NASA’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program (FAP) conducts long-term, cutting-edge research in all flight regimes to address the major challenges of modern air transportation: public concern over noise and emissions; the affordability of air travel given concerns about jet fuel supplies and costs; the need for increasing mobility to meet the growth of air transportation; and the need for progress toward faster transportation. FAP also conducts research associated with air-breathing access to space and entry and descent into planetary atmospheres to support the Vision for Space Exploration.
FAP focuses on tools and technologies to enable revolutionary changes for vehicles across all flight speed regimes. From the most basic knowledge of underlying phenomena through experimentation into advanced concepts and technologies at the component and systems level, new technological capabilities are being developed. To achieve this objective, the Program:
- Invests in the fundamental core competencies of aeronautics
- Openly involves the external aeronautics community to support the best technological talent and ideas
- Widely disseminates research results that provide the greatest possible national benefit and that stimulate new advances in aeronautics technology
Fundamental Aeronautics is organized into four projects:
The Subsonic Fixed Wing Project conducts research on new aircraft configurations, such as the hybrid-wing body, and advanced propulsion systems that could dramatically reduce noise, emissions, fuel burn, and runway field length. Success in overcoming technical challenges will result in major changes to subsonic engine cycle and airframe configurations, thus broadening the technology trade space for a variety of sizes of subsonic fixed wing vehicles, from large transports to aircraft with short takeoff and landing capability.
The Subsonic Rotary Wing Project conducts research designed to radically improve the capabilities and civil benefits of rotary wing vehicles and enhance mobility in the future air transportation system by enabling point-to-point transportation using smaller airports in a metroplex concept. Research efforts to increase speed and range, payload, and propulsive efficiency, and to reduce noise, will enable development of new rotorcraft configurations, such as large-size, heavy-lift tiltrotors that can be part of the future civil air transportation system.
The Supersonics Project conducts research to eliminate environmental and performance barriers that prevent the realization of practical commercial supersonic cruise vehicles. Technologies are being developed to meet the environmental challenges specifically associated with supersonic aircraft, which include reduction of sonic boom to enable supersonic flight over land, acceptable levels of airport noise without performance penalty, and the reduction of gaseous emissions (such as NOX and others) at high altitudes.
The Hypersonics Project conducts long-range, fundamental and multidisciplinary research to enable new air-breathing launch vehicle architectures with increased reliability for low-cost access to space. Cutting-edge hypersonics research on Reliable Airbreathing Launch Vehicles (RALV) will enable sustained hypersonic flight through Earth’s atmosphere, with particular application to the first stage of a two-stage-to-orbit launch system.
Aeronautics-related challenges associated with planetary entry, descent, and landing (EDL) are being addressed in the Hypersonics and Supersonics projects. Research focusing on the Planetary Atmospheric Entry System (PAES) will result in the development of technologies and concepts that can enable the safe and accurate delivery of large payloads to Mars with masses up to two orders of magnitude greater than can be achieved today.
Common to all projects is the development of physics-based prediction and analysis tools for reduced uncertainty in design processes, and advanced multidisciplinary design and analysis capability to guide our research and technology investments and realize integrated technology advances in future aircraft.
Execution of research in the Fundamental Aeronautics Program occurs principally at four NASA field centers:
|
to the No Fear Act