{"id":832479,"date":"2026-07-30T02:09:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T02:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/832479\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T02:09:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T02:09:12","slug":"nasa-awards-3-2-million-for-18-early-stage-niac-technology-concepts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/832479\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA awards $3.2 million for 18 early-stage NIAC technology concepts"},"content":{"rendered":"


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NASA has awarded 18 Phase I grants under its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, committing a total of $3.2 million to early-stage studies of technologies ranging from lunar exploration systems to interstellar mission concepts.<\/p>\n

Each Phase I award provides up to $175,000 for a nine-month initial investigation. NASA said the NIAC-funded projects are focused on concept development and are not considered official NASA missions.<\/p>\n

\u201cNASA has outlined an ambitious vision for the future of space exploration, we\u2019re returning the Moon to stay, advancing to Mars, and pushing to deepen our understanding of space,\u201d said Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology division within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. \u201cAchieving that will require more than incremental technological advancement. It means we need great leaps. These awards are the kinds of innovation the world needs NASA to help foster.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA described NIAC as an innovation incubator designed to fund early development of potential breakthrough technologies. According to the agency, concepts must demonstrate transformative potential as well as possible feasibility for eventual implementation.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery innovation, every leap in technology, starts with a seed of an idea,\u201d said Phillip Williams, NIAC\u2019s acting program executive. \u201cThe NIAC program allows NASA to germinate those seeds and determine if there\u2019s something that could be grown to benefit future space missions and our nation\u2019s aerospace economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA said several awardees focused on enabling a sustained lunar presence, including concepts for hovering robots to explore lunar lava tubes, thermal management methods for small mobile exploration robots, and integrating radioisotopic heat sources into spacesuits to keep astronauts warm during the Moon\u2019s nearly two-week-long lunar nights.<\/p>\n

Other selections target planetary science and astrophysics. NASA said one project explores hardening instruments for longer missions on Venus, while two concepts aim to study planetary rings, including a proposed swarm of 10,000 small satellites to map Saturn\u2019s rings and a system intended to collect ring samples from planets such as Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.<\/p>\n

NASA also highlighted concepts that would look beyond the solar system, including approaches for powering interstellar spacecraft, mapping continents on exoplanets, observing photon rings around black holes, and detecting subtle gravitational waves to help explain galaxy formation. Additional concepts relate to Earth-focused questions, including potential use of spaceborne dust to reduce solar radiation and improved awareness of debris orbiting Earth.<\/p>\n

The 2026 NIAC Phase I selections listed by NASA are:<\/p>\n

Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California: Dimming the Sun Using Controllable Dust Cloud to Reduce Solar Insolation (DimSun)<\/p>\n

David Bugby, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Combinatory Architecture offering Neomobility, on-Venus Adaptability, and Survivability (CANVAS)<\/p>\n

A.C. Charania, Zeno Power Systems, Inc., Washington: Extended Astronaut Radioisotope-EVA in Nighttime and Deep-space Icy Landscapes (EARENDIL)<\/p>\n

Anish Damodaran, University of Central Florida, Orlando: PS21: Transforming Submillimeter Space Interferometry with Photonic Technologies<\/p>\n

Artur Davoyan, University of California, Los Angeles: Coilable Stacked Solar Sails for Very High delta-V Missions<\/p>\n

Daniel Drew, University of Hawaii, Honolulu: Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst (SPARK)<\/p>\n

Gilly Elor, Stone Aerospace, Inc., Del Valle, Texas: Power-over-Fiber to Enable a Lunar Underground eXplorer (LUX)<\/p>\n

Zhaoyan Liu, NASA Ames Research Center, California\u2019s Silicon Valley: Quantum Wind Lidar Applications for Planetary and Earth Science Missions<\/p>\n

Jeff Nosanov, Orbital Velocity, LLC, Decatur, Georgia: OBLIVIAN: Observing Black hole LIght Via Intensity cOrrelatioN (OBLIVIAN)<\/p>\n

Keunhan Park, University of Utah, Salt Lake City: Plasmon-Enhanced Radioisotope Thermophotovoltaic (PRTPV) Power Generation for Interstellar Missions<\/p>\n

Austin Phoenix, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia: Efficient variable Conductivity Lunar Insulator for Passive Surveyor Environmental Control (ECLIPSE)<\/p>\n

Marco Quadrelli, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: PRAXIS: Planetary Rings Autonomous EXploration with In-situ Sampling (PRAXIS)<\/p>\n

Michael Rubenstein, Northwestern University, Chicago: Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellations for In-situ Exploration of Saturn\u2019s Rings, Atmosphere, and Magnetosphere<\/p>\n

Benjamin Schafer, Rarefied Technologies Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico: Photophoretic Tracers for Near-Space Remote Sensing at 30-100 km Altitudes<\/p>\n

David Smith, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina: Robotically Assembled Electromagnetic Metamaterials for Long-Range Space Situational Awareness<\/p>\n

Pablo Sobron, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Mountain View, California: Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys<\/p>\n

Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Mapping Alien Continents: Achieving Optical VLBI for Exoplanet Imaging<\/p>\n

Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Precision Astrometry Using Optically Independent Spacecraft for Gravitational Wave Detection<\/p>\n

More information on the NIAC program is available at https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/about-niac\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA has awarded 18 Phase I grants under its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, committing a total…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":832480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,131,404864,404865,128],"class_list":["post-832479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nasa","tag-nasa-innovative-advanced-concepts","tag-niac-technology","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/832480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}