NASA Funds 12 Far-Out Space Tech Ideas

Future starships may be constructed in Earth orbit using a ring-type construction facility, which could have hotel rooms where guests could observe the construction.

NASA has granted funding to a dozen imaginative tech concepts, in the hopes that one or more of them will lead to big breakthroughs in space science and exploration.

The 12 ideas, which were selected under Phase 1 of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, are ambitious and varied.

One aims to build biomaterials such as human tissue with a 3D printer, for example, while another proposes to induce deep-sleep torpor states in astronauts making the long journey to Mars.

"These new Phase 1 selections include potential breakthroughs for Earth and space science, diverse operations and the potential for new paths that expand human civilization and commerce into space," NIAC program executive Jay Falker said in a statement.

Phase 1 awards are worth about $100,000. The selected mission teams will use the money to conduct nine-month initial analysis studies, after which they can apply for Phase 2 funding of approximately $500,000 for two more years of concept development.

The 12 selected concepts, along with their principal investigators, are:

• Pulsed Fission-Fusion (PuFF) Propulsion System (Rob Adams, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center)
• Torpor-Inducing Transfer Habitat For Human Stasis To Mars (John Bradford, Spaceworks Engineering, Inc.)
• Two-Dimensional Planetary Surface Landers (Hamid Hemmati, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
• Dual-mode Propulsion System Enabling CubeSat Exploration of the Solar System (Nathan Jerred, Universities Space Research Association)
• Growth Adapted Tensegrity Structures: A New Calculus for the Space Economy (Anthony Longman)
• Eternal Flight as the Solution for 'X' (Mark Moore, NASA Langley Research Center)
• Deep Mapping of Small Solar System Bodies with Galactic Cosmic Ray Secondary Particle Showers (Thomas Prettyman, Planetary Science Institute)
• Biomaterials Out of Thin Air: In Situ, On-Demand Printing of Advanced Biocomposites (Lynn Rothschild, NASA Ames Research Center)
• Plasmonic Force Propulsion Revolutionizes Nano/PicoSatellite Capability (Joshua Rovey, University of Missouri, Rolla)
• Transformers For Extreme Environments (Adrian Stoica, Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
• 10-Meter Sub-Orbital Large Balloon Reflector (Christopher Walker, University of Arizona)
• Low-Mass Planar Photonic Imaging Sensor (Ben Yoo, University of California, Davis)

The NIAC program has been operating in its present form since 2011. The original NIAC, called the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, ran from 1998 through 2007.

NB: In 2008, Congress ordered the U.S. National Research Council to investigate NIAC's effectiveness and importance. The reviews were favorable, leading to the program's resurrection several years later.

To learn more about the 2013 Phase 1 selections, go to the NIAC page

Canada funds Non-Nuclear sources for Medical Isotopes

Canada expects to be able to make enough medical isotopes through non-nuclear methods by 2016 to replace those now produced by an aging reactor and better assure an uninterrupted supply for medical imaging, a government minister said on Thursday.

To that end, the federal government will fund three research institutes developing cyclotron and linear accelerator technologies for production of isotopes on a commercial scale, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said.

Canada's only current source of the isotopes is a problem-plagued reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd's facility at Chalk River, Ontario.

The reactor is licensed to run until 2016. "Our challenge now is to prove that cyclotron and linear accelerator production can be commercially viable. ... We envision a future where isotope production will no longer require highly enriched uranium — a weapons-grade material," he said.

The government will give a total of C$25 million ($24.3 million) to the three facilities for this goal.

Asked if there would be a gap between the end of production by the Chalk River reactor and the supplies from the other sources, Oliver said he did not think so, since the technology was proven and what remained was commercialization.

"That's been worked on for a while," he told reporters after making the announcement. "It's reached a fairly robust stage right now. We're talking about increasing the amount ... and we're comfortable we can meet those objectives by 2016."

Chalk River facility

Oliver also announced Canada wanted a private operator to run the Chalk River facility, a move that would take two years to accomplish.

The temporary closure of the Chalk River reactor for safety reasons in 2007 and then again from May 2009 to August 2010 caused a medical challenge and a political furor as the government scrambled to find isotope replacements internationally.

