What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project MSL-01 of PE 0602025E. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
- Perform a coupled optimization demonstration between high-throughput material testing and design optimization frameworks balancing performance, cost, and sustainability. - Establish a proof-of-concept manufacturing demonstration for a continuous material shape optimized component. - Initiate incorporation of enhanced quantum metamaterials in multifunctional nanoelectronic devices for applications to quantum computing, sensing, and signal processing. - Initiate scalable wafer-level fabrication and application-specific development of quantum metamaterial-based nanoelectronic devices. - Conduct out-of-plane liquid mirror hardware demonstration in a particular aperture size scale range and begin advancing designs from laboratory setting to on-sky demonstrations. - Develop detailed design and complete hardware-informed critical design review for a larger scale liquid mirror telescope system that will be capable of astronomical and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) observations without spin-stabilization. - Scale up studies of cell designs using materials with demonstrated high energy displacement thresholds and self-healing, annealing techniques. - Perform proof-of-concept demonstrations of quantum sensing of neutrinos with greatly increased sensitivity compared to currently used neutrino detection methods.
The FY 2027 decrease reflects a shift from design and development to system demonstration.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
- Perform full test and design system demonstrations on material testing platforms and design optimization routines. - Screen new materials driven by design optimization routines and incorporate newly measured properties into design processes in real time. - Demonstrate and prepare manufacturing plans for continuous material shape optimized components. - Design and fabricate functional quantum metamaterial-based nanoelectronic devices for applications in quantum sensing, computing and communications. - Validate and benchmark enhanced quantum effects in metamaterials used in nanoelectronic devices for applications in quantum sensing, computing and communications. - Experimentally validate feasibility of scaling up liquid mirror design and all required component technologies in a specific meter effective aperture size scale range. - Develop detailed design and complete hardware-informed critical design review for a liquid mirror telescope system in a laboratory environment. - Develop atomically-referenced, tunable, narrow-linewidth sources of terahertz radiation to enable calibration-free and matched transmitter-receiver systems. - Develop wafer-scale atomic vapor cells with the requisite homogeneity, manufacturability, and optical quality to enable higher performance and more robust electrometry. - Test high energy displacement threshold materials capable of converting radiation into energy over an extended lifetime. - Implement embedded sensors on a combustor system, a key component of jet engines. - Engineer phononic structures to enable quantum sensing of interaction of subatomic particles (i.e. neutrinos) with atoms in a material. - Explore novel chemical structures that enable the controlled tunability of energetic materials.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Enacted | 55.6 |
| FY2027 | Request | 41.2 |
This activity is 31% of project MSL-01's FY2027 request and 2.5% of PE 0602025E's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
8 activities in project MSL-01
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the project page.