Technical Objectives
In order to achieve it's goal, the CICT Program is organized around four technical objectives, which when taken together, form a solid foundation for NASA missions well into the new century.
Goal-directed Systems
CICT will enable smarter, more adaptive systems and tools that work collaboratively with humans in a goal-directed manner to achieve NASA's twenty first century mission/science goals, including:
- Robotic exploration of deep space;
- Combined human-robotic exploration of Mars;
- Safe and cost effective operation of the Space Shuttle and follow-on launch vehicles;
- Use of Earth-orbiting satellites to establish cause and effect relationships associated with such important phenomena as global warming; and
- Development of methodologies to enhance the capacity, safety, and security of the U.S. air transportation system.
Seamless Access to NASA Information Technology Resources
CICT will enable seamless access to ground-, air-, and space-based distributed hardware, software, and information resources to enable NASA missions in aerospace, Earth science, and space science. Through this seamless access to NASA assets, scientists and engineers will be able to focus on making new discoveries in science, designing the next generation space vehicle, controlling a mission or developing new concepts for the National Airspace system rather than on the details of using specific hardware, software and information resources.
High Rate Data Delivery
CICT will enable broad, continuous presence and coverage for high rate data delivery from ground-, air-, and space-based assets directly to the users. High rate data delivery is an enabling technology for NASA's twenty-first century missions, including:
- The Earth Science Enterprise Digital Earth Vision, in which all observing spacecrafts are in a distributed network to provide real-time multi-sensor information transfer directly to users.
- The HEDS Enterprise missions requiring multi-gigabit Internet-based communications in near-Earth orbit.
- The Space Science Enterprise missions requiring high rate communications from scientific spacecraft traveling to our outer planets and beyond in addition to intra-planetary networks for surface exploration.
Strategic Research
Many of the missions in NASA's future will rely on technologies that are new and dramatically different from those commonly in use today. CICT will research, develop, and evaluate a broad portfolio of fundamental information and bio/nano-technologies for infusion into future NASA missions. The challenges of deep space exploration, hostile environments, and remote science create a compelling need for technologies that employ new materials; smaller, lighter, and more power-efficient devices; highly reliable software; and reconfigurable computing and information management systems.
