NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has created 18 new awards to support visionary ideas to improve aerospace technologies in areas ranging from exploring the solar system to understanding the universe.

The 18 NIAC Phase I grants total $3.2 million. Each grant provides up to $175,000 for an initial nine-month investigation. NIAC projects deal with early-stage concept development and are not considered official NASA missions.

“NASA has outlined an ambitious vision for the future of space exploration: We will return the Moon to stay, push toward Mars, and push to deepen our understanding of space,” said Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology division within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Achieving that will require more than incremental technological advancement. It means we need breakthroughs. These awards are the kind of innovation the world needs NASA to help foster.”

As an innovation incubator, NIAC funds the early development of potential innovative technologies. Concepts for award consideration must have both transformative potential and possible feasibility for eventual implementation.

“Every innovation, every technological leap, begins with the seed of an idea,” said Phillip Williams, NIAC acting program executive. “The NIAC program allows NASA to germinate those seeds and determine if there is something that could be grown to benefit future space missions and our nation’s aerospace economy.”

As NASA and its partners push for a sustained lunar presence, some of the 2026 honorees focused on ways to help explore the Moon and build infrastructure there. These include a system to help floating robots explore lava tubes beneath the Moon’s surface, a method to control temperatures for small mobile exploration robots, and a way to incorporate radioisotopic heat sources into suits to help keep astronauts warm when operating in the nearly two-week long lunar nights.

Other concepts focus on exploring some of the most notable features of the solar system. Venus, with its hot atmosphere, presents a daunting challenge to research vehicles, so an NIAC awardee is exploring methods to strengthen instruments for longer missions.

Two other concepts could help study planetary rings. One would use a swarm of 10,000 small satellites to map and analyze Saturn’s rings, while another would create a system to collect samples from rings like those around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Some NIAC awardees will look far beyond the solar system, exploring ways to power interstellar spacecraft, map continents on exoplanets, observe photon rings around black holes, and detect subtle gravitational waves to explain how galaxies formed. Others will work to answer questions directly related to life on Earth, such as the potential use of spaceborne dust to reduce solar radiation and raising awareness about debris orbiting Earth.

The researchers, known as NIAC Fellows, will investigate their concepts and identify potential challenges and opportunities for further development.

The 18 selections for the 2026 NIAC Phase 1 grants are:

• Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California: Dimming the Sun Using a Controllable Dust Cloud to Reduce Solar Insolation (DimSun)

• David Bugby, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Combinatorial Architecture Delivering Neomobility, Adaptability on Venus, and Survivability (CANVAS)

• AC Charania, Zeno Power Systems, Inc., Washington:
  Extended EVA radioisotope of astronauts in frozen night landscapes and deep space (EARENDIL)

• Anish Damodaran, University of Central Florida, Orlando: PS21: Transforming Submillimeter Spatial Interferometry with Photonic Technologies

• Artur Davoyan, University of California, Los Angeles: Rollable stacked solar sails for very high delta-V missions

• Daniel Drew, University of Hawaii, Honolulu: Solid State Propulsion for Autonomous Karst Reconnaissance (SPARK)

• Gilly Elor, Stone Aerospace, Inc., Del Valle, Texas: Power over fiber to enable a lunar underground explorer (LUX)

• Zhaoyan Liu, NASA Ames Research Center, California’s Silicon Valley: Quantum Wind Lidar Applications for Planetary and Earth Science Missions

• Jeff Nosanov, Orbital Velocity, LLC, Decatur, Georgia: OBLIVIAN: Observing Black Hole Light Through Intensity Correlation (OBLIVIAN)

• Keunhan Park, University of Utah, Salt Lake City: Plasmon-Enhanced Radioisotope Thermophotovoltaic (PRTPV) Power Generation for Interstellar Missions

• Austin Phoenix, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia: Efficient Variable Conductivity Lunar Insulator for Environmental Control of Passive Surveyors (ECLIPSE)

• Marco Quadrelli, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: PRAXIS: Autonomous Exploration of Planetary Rings with In Situ Sampling (PRAXIS)

• Michael Rubenstein, Northwestern University, Chicago: Constellations of actively steerable femtosats for in situ exploration of Saturn’s rings, atmosphere, and magnetosphere

• Benjamin Schafer, Rarefied Technologies Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico: Photophoretic tracers for near-space remote sensing at altitudes of 30 to 100 km

• David Smith, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina: Robotically Assembled Electromagnetic Metamaterials for Long-Range Spatial Situational Awareness

• Pablo Sobron, Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mountain View, California: Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys

• Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Mapping Alien Continents: Achieving Optical VLBI for Exoplanet Imaging

• Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Precision Astrometry Using Optically Independent Spacecraft for Gravitational Wave Detection

For more information about NASA’s NIAC program, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/about-niac

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Rob Margetta
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
robert.j.margetta@nasa.gov