Instead of having a single spacecraft descend through a hostile atmosphere and gather readings from a single location, why not have it break up in to a dozen pieces and spread its sensors over hundreds of miles? That’s the idea behind the Lofted Environmental and Atmospheric VEnus Sensors project, which aims to create lightweight units that can provide more data and even collaborate as they descend.”,What’s inside that asteroid? No one knows. And it takes a lot of effort to find out. Instead of building expensive space bullets to fire at it to see what flies out, why don’t we let meteoroids — the original space bullets — hit the thing for us?
How we’ll get the meteoroids to hit the asteroid but not the spacecraft watching it is an open question.”,With telescopes, generally the bigger the better. But getting something really big into orbit is no joke — and if something goes wrong, you might have to scrap the whole thing.
Instead, these researchers propose launching hundreds or thousands of identical craft that could find each other and assemble into a single large surface. If one breaks, send in another to take its place!”,Building a habitat or craft on an alien planet is a difficult proposition. Perhaps a space-hardened variety of fungus will grow it for us!
This team has identified some mycelial materials that are ultra-strong, fire-resistant and insulative, and can essentially be grown. Of course, whether they can be grown on Mars is yet to be determined.”,The idea of propelling a spacecraft using a giant laser is actually quite practical except for the fact that the laser in question would need to be several kilometers wide.
This highly interesting project basically entangles the laser beam with a stream of neutral particles. The particles create a waveguide effect, narrowing the path of the photons, and the photons create a high-energy core to which the particles are attracted. This “soliton” beam would be narrower and more powerful than a laser alone and could accelerate a craft to 1/10th the speed of light.
Has a cool name, too. PROCSIMA: Photon-paRticle Optically Coupled Soliton Interstellar Mission Accelerator.”,This is a very clever project. Essentially it’s impossible right now to have, say, 200 coordinated satellites in space each within a few hundred feet of each other. But such an array would be able to capture very interesting data.
So instead of making an actual array, the Rotary Motion Extended Array Synthesis (R-MXAS) project puts all the sensors on a cylindrical satellite and has the satellite “roll” in sync with its motion above the Earth, exposing various sensors as it goes.
Think of it like a design etched into a rolling pin — you roll it along the dough and the cylindrical pattern turns into a 2-D picture. That’s the idea here.”,A complex surface environment like Earth’s demands many modes of locomotion: flying, swimming, walking, rolling… and the same could be said of Europa, Mars and other destinations.
Shapeshifter aims to create a robot platform that encompasses as many of these modalities as possible. It will roll along as a ball, fly or hover as a drone, form a torpedo under water and more, yet will be “extremely simple with a minimal design.”
This one is still firmly in the realm of sci-fi, but I love the idea of these things zooming around.”,Steam served us well in the 19th and 20th centuries, why shouldn’t it do so in the 21st?
This little doodad would be deployed on ocean worlds, with a parent lander providing it with power and ice. It would turn these into steam, creating propulsion for hops around the landscape, heedless of obstacles — they call it “complete terrain agnosticism.”
The acronym actually works quite well. SPARROW: Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robot for Ocean Worlds.”,This concept discards the absurd previous ideas of using “unrealistic amounts of trapped antimatter” and instead will be “radioisotope positron catalyzed fusion propulsion” that appears to produce antimatter on the fly.
Sure, why not?”,All these cool new spacesuits are going to be ruined by the necessity of having a giant life support system on the back. Not only does it ruin the lines, but it’s clumsy and heavy.
What if instead, the backpack rolled along next to you like a dog at heel? Could be nice. I feel like that exposed pipe there as a single point of failure is kind of a design flaw, though.”,The tech isn’t quite there for this one, but it seems like a no-brainer in a lot of ways. Tiny winged drones that use a rover or lander as a base and fly out to survey or sample remote locations.
The Marsbee project is looking specifically at flapping bots that would work in the Martian atmosphere; part of the team has already created a hummingbird-sized tiny flapping robot that can fly on Earth, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.”,These deployable bots represent an alternative to the risky approach of sending a single expensive lander to the surface of an astroid. Their soft bodies make for an easy landing, and then can conform to the terrain both to crawl along and eventually to grip it tightly like a barnacle.
Once attached, the sampling mechanism can “liberate” materials from the surface and send them off to a waiting orbiter.
I remember this one from last year; the design has evolved a bit since then from a sort of pancake or worm to to a flower.”,This project isn’t about building a kilometer-wide telescope so much as addressing what benefits such a telescope would have. Some are obvious but others aren’t, and the team is looking into it in the lab.
They’re also looking into how it might be built, but that’s still very very far out. Their data may be helpful in producing the next generation of space telescopes, kilometer-wide or not.”,This is another Phase I from last year, and exemplifies the difficulties of this method of propulsion. The good news: the laser won’t have be to 10 kilometers wide… only two. The bad news: 100 megawatts of output isn’t enough, you need 400.
Still, the bare idea of a laser-powered craft moving along via ion engine is promising, and the necessary high-efficiency (over 50 percent) photovoltaic cells are an interesting research project in their own right.”,No, it isn’t from Sega — this is the Mach Effect Gravity Assist drive system. It utilizes “transient variations in the rest masses of objects that simultaneously experience accelerations and internal energy changes.” We are assured that this system is based on “technically credible physics.”
This sounds a little like someone on a wild goose chase (like the Emdrive), but that’s kind of the point of the program. And the fact that it got a Phase II selection means it holds some promise.”,Getting to an outer planet in our solar system is a relatively easy task, cosmically speaking. But sampling it and returning that sample to Earth is hard! You need “two times the delta-V” — because not only do you have to slow down using the same total force but you have to get going the other direction, doubling that force. That takes fuel.
The Nano Icy Moons Propellant Harvester, or NIMPH, would send a lander to the surface of a planet or moon and collect the materials necessary to fabricate enough fuel to get home. This would also reduce the original launch mass, making the mission easier to get going in the first place.”,Triton is Neptune’s largest and weirdest moon. Unlike literally every other moon in the solar system, it orbits in the opposite direction of its planet’s rotation. Its surface is strange, alternately smooth and pockmarked, and its origin is thought to be similar to Pluto’s.
The lander proposed for its exploration uses frozen nitrogen to fuel its hopping method of getting about, which would hopefully allow it to travel around the moon’s rougher terrain.”,Viewing distant exoplanets is a puzzle, and often we have to view them not directly, as in light bouncing off them, but indirectly, as in when they pass between us and their sun. This project aims to make direct imaging more possible by utilizing the concept of a solar gravitational lens.
Basically if you model the way even a very small amount of light travels from an exoplanet and is bent around the gravity well of our sun, you find that it essentially creates a sort of 3D projection that you can read if you travel through it.
It sounds wild, but if the physics check out, you could get megapixel-scale imagery of exoplanets up to 30 parsecs away.”,
The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program is perhaps the best place to get federal funding for an idea that sounds crazy — because the program managers think it might be just crazy enough to work.
Researchers making the “Phase I” cut are awarded about $125,000 over 9 months to develop their idea, be it mind-boggling or merely technically difficult. If significant progress is made or the concept is otherwise found to be promising, a second “Phase II” investment of up to $500,000 can be made at NASA’s option.
This year, according to NIAC program executive Jason Derleth, was “especially fierce, with over 230 proposals and only 25 winners.” A significant amount of Phase II awards were also made (you may remember some from last year’s selections).
I’ve collected most of them here with explanations in the plainest language I could summon — click on to see what NASA thinks the future of space exploration might look like.
