The US space agency NASA is investing in 22 Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) proposed by young scientists for an initial feasibility study. More details with the list of projects can be found on the NASA website.
The list includes projects that have the potential to revolutionize space exploration. The agency announced 15 projects that were approved in the first stage of the competition. The authors of these projects will receive 125 thousand US dollars to carry out research for nine months. The other seven projects have already passed the second phase and will receive US $ 500,000 for research over two years. Scientists will be able to continue to develop the project started during the first stage of the competition.
“The program offers financial assistance to young scientists to develop promising aerospace projects that we are evaluating,” said Steve Yurchik, deputy administrator of NASA's space mission technology department.
Among the ideas selected for the first stage of the competition was a project to send an airship to Mars. The idea of airships hovering over the Red Planet goes back to the novels by Edgar Burroughs about the planet Barsum. Scientist John-Paul Clark of the Georgia Institute of Technology intends to develop a special vacuum airship that can operate in the Martian atmosphere.
To bring life to Mars, astronauts in the 2000 film Red Planet laid a layer of bioengineered algae that produce oxygen. Adam Arkin of the University of California, Berkeley plans to study bioengineered strains of the bacteria Pseudomonas stutzeri to detoxify perchlorate in Martian soil and enrich it with ammonia. According to the plan, such a step would make it easier to grow potatoes on Mars.
In David Brin's novel Genesis, Earthlings figure out how to use the sun's gravitational field to focus light beams and find distant objects in the solar system. Vyacheslav Turyshev, a graduate of Moscow State University who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, plans to launch a space telescope that uses the Sun as a gravitational lens to detect exoplanets and study life on them.
It is noted that the development of most projects will take at least another ten years.