From Star Trek-like medical scanners to concepts for unscheduled agriculture as in The wide“Science fiction has often inspired actual research at NASA and other space agencies. This week, researchers are meeting at a virtual conference for NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to brainstorm and explore science fiction-like ideas, some of which could very well shape missions for the next 20 years.
A Drone helicopter Hopping over a Martian crater or moon rover mapping moon ice may seem like a stretch a decade ago, but the copter actually is flew earlier this year, and the rover is being planned. Now the organizers of the conference have asked for proposals for further exploratory projects, some of which the agency could eventually fund. “We’re investing in long-term, distant technology, and most of them are unlikely to work. Those who do can change anything. It’s high risk, high payoff, almost like a venture capital investment portfolio, ”said Jason Derleth, NIAC program director.
Instead of focusing on incremental developments, the program seeks breakthrough technologies that are ten times better than the state of the art, says Derleth. He compares it to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also researches extremely speculative concepts, but among other things developed the forerunner of the modern Internet.
The annual conference, which will run until Thursday, September 23rd, will be open to the public on NIAC Live broadcast. Some of the proposals discussed so far – for example for new ways to launch foldable space stations or astronaut habitats, or to extract resources from other worlds – revolve around the insight that one has to get the best out of every rocket for long space travel.
The next generation of space travelers needs resources to survive, for protective structures and for onward or home journeys. “This gives us two options: Take everything with you as if you were going on a hike in the desert. Or find new and creative ways to use what is already there, ”said Amelia Greig, aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at El Paso, who presented at the conference on Tuesday.
To aid creative reuse of lunar resources, Greig and her colleagues suggest a technology called ablative arc mining that would slurp Water ice and the types of metals that could be used as building materials. “It’s like mining the moon with controlled lightning,” she said during her presentation. Their concept describes a van-sized moon crawler – named after the Jawa sand crawlers from Star Wars – that selects a point and then places a ringed device that carries it at its front end parallel to the ground. Arcs hiss across the ring, which can be up to a meter in diameter, and tear particles from the surface of the moon. These now charged particles can then be moved and sorted by the electromagnetic fields of the machine. In this way, a single device could fill one container with water, another with oxygen bound to other elements, and another with silicon, aluminum or other metal particles, rather than just determining a resource.
An artist’s impression of the ablative arch mining system used in a crater near the South Pole of the Moon.
Illustration: Janet Hill / Creative Studios / The Center for Faculty Leadership and Development / UTEP
