NASA Bets on an Asteroid Killer, a Venusian Balloon, and More New Tech

Elena D’Onghia is known for her research on the structure of the Milky Way and our cosmic neighborhood. But the galactic and dark matter astrophysicist now has a totally different project, which could prove beneficial to a space-faring civilization: generating portable magnetic fields to divert potentially deadly space radiation away from astronauts. “I really wanted to do something on the side that would help society more, something where there was no solution yet. So we started thinking about this idea of shielding spacecraft from radiation,” she says.

Her idea, which sounds like a Magneto superpower, is one of 17 projects that received funding last month from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a program that invests in high-risk, high-reward proposals. Each phase 1 project, like D’Onghia’s radiation concept, received $175,000 apiece for a nine-month study, while the five proposals that advanced to phase 2 were each awarded $600,000 for a two-year period. Within a couple of decades, a few of them could mature enough to be part of the next generation of space missions. “Their job is really to change the future,” says Ron Turner, a senior science adviser for the NIAC program and an analyst at the nonprofit company Analytic Services, Inc. “We are here looking for innovative ideas that might somehow change the way space and aeronautics are done.”

Scientists like D’Onghia are exploring far-out ideas, but they also must demonstrate their feasibility and benefits, Turner says. Funding from the program helps people study each aspect of their proposal in more detail to see what exactly needs to be done to make it a reality. The proposals need not be targeted toward NASA; for example, one of the projects funded in the most recent round is a concept for defending Earth against a killer asteroid on a collision course with our planet. Others include sending a space balloon to Venus, and creating a foldable space station.

D’Onghia’s magnetic field project emerged from coffee shop conversations a few years ago with Paolo Desiati, her physicist colleague at the University of Wisconsin. They wanted to attack a futuristic health problem: As a spacecraft heads toward Mars, it will be bombarded with charged particles from the sun, and cosmic rays that can come from much farther away. Over an approximately nine-month trip, astronauts will be exposed to a significant amount of radiation, causing cellular damage and increasing their risk of cancer. Even if astronauts don’t linger on the Red Planet and promptly make the return trip home, their exposure will put them over the career-long radiation limit NASA recommends. “Until we solve this, we’re not going to Mars,” D’Onghia says.

They came up with a concept called CREW HaT, short for “Cosmic Radiation Extended Warding using the Halbach Torus,” a device made of magnetic coils with superconducting tapes that could be installed on a spacecraft’s exterior. Their design includes eight angled panels arranged in a circle, each with magnets in them, to ward off at least half the cosmic rays that hit with energies up to 1 billion electron-volts. (That’s actually not much energy, but the health risks accumulate over time.) The magnetic field the panels create would change the trajectories of incoming charged particles so they don’t hit the bodies of the passengers inside. The CREW HaT, which is a form of active shielding, would be combined with passive shielding—building spacecraft from materials designed to absorb some radiation.

Their goal is to design a version that’s not too heavy and doesn’t use too much power, so that it could be launched with a spacecraft like NASA’s Orion or SpaceX’s Starship and switched on outside the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Before they can build a prototype, their next steps include extending their calculations to include higher-energy cosmic rays, to see whether the tech could be used to divert them without increasing the weight of the apparatus too much. “This is the challenge. Previous concepts turned out to be extremely heavy and not realistic, but they laid the road to new ideas,” Desiati says.

Graphic depiction of the CREW HaT concept.Illustration: Elena D’Onghia

Another newly funded NIAC concept envisions a last-minute defense against a planet-killing asteroid or comet heading straight for Earth. Scientists believe they’ve detected at least 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids half a mile across or larger, which could be big enough to wipe out humanity. Yet it’s still possible—though unlikely—that such a large object could elude detection systems until it’s found with only a short warning time, like the comet in the movie Don’t Look Up. When an object is that close, nudging it aside with something like NASA’s DART spacecraft is no longer an option. “This is a bad day. And you cannot deflect this object with any reasonable mass that humanity has access to. Unless you can arrange to get the moon in front of it,” jokes Philip Lubin, an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, who leads the project.

