NASA has awarded AstraQua a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract for AstraSense: AI-Driven Health Predictions for Sustainable Aviation.
The award falls under NASA’s subtopic for Health Management and Sensing Technologies for Sustainable Aviation Vehicles, an area focused on keeping next-generation aircraft systems safe, efficient, and reliable through better predictive insight.
What AstraSense Does
AstraSense is being developed to analyze aviation-system signals for diagnosis and prognosis, contributing health intelligence to AstraQua’s broader autonomy architecture. Instead of waiting for a component to fail or relying purely on scheduled maintenance, the goal is to give operators earlier, more accurate signals about system condition, supporting the broader push toward sustainable, electrified aviation where efficient, well-understood hardware health is critical.
The approach draws on the same onboard-first philosophy behind AstraQua’s wider autonomy platform: process sensor data close to the source, flag anomalies before they become failures, and give operators a clearer picture of system health without waiting on a constant connection back to the cloud.
Why the Award Matters
NASA’s SBIR program funds small businesses developing technology with real potential to advance the agency’s missions. The award funds research and evaluation of the proposed approach. It provides a development pathway toward aerospace demonstrations and commercialization; it is not NASA endorsement, product certification or validation of the complete autonomy architecture.
Local, onboard AI inference is central to how AstraSense reads system health in real time.
What Comes Next
Over the course of the Phase I effort, AstraQua will work to demonstrate AstraSense’s core health-prediction capability and lay the technical groundwork for a possible Phase II follow-on. The results will directly inform how the company positions AstraSense for hybrid-electric and all-electric aircraft platforms going forward.
Explore how AstraSense is advancing machine health awareness for next-generation aviation.
AQFM™ is the intelligence foundation we are developing for a modular autonomy architecture, with AstraSense contributing specialized health intelligence.