The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has created 18 new awards to help visionary concepts to enhance aerospace applied sciences in areas starting from the exploration of the photo voltaic system to understanding the universe.
The 18 NIAC Phase I awards complete $3.2 million. Each award gives as much as $175,000 for a nine-month preliminary investigation. The NIAC initiatives are about early-stage idea improvement and usually are not thought of official NASA missions.
“NASA has outlined an ambitious vision for the future of space exploration, we’re returning the Moon to stay, advancing to Mars, and pushing to deepen our understanding of space,” stated Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology division throughout the Research and Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Achieving 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.”
As an innovation incubator, NIAC funds early improvement of potential breakthrough applied sciences. Concepts for award consideration will need to have each transformative potential and doable feasibility for eventual implementation.
“Every innovation, every leap in technology, starts with a seed of an idea,” stated Phillip Williams, NIAC’s appearing program government. “The NIAC program allows NASA to germinate those seeds and determine if there’s something that could be grown to benefit future space missions and our nation’s aerospace economy.”
As NASA and its companions push for sustained lunar presence, a number of the 2026 awardees centered on methods to assist discover the Moon and construct infrastructure there. These embrace a system to help hovering robots to discover lava tubes beneath the Moon’s floor, a technique to handle temperatures for small cellular exploration robots, and a solution to incorporate radioisotopic warmth sources into fits to assist hold astronauts heat when working within the Moon’s almost two-week-long lunar nights.
Other ideas deal with exploring a number of the photo voltaic system’s most exceptional options. Venus, with its scorching environment, presents an imposing problem for analysis autos, so one NIAC awardee explores strategies for hardening devices for longer missions.
Two different ideas might assist research planetary rings. One would use a swarm of 10,000 tiny satellites to map and analyze the rings of Saturn, whereas one other would create a system for accumulating samples from rings comparable to these circling Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Some NIAC awardees will look far past the photo voltaic system, exploring methods to energy interstellar spacecraft, map out continents on exoplanets, observe the photon rings round black holes, and detect refined gravitational waves to clarify how galaxies fashioned. Others will work to reply questions immediately associated to life on Earth, just like the potential use of spaceborne mud to scale back photo voltaic radiation, and consciousness concerning the particles orbiting Earth.
Researchers, often called NIAC Fellows, will examine their ideas and determine potential challenges and alternatives for additional improvement.
The 18 selections for 2026 NIAC Phase 1 grants are:
- Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California: Dimming the Sun Using Controllable Dust Cloud to Reduce Solar Insolation (DimSun)
- David Bugby, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Combinatory Architecture providing Neomobility, on-Venus Adaptability, and Survivability (CANVAS)
- A.C. Charania, Zeno Power Systems, Inc., Washington:
Extended Astronaut Radioisotope-EVA in Nighttime and Deep-space Icy Landscapes (EARENDIL)
- Anish Damodaran, University of Central Florida, Orlando: PS21: Transforming Submillimeter Space Interferometry with Photonic Technologies
- Artur Davoyan, University of California, Los Angeles: Coilable Stacked Solar Sails for Very High delta-V Missions
- Daniel Drew, University of Hawaii, Honolulu: Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst (SPARK)
- Gilly Elor, Stone Aerospace, Inc., Del Valle, Texas: Power-over-Fiber to Enable a Lunar Underground eXplorer (LUX)
- Zhaoyan Liu, NASA Ames Research Center, California’s Silicon Valley: Quantum Wind Lidar Applications for Planetary and Earth Science Missions
- Jeff Nosanov, Orbital Velocity, LLC, Decatur, Georgia: OBLIVIAN: Observing Black gap LIght Via Intensity cOrrelatioN (OBLIVIAN)
- Keunhan Park, University of Utah, Salt Lake City: Plasmon-Enhanced Radioisotope Thermophotovoltaic (PRTPV) Power Generation for Interstellar Missions
- Austin Phoenix, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia: Efficient variable Conductivity Lunar Insulator for Passive Surveyor Environmental Control (ECLIPSE)
- Marco Quadrelli, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: PRAXIS: Planetary Rings Autonomous EXploration with In-situ Sampling (PRAXIS)
- Michael Rubenstein, Northwestern University, Chicago: Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellations for In-situ Exploration of Saturn’s Rings, Atmosphere, and Magnetosphere
- Benjamin Schafer, Rarefied Technologies Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico: : Photophoretic Tracers for Near-Space Remote Sensing at 30-100 km Altitudes
- David Smith, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina: Robotically Assembled Electromagnetic Metamaterials for Long-Range Space Situational Awareness
- Pablo Sobron, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Mountain View, California: Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys
- Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Mapping Alien Continents: Achieving Optical VLBI for Exoplanet Imaging
- Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Precision Astrometry Using Optically Independent Spacecraft for Gravitational Wave Detection
To be taught extra about NASA’s NIAC program, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/about-niac
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Rob Margetta
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
[email protected]