Engines capable of crossing the Solar System in less than a year, revolutionary telescopes, bricks that grow by themselves on Mars so that colonists can build their houses upon arrival, lunar pipelines that transport oxygen from one settlement to another, seaplanes capable of flying over lakes of methane from Titan in search of life… These are just some of the 14 proposals recently chosen by NASA as candidates to improve space exploration in the future.
Each of the selected projects, the result of the work of researchers from multiple universities and private and public institutions, will receive funding of $175,000 through the space agency’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.
In this way, the viability of the proposals will be verified and their possible inclusion in future space missions will be assessed.
“The NIAC program – said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson – helps provide these forward-thinking scientists and engineers with the tools and support they need to drive the technology that will enable future NASA missions.”
Hydroplanes on Titan
Many of the projects seem straight out of science fiction, although in their presentation video, NASA explicitly says that “it is science, not science fiction.” A good example of this is TitanAir, a low-cost seaplane proposed by Quinn Morley of Planet Enterprises, which could fly over the intriguing methane lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan on successive daily hour-long flights. At the same time, the ship’s wings would collect samples of the organic substances emanating from the lakes and analyze them for possible signs of life.
bricks that build themselves
Congrui Jin of the University of Nebraska has proposed a technology that will make it possible to build habitats on Mars without having to transport the materials there from Earth. Until now, NASA has experimented with inflatable and lightweight habitats (to reduce their mass and volume), but the physical structures needed to equip these modules must always be sent back from Earth on a second mission. But according to Jin, all that equipment can be achieved by ‘in situ’ construction, using cyanobacteria and fungi as building agents.
The idea is to create a system of synthetic lichens, made up of diazotrophic cyanobacteria and filamentous fungi, to produce abundant minerals (calcium carbonate) and biopolymers, which will achieve the ‘miracle’ of uniting the Martian regolith into consolidated building blocks. Those self-growing blocks can later be assembled into various structures such as floors, walls, partitions, and furniture.
A telescope of thousands of satellites
Another original proposal is that of Mary Knapp, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has imagined a new type of space observatory capable of seeing what no other has yet achieved. Humanity has, in effect, never been able to observe the low-frequency radio sky, as it is hidden from ground-based telescopes by Earth’s ionosphere and difficult to see from space because of the long wavelengths involved ( meters to kilometers) would need huge (and impossible to build) telescopes to see clearly.
However, an array of thousands of identical small satellites, positioned at L5 (Lagrange 5, one of the five points where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity cancel each other out), could work together to detect radio emissions at low frequencies. from the earliest times of the Universe and measure the magnetic fields of terrestrial exoplanets, thus helping to identify distant Earth-like worlds.
Get to Pluto in a year
Perhaps one of the most interesting projects at NIAC is the so-called Pellet-beam, proposed by Artur Davoyan, from the University of California at Los Angeles. It is a new propulsion architecture that is based on the creation of a beam of microscopic particles at hypervelocity (120 km/s) driven by a laser. That beam of microparticles will then power a spacecraft. The system is designed to give speed to objects of a maximum ton, and would allow them to be taken to a distance of 500 Astronomical Units in 20 years (one Astronomical Unit, AU, is the distance between the Sun and the Earth, 150 million km). . That is to say, almost five times further and in half the time of the 35 years that Voyager 1 has taken to reach the edge of the Solar System at 123 Astronomical Units from Earth.
Access to the underground oceans
Among NASA’s many needs and requirements is a system capable of traversing the thick ice sheets (tens of km thick) that hide subterranean oceans of liquid water in places like Ceres, Enceladus, Pluto, or Europa. Theresa Benyo, from the Glenn Institute, in Cleveland, proposes a probe capable of drilling, thanks to the heating of its nuclear propulsion, the icy decks and accessing the oceans, in search of life. The probe also guarantees communications with the surface at all times, and allows preliminary analysis of possible forms of extraterrestrial life.
The projects are very varied and, of course, promising. NASA has announced that everyone will begin to receive the assigned resources from February. We leave below the complete list of projects, with the links that allow you to obtain complete information about each one of them.
fluidic telescope
Photophoretic propulsion for the exploration of the Mesosphere
Oceans of frozen worlds
Bending of large space structures
Lunar South Pole Oxygen Pipeline
Particle beam propulsion for space exploration
rapid transit to mars
Self-growth building blocks
Great long-wavelength observatory
TitanAir
Flashlight to illuminate dark areas of the Moon
Detection of all nearby exoplanets
Radioisotope Power Generator
new rocket engine