WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA has awarded AstraQua Inc. a $1.27 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract to develop software that monitors electric aircraft propulsion systems and identifies potential equipment failures.
AstraQua announced the award on October 21. The funding will support further development of AstraSense, an onboard software platform designed to detect component degradation, diagnose faults and estimate operating capability before equipment needs attention.
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AstraSense monitors equipment health
AstraSense processes sensor information directly on an aircraft or autonomous platform rather than relying on a continuous connection to external computing systems. The software looks at operating conditions to uncover changes that may indicate developing problems. AstraQua aims to use those findings to help autonomous systems account for equipment health when making operational decisions.
For example, a system that detects declining propulsion performance could use that information to determine whether it should continue operating, adjust its mission or return for maintenance.
The approach builds on conventional health monitoring by estimating how equipment degradation could affect future operation rather than relying solely on alarms triggered after a measurement crosses a specified threshold.
NASA funding supports additional testing
The Phase II contract follows an earlier SBIR Phase I effort involving health management and sensing technologies for sustainable aviation and autonomous systems.
AstraQua plans to evaluate AstraSense using hardware testbeds, with an emphasis on verifying fault-prediction performance and assessing how the software responds to changing equipment conditions.
The funded work focuses on hybrid-electric and all-electric aircraft propulsion. The company is also considering applications in planetary exploration vehicles and industrial robotics, although those uses fall outside the current contract's primary scope.
AstraQua founder and CEO Loay Elbasyouni previously served as lead electrical engineer for NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter and worked on Perseverance rover mission systems. The company has not reported completed Phase II validation results or announced a deployment schedule for AstraSense.
