The goal of the Concepts for Ocean worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) Program is to develop and advance the maturity of spacecraft technologies required for exploration of ocean worlds such as Europa and Enceladus.

For this particular program element, C.26 COLDTech: Autonomy, Communications, and Radiation-Hard Devices, the specific technologies sought are 1) autonomy for landed operations, 2) technology to enable communication through many kilometers of ice thickness; and 3) radiation-hard digital devices. Proposals are expected to consider the practicality of incorporating the technical advances into flight missions, i.e., mass, volume, power, computational resources, and data rates will be constrained on typical planetary science missions so proposed technologies should aim to minimize their use.

Proposals to this program will be taken by a two-step process in which the Notice of Intent is replaced by a required Step-1 proposal submitted by an organization Authorized Organizational Representative. Only proposers who submit a Step-1 proposal are eligible to submit a Step-2 (full) proposal. See Section 3 for details.

Step-1 proposals are due December 1, 2020 and Step-2 proposals are due February 19, 2021.

Go to: http://solicitation.nasaprs.com/ROSES2020

Questions can be addressed to: Carolyn Mercer, cmercer[at]nasa.gov