Lubin’s “PI Terminal Defense for Humanity” concept involves launching a huge rocket, like SpaceX’s Starship or NASA’s Space Launch System, which would deploy a series of rodlike “penetrator interceptors” to strike the asteroid and blow it up in multiple waves, ultimately pulverizing it. The modified rocket needs either numerous interceptors with explosives or fewer interceptors with nuclear warheads, Lubin says, “because you need a crapload of energy—that’s a scientific term—to take this thing apart.” (The rocket itself doesn’t need to fly that fast, since all the speed and momentum comes from the asteroid.) If the plan works, the space rock would get broken up into bits small enough to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, rather than causing regional or even global devastation. “What would’ve killed millions of people is now a light and sound show,” Lubin says.

As he and his colleagues move forward with the project, Lubin plans to work on the penetrator design and use supercomputers to simulate the effects of those interceptor impacts on an asteroid at a speed of 50,000 miles per hour.

Graphic depiction of PI Terminal Defense for Humanity.

Illustration: Phillip Lubin

Another NIAC award went to a proposed space balloon mission to Venus, Earth’s neighbor. Compared to Mars, Venus has been somewhat neglected, although last year NASA announced two upcoming Venus missions: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS. “Those missions right now don’t have an astrobiology focus, no search for habitability or signs of life,” says Sara Seager, a MIT astronomer. Her project aims to rectify that.

Venus is plagued by a runaway greenhouse effect. The world’s surface is 800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. No lander lasts long, and it’s unlikely life could arise on the ground. But tiny lifeforms could exist in the cooler atmosphere, Seager says. In 2020, scientists published a study saying they had detected phosphine in the planet’s atmosphere, and that it could be a possible sign of life. The study was hotly debated, and other researchers have put forward alternate theories for what could be generating phosphine, but it did renew interest in the planet.

Seager’s idea involves sending an orbiter that deploys an inflatable probe, which looks like a hot-air balloon with no opening. While that’s not the only Venus balloon concept out there, what they do next with it is new. At around 30 miles above the surface, a canister hanging from the balloon would scoop up some cloud particles, including some liquid and solid material—and potentially any little alien microbes that are up there, which Seager says might be as small as 0.2 microns. But since it would be extremely tough to design an instrument with a microscope that could examine the contents of the canister in flight, she proposes returning the sample to Earth. (This is also the plan for Mars rock samples, and for those from asteroids like Ryugu and Bennu.) Her design calls for the sample to be slotted in a small rocket, which would ascend and rendezvous with the orbiter, which would carry it home. “This search for signs of life on Venus has been around for a long time, and now the stars are aligned to start taking it seriously,” she says.

With their NIAC funding, Seager and her colleagues now aim to nail down some of the details, including exactly how big the balloon, sample container, and rocket have to be.

The latest batch of NIAC-supported concepts include other far-out ideas too, like a body-scanning device that can then create bespoke spacesuits, and a relatively quiet propulsion system for an aircraft that can vertically take off and land. After phase 1 runs its course, some researchers will make so much progress that NIAC will further fund them with a phase 2 award, giving them more time to develop prototypes or work with other organizations or companies that can do so. Projects that advanced to the second round this time include a concept for a kilometer-long space station that could fit inside a single rocket and unfold around the moon.

While most NIAC concepts might take decades before scientists and engineers iron out the details, some quickly make the transition from drawing board to space mission applications, Turner says. Chris Walker, a University of Arizona astronomer, designed an inflatable space antenna through NIAC, and then soon cofounded the startup company Freefall Aerospace to further develop the technology. A small version of the original concept, called CatSat, is now slated for launch this summer. A different NIAC project led to a technology demonstration called Mars Cube One (MarCO), twin communications-relay CubeSats built by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that launched in 2018 with the Mars InSight mission.

D’Onghia and Desiati were thrilled that NASA officials listened to them and took their work on magnetic fields seriously. In the alternative worlds of sci-fi, someone always invents some kind of shield against various types of space radiation, Desiati points out. “Elena and I are very excited to be part of a process that might actually end up producing a real space shield,” he says. “It’s science fiction becoming reality, which is kind of mind-blowing.”

NASA Bets on an Asteroid Killer, a Venusian Balloon, and More New Tech

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