LMT Awarded 3 New NASA SBIR Contracts in 2020

Advancing our suite of autonomous, rugged sample-to-analysis instruments, NASA has awarded Leiden Measurement Technology three new Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contracts in 2020, including two Phase II contracts. With these awards, LMT continues its partnership with NASA to build innovative systems for life detection and conducting other advanced in-situ chemical analysis.

The first Phase II award will advance HYMDOL: a high-resolution, compact microscope designed as a rugged, compact instrument, suitable for mission deployments on icy worlds, such as Europa, where it could be used for life-detection and mineralogy studies. The second Phase II award is for a Sample Pre-processing Instrument for Chemical Exploration (SPICE), an automated sample pre-processing module capable of efficiently extracting chemical analytes from solid samples for delivery to analytical instruments.​ It will allow NASA to identify other chemical species that may be present in very small quantities but that can provide insight into makeup of planets, moons and small bodies. 

A new SBIR Phase I award will LMT to design an innovative new high-resolution, compact, fully-automated epifluorescence microscope with exceptional resolution from the deep ultraviolet through visible (DUV-VIS) spectrums. This entirely custom, miniaturized microscope system will occupy volume of less than 1,500 cc, while still enabling sub-micron imaging throughout the DUV-VIS in up to five different excitation wavelengths. 

​LMT is proud to continue to be supported by NASA's SBIR program as we strengthen our innovative suite of scientific sample-to-data tools. ​