The closures dealt a blow to Nordion Inc, which as a major supplier of isotopes relied on Chalk River. Nordion had no immediate comment on Thursday's announcement.

AECL had built two more modern prototype reactors to make isotopes but eventually mothballed them after a series of problems. An arbitration panel last year rejected Nordion's claim for damages against AECL.

A CANDU Nuclear Facility

Oliver said the government was not seeking to close down or sell the Chalk River nuclear laboratories.

In October 2011 Canada sold AECL's Candu nuclear reactor division to a subsidiary of SNC Lavalin Group Inc.

Major boost for UK space technology industry

The Government is to grant nearly 6 million pound to co-fund major new British research that will develop commercial products and services using space technology and data from space-based systems.

The grant funding, part of the National Space Technology Programme (NSTP) from the UK Space Agency and the Technology Strategy Board, will support four major research and development consortium projects to be led by Astrium Ltd, Avanti Communications Ltd, DMC International Imaging Ltd and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.

The total value of the R and D, including contributions from the participating companies, is over £11.5 million.

The portfolio of projects includes participation by 21 partner companies, universities and research organisations, including 7 SMEs.

Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said: "The UK space industry supports thousands of high-tech jobs in the UK and is an important driver of economic growth.

This 6 million investment will build on that success by helping some of the most innovative British businesses develop highly commercial, cutting-edge space technology that will be in demand in a growing global market."

Dr David Williams, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, said: "These initial major projects springing out of the National Space Technology Programme are great examples innovative and ambitious R and D in the UK space sector.

By investing in these projects, we are securing our future national capability across the range of vital applications and services that space technology can provide."

Iain Gray, Chief Executive of the Technology Strategy Board, said: "We are delighted to support these exciting new projects, which will enable the development, commercialisation and exploitation of space technologies to address challenges and provide growth opportunities across a wide range of emerging markets."

The four projects will:

• Begin the development of the Next Generation Telecommunications satellite platform. The work is focused on developing the mechanical platform architecture for future European telecommunications satellites in the 3 to 6 tonne range. This project will also prepare UK companies to take leading roles in future European Space Agency programmes to develop telecommunication space technologies;
• Develop a ruggedised and light-weight portable Ka-Band satcom terminal. This "suitcase" terminal will provide portable and mobile access to the latest generation of high bandwidth satellite broadband services;
• Develop a system and service for measuring land carbon stocks and fluxes from Satellite Earth observation data. This service will provide much higher resolution services than are currently available and enable the monitoring and trading of carbon credits and similar commercial tools for tackling climate change;
• Prepare the way for the planned UK NovaSAR Synthetic aperture radar mission by accelerating the technology development of an innovative S-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument.

The investment forms the core part of the UK Space Agency's National Space Technology Programme (NSTP), which sees government investment of 10 million pounds to help UK industry exploit growth opportunities in the space sector and improve the UK's space technology capabilities.

Last month the UK Space Agency and the Technology Strategy Board announced investment of 2.5 million pounds through the NSTP in twenty-eight short-term, fast-track research and development projects.

NASA Provides New Funding to Asteroid Search Program

The asteroid 2012 DA14 currently has the greatest chance of impacting Earth, possibly crashing down on Feb. 16, 2020. NASA

The search for potentially dangerous asteroids will continue through 2015 after federal funders agreed to give the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, a $4.1 million funding boost, researchers announced.

The survey uses two telescopes run by the University of Arizona to scan the sky for objects that enter a collision course with Earth.

The new funds will be used to upgrade the program's telescopes, something researchers said is sorely needed.

"When we began observing in 2000, our image sensor was 16 megapixels, which was large by any standard," Steve Larson, a Catalina Sky Survey researcher and senior staff scientist at University of Arizona, said in a statement.

"Today, commonly available consumer digital cameras have surpassed that size, and we were reaching the limit of productivity with our current camera design."

The new telescopes will quadruple the amount of sky the telescopes cover each month.

The asteroid watchers also plan to use the new money to develop more sensitive software and conduct more searches.

The Catalina Sky Survey uses two telescopes to take images of a selected part of the sky roughly 10 minutes apart, according to a press release.

