The agency’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program provides seed funding for ideas that sound like sci-fi—but just might work.
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 divertaway from astronauts. “I really wanted to do something on the side that would help society more, something where there was no solution yet.
Her idea, which sounds like a Magneto superpower, is one of 17 projects that received funding last month from, 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.
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.
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.
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.