Instrument Incubator Program (IIP)

The Program
The Instrument Incubator fosters the development of innovative remote-sensing concepts and the assessment of these concepts in ground, aircraft, or engineering model demonstrations. Because the Earth Science Division is an evolving program, periodic NASA Research Announcements will solicit a wide range of instrument development activity that offers proposers flexibility in advancing instrument development.

In general, Instrument Incubator Program technologies enter with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 3 and exit with a TRL of 5. For more information on the TRL scale and definitions of each level, read the NASA Advanced Concepts Office white paper on Technology Readiness Levels (36KB, MS Word).

The Objective
New and innovative technologies will lead to future flight instruments that are smaller, less resource intensive, less costly, and require less build time. Furthermore, by investing early in the development life cycle of an instrument and demonstrating performance in ground based or aircraft instrumentation, flight builds will also encounter less development risk and therefore less cost and schedule uncertainty.

The Strategy
As promising new technologies emerge from core technology programs in government, private industry, university, or other non-profit organizations, proposers are encouraged to incorporate this latest technology into their instrument concepts. NRAs are expected to solicit some combination of feasibility studies; requirements analysis; design; construction of breadboards, prototypes, and engineering models; and laboratory and field demonstrations. Individual NRAs may focus on specific science questions or may address the whole science program. The Program provides a continuing source of mature instrument designs merging state-of-the-art technologies with measurement objectives available for use in the next generation of science missions.

Program Content Determined via NASA Research Announcements (NRA)
A key element of the Instrument Incubator Program's strategy to infuse new and innovative technology into future remote-sensing instruments is the advanced studies and ground-based demonstration phase. NRAs are conducted regularly to ensure that a steady stream of instrument technologies is available for future measurement needs. This activity will be conducted by government, academic, and private industry research teams knowledgeable in remote-sensing and in situ measurement techniques that measure global variables of the Earth system that are selected via a peer reviewed process. The program encourages the use of the latest remote sensing technologies resulting from NASA's technology development programs as well as other government agencies and academic and private industry investments and combines them into new instrument systems and subsystems.

NASA Research Announcements appear in their entirety at the NASA Research Announcements website that is linked to the NASA Headquarters homepage.

Future IIP Emphasis
Future Incubator solicitations will focus on specific areas of science or measurement technology, taking into account the ongoing set of IIP projects, the current science priorities, the current set of future mission scenarios, and existing and planned technology partnerships.