NASA experts have approved another list of 25 "crazy" space exploration projects, the authors of which propose to study Mars with the help of "transformer" robots and cyberbees, build a positron and laser engine to fly to Alpha Centauri, and also protect Marsonauts from radiation using a giant magnet.
“This year we received a record number of applications - over 230 proposals from our competitors, and therefore the struggle between them was especially fierce. I look forward to seeing these projects come to life,”said Jason Derleth, NIAC Program Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, USA.
Every few years, the agency holds the NIAC innovation competition, in which experts collect and implement the most daring, bizarre and promising ideas for studying near and deep space, as well as the surface of the planets of the solar system.
NASA specialists annually select several high-risk but promising space projects invented by small research teams. Then the agency provides resources and funds for their implementation, another 20-25 researchers receive small grants for the initial study.
Through hardship to the stars
Today NASA and other leading space agencies of the world have recognized that it will be impossible to study space without creating new propulsion and power plants that can take humanity to the interstellar level. Immediately five projects approved by the NIAC are devoted to the creation of such systems that can either accelerate starships to near-light speeds, or move almost indefinitely.
Three of them have already been approved in previous NIAC competitions, and now they are the winners in the second phase of this project, which involves much more substantial funding and implies that the authors of these ideas have been able to prove that their "crazy projects" really work.
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The first was the scandalous project of the "Mach engine" that violates Einstein's theory of relativity and, presumably, works thanks to one of the properties of space-time, discovered at the end of the 19th century by the famous German physicist Ernst Mach.
He suggested that all properties of physical bodies depend not only on themselves and their immediate environment, but also on their location relative to all other objects in the Universe. This property, as the American physicist James Woodward showed in 1990, can in theory be used to accelerate a spacecraft without consuming fuel, attracting and repelling charged objects at certain periods of time.
As Woodward and his colleague Heidi Firn note, winning the first phase of the NIAC gave them the resources to tackle the overheating problem of early prototype engines and develop a theory to describe how it worked. Thanks to this, they calculated how much energy needs to be spent to fly to Proxima b, the closest Earth-like planet to us.
An interstellar laser sailing ship as seen by the artist.
The money allocated by NASA in the second phase of the NIAC will be spent by physicists on the creation of the first prototypes and their validation. If the experiment succeeds, Firn and Woodward speculate that the next step could be a flight to Proxima Centauri.
Two other projects - the Breakthrough laser sailboat and the PuFF thermonuclear engine - fit well into the mold of modern physics. As part of the first initiative, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) propose using a 100-megawatt orbital laser to accelerate a spacecraft with a 110-meter sail to near-light speeds and fly to the outskirts of the solar system.
The authors of the second idea propose to create an installation that compresses thermonuclear fuel to almost critical temperatures and pressures, forcing its atoms to merge with each other and release energy. Unlike thermonuclear reactors and bombs, this gas will not compress further and generate even more energy, but will leave the engine in the form of a super-dense jet jet capable of accelerating the ship to ultra-high speeds.
According to the authors of this idea, engineers from the NASA Space Flight Center named after Marshall, a similar installation can be created today using existing materials. It will take the first people to Mars in just a month, and in several decades it will fly to the stars closest to us, using the "improvised" fuel in the form of interstellar gas and dust.
Calculating madness
More “realistic” projects are presented at the competition. For example, scientists from A&M University in Texas, the authors of the PROCSIMA project, propose to reduce the size and power of both the laser itself and the "sailboat" it accelerates, using not one, but two types of emitters. The first of them will still produce light, and the second - a beam of charged particles, which play the role of a kind of "fiber" for electromagnetic radiation.
These particles, as conceived by the authors, will keep photons inside themselves, preventing them from "scattering" through space, which will increase the efficiency of such an accelerator by about 10 thousand times and will allow it to work at much greater distances than Breakthrough. According to their calculations, PROCSIMA will be able to accelerate a small probe with a diameter of a meter to 10% of the speed of light and deliver it to Alpha Centauri in 42 years, or quickly bring the telescope to the point where the sun's gravity begins to distort the light.
A laser engine for a probe flying towards Alpha Centauri.
The second project, RPP, is a variation on the "nuclear engine" theme. Its creators propose to build a facility that will be fueled by rare isotopes. Their decay will lead to the formation of positrons - the simplest form of antimatter. These positrons can be combined into a single beam of antimatter particles, whose collisions with a beam of ordinary matter will generate powerful thrust and accelerate the ship to near-light speeds.
Inhabitants of the "iron" planet
Most of the rest of NIAC's projects are devoted to the study of Mars and other planets of the solar system, as well as the creation of such research machines that could work indefinitely.
For this reason, the general theme of these projects has become the so-called ISRU (in-situ resource usage) concept, which is based on the idea of using all "improvised means", including air, rocks and other states of matter on planets to provide probes with energy and fuel. …
For example, scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center propose to create and "populate" Mars with a special kind of mushroom that can grow on the surface of the Red Planet. These mushrooms will release melanin and other substances that actively absorb ionizing radiation and cosmic rays, and protect people or machines from the effects of radiation.
In the future, such mushrooms can be used to cover the plastic components of the casing of Martian bases and use the mycelium to equip habitable modules and even entire "cities".
Their colleagues at JPL are developing a real transforming robot that can change shape and manner of movement, disassembling itself into parts and connecting them in other ways. This machine, dubbed FAR, will consist of many primitive mini-robots equipped with a set of propellers and other simple propulsion devices capable of connecting to form objects of arbitrary shape and size.
For example, such a "transformer" will be able to turn into a ball driven by the winds, into a torpedo that can quickly swim under water, into an analogue of a drone with a large wing, and into many other structures capable of solving a variety of tasks.
Robot "transformer" to explore Mars and other planets.
Its competitors will be a kind of cyberbees, which are developed by engineers from the universities of Alabama and Japan. Flying insects, as scientists have long noticed, spend unusually little energy during flight, which will allow a small robot with "bee" wings to live many times longer than an ordinary drone and drone. In addition, a small mass of such cyberbugs will allow sending a swarm of such robots to Mars.
The SPARROW project, designed to search for traces of life on Europa, Enceladus and other planets with subglacial oceans, will work in a similar way. It is a small drone powered by water vapor produced by the lander, which melts the ice around the planet.
This approach, as its developers hope, will allow SPARROW to study several interesting points on the surface of these planets at once, where the first traces of extraterrestrial life may be found.
As NASA experts emphasize, all projects approved within the framework of the competition are not designed for quick implementation - it will take at least ten years to develop them. However, the potential of all approved innovations is expected to be 100% realized.
