Every year, NASA offers preliminary funding to several unusual projects. The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program “nurtures visionary ideas that could transform future NASA missions with the creation of breakthroughs – radically better or entirely new aerospace concepts.” Some of the past NIAC award-winning ideas that became a reality include the Ingenuity helicopter now flying on Mars and Cubesats, small one-foot cube satellites that can use smartphones as the onboard computers. You’ve always heard how powerful of a computer your iPhone is! Other funded NIAC proposals include such diverse projects as the 3-D printing of biomaterials such as arrays of cells and a proposal to use the sun as a gravitational lens to study exoplanet surfaces. One idea proposes using bacteria and fungi brought from Earth plus known gases and soil materials on Mars to create bioengineered building materials. This dramatically reduces the weight needed to be sent to Mars to create safe habitats for future Martian astronauts.
NASA awarded 13 new NIAC awards in
2023 for projects beginning this year. The two most exciting for me are a
Venus Sample Return mission and sending a cluster of microsatellites to study
the nearest exoplanet.
Over four decades ago, the Soviet
Union landed multiple Venera probes on Venus. But conditions on Venus quickly
overwhelmed them. Surface temperatures reach nearly 900 degrees, hot enough to
melt lead. Atmospheric pressure is ninety times that on Earth. Although each of
the 10 landers provided valuable information about the planet, the
longest-lasting probe, Venera 12, only lasted 110 minutes.
One NIAC award went to a team that
wants to use the high-temperature technology developed for probes that study
the sun up close plus an innovative rocket engine design that can use fuel
created from the gasses in the Venusian atmosphere to return samples from the surface
of the planet. Venus may once have been much like Earth, but the runaway
greenhouse conditions turned it into a hellish environment. This mission might
allow us to better understand the conditions on Venus before that change.
The closest star to us, Proxima
Centauri, is 4.2 light years, 25 trillion miles, distant. Using our current
fastest rocket technology, it would take us more than 50,000 years to reach it.
A roughly Earth-sized planet, Proxima Centauri B, orbits the star. One NIAC
award went to a group to study the feasibility of sending thousands of tiny
spacecraft to study that planet. They plan to power them using a 100-gigawatt
laser beamed at the swarm from Earth. The tiny crafts would work together
creating the equivalent of a giant dish antenna to send signals back to Earth.
They estimate the trip would take only 20 years and data returned at the speed
of light requires only 4.2 years.
Only a handful of NIAC awards lead to actual NASA missions. I hope these two come to full fruition.
