INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program is all about making high-risk, high-reward bets on unique — and sometimes eyebrow-raising —
ideas for space exploration and observation
This year grants total $7 million and include one of the most realistic projects yet
It might even get made!
NIAC awards are split into three tiers: Phase I, II and III
Roughly speaking, the first are given $125,000 and nine months basically to show their concept isn&t bunk
The second are given $500,000 and two years to show how it might actually work
And the third get $2 million to develop the concept into a real project.
It speaks to the, shall we say, open-mindedness of the NIAC program
that until this year there have only been two total recipients of Phase III awards, the rest having fallen by the wayside as impractical or
This year brings the third, a project at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory we first noted among 2018 NIAC selections.
From fungal architecture
to shape-shifting robo-swarms, here are NASA latest moonshots
Artist concept of how the resulting image might look.
The &solar
gravitational lens& project involves observing the way light coming from distant explanets is bent around our sun
The result, as the team has spent the last two years reinforcing the theory behind it, is the ability to create high-resolution images of
extremely distant and dark objects
So instead of having a single pixel or two showing us a planet in a neighboring star system, we could get a million pixels — an incredibly
detailed picture.
&As this mission is the only way to view a potentially habitable exoplanet in detail, we are already seeing the
significant public interest and enthusiasm that could motivate the needed government and private funding,& the researchers write.
Several of
the Phase II projects are similarly interesting
One proposes to mine ice-rich lunar soil in permanently dark areas using power collected from permanently bright areas only a few hundred
meters up in tall &Sunflower& towers
Another is a concept vehicle for exploring vents on Saturn watery moon Enceladus
One we also saw in 2018 aims to offload heavy life support systems onto a sort of buddy robot that would follow astronauts around.
The Phase
I projects are a little less consistent: antimatter propulsion, extreme solar sails and others that aren&t so much unrealistic as the
science is yet to come on them.
The full list of NIAC awards is here — they make for very interesting reading, even those on the fringe
They&re created by big brains and vetted by experts, after all.
