National nonprofit The Aerospace Corp’s announced the Solar Gravity Lens concept has received a $2 million grant by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program.
SGL aims to send a fleet of optical telescopes to image habitable planets far beyond our solar system. This 2-year grant will support the further maturation of SGL technologies in a mission led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with The Aerospace Corp. as the mission architect.
“NASA’s selection of the SGL mission for the NIAC III award is a boost for the nation’s efforts to explore deep space,” said Steve Isakowitz, Aerospace president and CEO. “The SGL concept is enabled by an exciting set of breakthrough technologies in solar sails, artificial intelligence, nano-satellites, and formation flying that promise to revolutionize what we do with satellites closer to home.”
The SGL team previously received NIAC Phase I and II awards, demonstrating basic concept feasibility and inventing a novel mission architecture using multiple low-cost spacecraft. The team also defined a viable roadmap toward building the required SGL mission capability, beginning with a technology demonstration mission in the 2023–24 time frame.
“This award brings us toward a proof-of-concept flight that would exit the solar system faster than any previous spacecraft,” said Tom Heinsheimer, Aerospace’s technical co-lead for SGL. “Then we would fly swarms of cooperating smallsats to observe the images of exoplanets substantially magnified by the predictions of Einstein as how light behaves around massive objects.”
“When the collection of exoplanet images is complete, hundreds of SGL spacecraft will sail outward toward the cosmos, carrying microchips that portray life on Earth — building on the legacy of the Voyager Golden Records launched on Voyager Spacecraft in 1977,” said Henry Helvajian, senior scientist in Aerospace’s Physical Sciences Laboratories and technical co-lead of SGL.