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Dr. Mukti Rana has been awarded an almost $300,000 NASA grant to develop protective coatings for instruments to be used in future space missions.
In this photo: Dr. Mukti Rana has been awarded an almost $300,000 NASA grant to develop protective coatings for instruments to be used in future space missions.
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DSU to develop coatings for NASA instruments in space

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Another Delaware State University researcher is now working in support of future NASA space missions.

After the University announced last week that two DSU researchers are working with NASA in connection with the Lunar Land Rover, this week DSU revealed that Dr. Mukti Rana has also been awarded a grant from the space agency of just under $300,000 to develop anti-reflection coatings for future NASA missions.

Electrically insulating spacecraft surfaces, cameras and detectors used for space explorations by NASA are vulnerable to non-uniform charge buildup due to particles emitted by the sun.

In this grant, the research team will work to design and produce an environmentally durable thin conducting films and anti-reflection coating for LIDAR and other space-flight applications. This grant proposal aims to work with aluminum doped zinc oxide and indium tin oxide thin films with various atomic compositions for using them as coating materials.

The coatings will be developed for various instruments such as LIDAR, cameras and detectors to be used in NASA’s VIPER (SQRLi), Dragonfly (Ocellus), and OSAM-1 (Kodiak) missions.  

Dr. Rana will collaborate on the project with Dr. Manuel A. Quijada, Components Group Lead of Optics Branch, and Dr. Javier G. Del Hoyo, an Optical Engineer from Goddard Space Flight Center.