NASA has selected 120 proposals for negotiation of phase 2 contract awards in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The selected projects have a total value of approximately $72 million. The contracts will be awarded to 103 small high-technology firms in 27 states.

Four of the proposals will develop technologies for NASA Stennis Space Center under the management of the Innovative Partnership Program:

• "Automated Extraction of Crop Area Statistics from Medium-Resolution Imagery," written by GDA Corp. of State College, Pa.;
• "Wireless Integrated Microelectronic Vacuum Sensor System," written by Invocon Inc. of Conroe, Texas;
• "Virtual Sensor Test Instrumentation," written by Mobitrum Corp. of Silver Spring, Md.; and
• "Automated Feature Extraction from Hyperspectral Imagery," written by Visual Learning Systems Inc. of Missoula, Mont.

The SBIR program is a competitive, three-phase award system. It provides qualified small businesses, including women-owned and disadvantaged firms, with opportunities to propose innovative ideas that meet specific research and development needs of the federal government.

Phase 1 is a feasibility study to evaluate the scientific and technical merit of an idea. Awards are for up to six months in amounts up to $100,000. Phase 2 expands on the results on the development of phase 1. Awards are for up to two years in amounts up to $600,000. Phase 3 is for the commercialization of the results of phase 2 and requires the use of private sector or non-SBIR federal funding. These NASA awards are for the second-phase in this competitive process.

Participating contractors submitted 280 phase 2 proposals. The criteria used to select the winning proposals included technical merit and innovation, phase 1 results, value to NASA, commercial potential and company capabilities.

The program is managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., with executive oversight by NASA Headquarters. Individual projects are managed by NASA's 10 field installations.

For a list of selected companies, visit: http://sbir.nasa.gov

- end -

text-only version of this release