NIAC
A Concentrated Beam of Particles and Photons Could Push Us to Proxima Centauri
Getting to Proxima Centauri b will take a lot of new technologies, but there are increasingly exciting reasons to do…
Advanced Optics Could Help Us Find Earth 2.0
NASA has long been interested in building bigger and better space telescopes. Its Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) has funded…
Slingshotting Around the Sun Would Make a Spacecraft the Faster Ever
NASA is very interested in developing a propulsion method to allow spacecraft to go faster. We've reported several times on…
How a Single Atomic Sensor Can Help Track Earth’s Glaciers
Earth observations are one of the most essential functions of our current fleet of satellites. Typically, each satellite specializes in…
NASA Takes Six Advanced Tech Concepts to Phase II
It's that time again. NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) has announced six concepts that will receive funding and proceed to…
Thermal Modeling of a Pulsed Plasma Rocket Shows It Should Be Possible To Create One
We've reported on a technology called pulsed plasma rockets (PPRs) here at UT a few times. Several research groups have…
NASA Invests in New Nuclear Rocket Concept for the Future of Space Exploration and Astrophysics
In the coming years, NASA plans to send several astrobiology missions to Venus and Mars to search for evidence of…
NASA Selects Bold Proposal to “Swarm” Proxima Centauri with Tiny Probes
Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it…
Lost In Space? Just Use Relativity
One of the hardest things for many people to conceptualize when talking about how fast something is going is that…
A Swarm Of Swimming Microbots Could Be Deployed To Europa’s Ocean
Europa and other ocean worlds in our solar system have recently attracted much attention. They are thought to be some…