A proposal to build a far-flung set of radio antennas to measure the cosmos is one of 13 far-out concepts to receive seed funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, also known as NIAC.
University of Washington astronomer Matthew McQuinn will receive a grant of $175,000 to flesh out his plan for a solar-system-scale interferometer capable of determining cosmological distances with precision that’s an order of magnitude beyond what’s possible today.
The plan would require building and launching a constellation of four radio dishes, each measuring at least several meters (yards) in diameter. The detectors would have to be widely separated, far out in deep space. How far out? “The science gets interesting when they are more than about 10 AU apart,” McQuinn told GeekWire in an email. That distance of 10 AU is just a bit less than the width of Jupiter’s orbit.
The detectors would be on the lookout for fast radio bursts that flash from beyond our Milky Way galaxy. By measuring the difference in arrival times at the different detectors, scientists could calculate the distance to the source of a burst with sub-percent precision. “It’s kind of like GPS localizations, but applied to fast radio bursts,” McQuinn explained.
In his proposal, McQuinn says such measurements could lead to new discoveries in fields ranging from gravitational-wave detection to the study of dark matter. McQuinn and a UW colleague, Kyle Boone, lay out the details in a research paper that was published last year in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The NIAC Phase I grant will give McQuinn an opportunity to investigate and simulate different mission concepts to firm up the specifications for the interferometer, and evaluate whether and how to proceed further.
NIAC has been around in different incarnations since 1998. The program is designed to provide relatively small grants for researchers who have big ideas for innovations relevant to potential NASA missions.
“The daring missions NASA undertakes for the benefit of humanity all begin as just an idea, and NIAC is responsible for inspiring many of those ideas,” NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free said today in a news release. “The Ingenuity helicopter flying on Mars and instruments on the MarCO deep-space CubeSats can trace their lineage back to NIAC, proving there is a path from creative idea to mission success. And while not all these concepts will fly, NASA and our partners worldwide can learn from fresh approaches and may eventually use technologies advanced by NIAC.”
Other concepts winning Phase I funding include proposals to send a sample return mission to Venus’ atmosphere, to build an electric-powered airplane to survey Mars, and to launch a swarm of miniaturized interstellar spacecraft to Proxima Centauri. Each grant recipient will receive a maximum of $175,000 to support further study, but there’s no guarantee that the research will lead to further NASA funding.
Here’s a quick rundown on the 12 other researchers winning NIAC Phase I grants:
- Steven Benner, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Florida: Add-on to Large-scale Water Mining Operations on Mars to Screen for Introduced and Alien Life.
- James Bickford, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Massachusetts: Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket.
- Peter Cabauy, City Labs Inc., Florida: Autonomous Tritium Micropowered Sensors.
- Kenneth Carpenter, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.: A Lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer: Artemis-enabled Stellar Image.
- Thomas Eubanks, Space Initiatives Inc., Florida: Swarming Proxima Centauri: Coherent Picospacecraft Swarms Over Interstellar Distances.
- Geoff Landis, NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio: Sample Return From the Surface of Venus.
- Aaswath Pattabhi Raman, University of California at Los Angeles: Electro-Luminescently Cooled Zero-Boil-Off Propellant Depots Enabling Crewed Exploration of Mars.
- Alvaro Romeo-Calvo, Georgia Tech Research Corp., Atlanta: Magnetohydrodynamic Drive for Hydrogen and Oxygen Production in Mars Transfer.
- Lynn Rothschild, NASA’s Ames Research Center, California’s Silicon Valley: Detoxifying Mars: The Biocatalytic Elimination of Omnipresent Perchlorates.
- Ryan Sprenger, Fauna Bio Inc., California: A revolutionary approach to interplanetary space travel: Studying Torpor in Animals for Space-health in Humans.
- Ge-Cheng Zha, CoFlo Jet LLC, Florida: Mars Aerial and Ground Global Intelligent Explorer (MAGGIE).
- Beijia Zhang, MIT’s Lincoln Lab, Massachusetts: LIFA: Lightweight Fiber-based Antenna for Small Sat-Compatible Radiometry.