A computer program then scrutinizes the images to identify objects moving in a straight line.

If the object qualifies as a near-Earth object (NEO), an object whose trajectory will bring it close to Earth, the survey reports it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The survey discovered 586 near-Earth asteroids in 2011, 65 percent of all NEOs discovered.

"NASA has recognized that over the last seven years, our program has constantly strived to improve its performance, and has collaborated with others to find new ways to exploit the nearly 1,000 images we take every night with our two telescopes in the mountains north of Tucson," Edward Beshore, principal investigator of the Catalina Sky Survey, said in a statement. "I think NASA recognizes the CSS as a valuable service to, well, humanity."

Congress mandated the Spaceguard Survey, which the Catalina Sky Survey is a part of, in 1998.

The Spaceguard Survey required 90 percent of NEO's over 1 km in diameter to be found by 2008.

As of 2011, researchers found 911 NEO's through the Spaceguard program and expect 70 more objects will be found, according to NASA.

NASA tracks every NEO that has a chance of colliding with Earth in the next 100 years.

NASA James Webb Space Telescope: Funding Restored

U.S. Senate panel has proposed giving NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) about $150 million more for 2012 than the White House requested for the overbudget project, which appropriators in the House of Representatives voted this summer to cancel.

The additional funding for JWST amounts to a 40 percent increase for the project and is part of a 2012 spending bill approved Sept. 14 by the Senate Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee.

Overall, the subcommittee's bill would provide NASA with a total of $17.9 billion for 2012. That is about $500 million less than the agency got for 2011 and $800 million less than what U.S. President Barack Obama sought for NASA in the 2012 budget request he sent Congress in February.

The Webb telescope, which was marked for cancelation in the $16.8 billion NASA spending bill the House Appropriations Committee approved in July, would receive $530 million next year under the Senate's bill — about 40 percent more than the $374 million the Obama administration included for the project in its 2012 request.

UK Space Agency Funds International Mars Rover

UK Space Agency Funds International Mars Rover

The ExoMars rover is a robotic scientist which will search for evidence of past and present life and study the local Martian environment to understand when and where conditions that could have supported the development of life may have prevailed.

The UK Space Agency is announcing Pounds 10.5M for the development of instruments to search for signs of past or present life on Mars.

The instruments are part of the scientific payload on the ExoMars rover to be launched in 2018 as part of a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and US space agency NASA. ExoMars is a flagship project in the UK Space Agency's science and exploration programme.

A two-step programme, the adventure begins in 2016 when NASA will launch an ESA-led orbiter to try to understand the origin and distribution of trace gases in the atmosphere of the Red Planet. In particular, it aims to explain why methane - a gas which scientists know should be destroyed in the atmosphere within a few hundred years - seems to be continuously forming at certain places on the planet.

The orbiter will also release an experimental probe which will make a fiery descent into the thin Martian atmosphere and use its on-board rockets to demonstrate Europe's ability to make a controlled landing on another planet.

Then in 2018, NASA will land ESA's ExoMars rover alongside a NASA rover. Thanks to funding from the UK Space Agency, the rover vehicle for ExoMars is being designed and tested by leading UK space company EADS Astrium at its facility in Stevenage, Hertfordshire under a multi-million pound contract.

The ExoMars rover is a robotic scientist which will search for evidence of past and present life and study the local Martian environment to understand when and where conditions that could have supported the development of life may have prevailed.

Unlike previous US rovers, ExoMars will carry a radar able to search beneath it for scientifically promising locations under the surface and a drill to extract samples from 2 m down that will be fed to its on-board laboratory.

The UK is leading on developing two of the nine instruments (the Life Marker Chip and the Panoramic Camera) on the rover and has a major involvement in two other instruments (the Raman Laser Spectrometer and the X-Ray diffactometer).

David Willetts, Universities and Science Minister, said, "The UK's world-leading technology will play a major role in this international ExoMars project.

Our scientists will expand our knowledge of the red planet and help generate applications for these technologies here at home to benefit society and the economy. It's exciting to see UK engineers working on the most ambitious Mars mission ever attempted."