Slava G. Turyshev and his team are on their phase III NASA NIAC project to develop a solar gravitational lens telescope. At optical or near-optical wavelengths, the amplification of light is on the order of 200 billion times and with equally impressive angular resolution. If we can reach this region beginning at 550 AU from …
NASA Advanced Concepts has funded research for a high performance spacesuit for future Mars Astronauts. Dr. Bonnie Dunbar is a former NASA astronaut and is now a professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M. Some of her fellow astronauts couldn’t fit in an Extra Vehicular Activity suit – more commonly known as a spacesuit. Her …
Philip Lubin has been funded by NASA NIAC to study a practical and effective method of planetary asteroid defense that allows for extremely short mitigation time scales if required. The method involves an array of small hypervelocity kinetic penetrators that pulverize and disassemble an asteroid or small comet. This effectively mitigates the threat using the …
Hybrid observatories will combine a 100 meter diameter starshade in space with a telescope on the ground. The Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE) would convert the largest ground-based telescopes now under construction (Giant Magellan Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, and Extremely Large Telescope) into the most powerful planet finders yet designed. No other proposed equipment …
Accurate storm predictions not only save resources and money, but also lives. To build the next generation of predictive weather models, we need to measure a storm from space across time over its entire lifecycle, from water vapor to heavy precipitation. To capture the phases of a storm, measurements need to be made at multiple …
Missions to the outer planets are an important and exciting part of NASA’s goals because these scarcely visited worlds, particularly the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, undoubtedly hold secrets about our solar system. Unlocking these discoveries will enable us to better understand Earth and the formation and evolution of our solar system and countless others. …
NASA has funded the NIAC phase 2 study for Kilometer-Scale Space Structures from a Single Launch. A thousand meters is longer and larger than many of the vehicles and things seen in Science Fiction TV and movies. The original TV show Enterprise (NCC1701) was 288 meters long, the Next Generation Enterprise NCC1701D was 642 meters …
Another NASA advanced concpet project is Cryospheric Quantum Rydberg Radar. This is especially interesting to Nextbigfuture because this overlaps with ColdQuanta’s QuantumRF work. Nextbigfuture interviewed ColdQuanta VP Max Perez about Atomic clocks and QuantumRF and Quantum computers. ColdQuanta has close to $100 million in funding and grants. ColdQuanta is doing advanced work with laser arrays …
NASA NIAC (NASA Advanced Innovation Concepts) has 2022 grants. It is a bit confusing as some of the projects have been written about before. This makes sense for phase 2 projects but there is a phase 1 project that has previously had work. Nextbigfuture covered this proposal six months ago. The Atomic Planar Power for …
Sutter Ultra is a NASA NIAC phase 2 study to find smaller and slower asteroids up to 350 times faster than all existing surveys combined. They will use sensor configuration with many low cost, high performance Compound Telescopes with Matched Filter (CTMF) technology, arrayed into a fully integrated system. They are making a ground demo …
The Solar System Pony Express is a global, multi-spectral, high-resolution planetary surveyor supported by regular visits from a cycler satellite network to retrieve petabits of data for transit to Earth. The “courier” satellites use optical communications to receive 1-3 petabits from the surveyor at least once per year. They then travel close to earth where …