NASA awards 18 NIAC grants worth $3.2 million for innovative space concepts

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A collage of artist concepts highlighting the novel approaches proposed by the 2026 NIAC awardees.

Credit: NASA

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

The 18 NIAC Phase I awards total $3.2 million. Each award provides up to $175,000 for a nine-month initial investigation. The NIAC projects are about early-stage concept development and are not considered official NASA missions.

“NASA has outlined an ambitious vision for the future of space exploration, we’re returning the Moon to stay, advancing to Mars, and pushing 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 great leaps. These awards are the kinds of innovation the world needs NASA to help foster.”

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

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

As NASA and its partners push for sustained lunar presence, some of the 2026 awardees focused on ways to help explore the Moon and build infrastructure there. These include a system to support hovering robots to explore lava tubes under the Moon’s surface, a method to manage 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 Moon’s nearly two-week-long lunar nights.

Other concepts focus on exploring some of the solar system’s most remarkable features. Venus, with its hot atmosphere, presents an imposing challenge for research vehicles, so one NIAC awardee explores methods for hardening instruments for longer missions.

Two other concepts could help study planetary rings. One would use a swarm of 10,000 tiny satellites to map and analyze the rings of Saturn, while another would create a system for collecting samples from rings such as those circling Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Some NIAC awardees will look far beyond the solar system, exploring ways to power interstellar spacecraft, map out continents on exoplanets, observe the 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, like the potential use of spaceborne dust to reduce solar radiation, and awareness about the debris orbiting Earth.

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

The 18 selections for 2026 NIAC Phase 1 grants are:

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

David Bugby, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Combinatory Architecture offering Neomobility, on-Venus Adaptability, and Survivability (CANVAS)

A.C. Charania, Zeno Power Systems, Inc., Washington:

Extended Astronaut Radioisotope-EVA in Nighttime and Deep-space Icy Landscapes (EARENDIL)

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

Artur Davoyan, University of California, Los Angeles: Coilable Stacked Solar Sails for Very High delta-V Missions

Daniel Drew, University of Hawaii, Honolulu: Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst (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 Via 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 Passive Surveyor Environmental Control (ECLIPSE)

Marco Quadrelli, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: PRAXIS: Planetary Rings Autonomous EXploration with In-situ Sampling (PRAXIS)

Michael Rubenstein, Northwestern University, Chicago: Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellations 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 30-100 km Altitudes

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

Pablo Sobron, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, 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

To learn more 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

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Last Updated

Jul 29, 2026

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Jennifer M. Dooren

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NASA Headquarters

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NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program

Research and Technology Mission Directorate