "sensor web" technology and is the latest component in a series of information technology research initiatives that will help NASA's Earth Science Division solve the massive challenge of collecting, processing, routing and storing Earth science measurement data. Of the 99 proposals submitted the 28 selected covered a variety of topics pertaining to smart sensing, sensor web communications and enabling model interactions in sensor webs. With the increasing number of Earth observing satellites planned over the next decade, Information Technology will be the key to collecting and distributing Earth science data and information products to the global science community. “Sensor web” is the name given to the concept of integrating multiple Earth observing satellites and/or ground-based in-situ sensors into a cohesive network to provide timely, on-demand data and analysis to users. The goal of the sensor web approach is to employ new data acquisition strategies and systems for integrated Earth sensing that are responsive to environmental events for both applications and scientific purposes.

AIST 2004 Mini-Solicitation
Six proposals, selected from a field of 30 submitted proposals, awarded funding totalling approximately $1.9 million. The projects focus on high-priority information technology areas: tools for warehousing, data mining, and knowledge discovery; technologies to facilitate queries/access of multi-disciplinary data; and techniques to facilitate customized data services. The data mining technologies sought address two challenge areas: ocean biology and biogeochemistry data mining, and data mining for climate and weather models.

AIST NRA 2002
This solicitation awarded funding for 21 proposals from a field of 200 submitted proposals, focus on high-priority information technology areas: on-board processing, space-based communications networks, mission automation, and high-end computing technologies for modeling. The total funding for these investigations, over a period of three years, is approximately $23 million; investigators hail from 14 states and the District of Columbia.

AIST NRA 1999
This solicitation awarded a total of approximately $26 million in funding for 30 proposals spanning across industry, academia, government, and NASA centers. Known as "Sensor Web," this is the first in a series of information technology research initiatives that will help NASA's Office of Earth Sciences to solve the massive challenge of collecting, processing, routing and storing Earth science measurement data. Of the 117 proposals submitted the 30 selected covered a variety of topics ranging from satellite on-board processing, data collection and analysis, information transmission and wireless networks, to satellite platform control.