By Suzanne Elliott
Two professors in West Virginia University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have received a $125,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to determine the viability of early-stage technologies that could change what’s possible in space.
“The funds will be used for conducting pilot studies for determining the feasibility of the proposed concept,” said Yu Gu, a WVU associate professor, who is working on the project with Piyush Mehta, an assistant professor. “We will build a high-voltage chamber to test if the generated lift and electric power would be sufficient to support the proposed mission.”
Gu and Mehta were one of 12 research teams selected to receive a $125,000 Phase One grant from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. That program is designed to foster ideas that could impact future NASA missions.
Only about 6 percent of the concepts submitted are selected for Phase One funding.
The long-term goal of Gu and Mehta’s project — Micro-probes Propelled and Powered by Planetary Atmospheric Electricity — is to perform large, or even global scale, measurement of planetary and lunar atmospheres in the solar system by deploying thousands of micro probes into space.
Each of the probes will have a small payload pod containing stored energy hanging under a string loop, which provides both atmospheric drag and electrostatic lifts. Two electric booms will sense the atmospheric potential incline and harvest a small amount of electricity to power each probe.
An onboard control system will extend mission time and keep the probe in the desired atmospheric layer, GU said.
“We envision tens of thousands of micro probes to be released onto the atmosphere,” Gu said. “Over time they will disperse into different regions. The failure of even a large percentage of these probes would not compromise the success of the mission.”
Gu said he got the idea for the project by reading an article about a spider’s ballooning capabilities. A spider will climb to an exposed point, and raise its abdomen toward the sky and extrude strands of silk and float away on an air current, a process known as ballooning. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea, according to an article in The Atlantic.
“I am currently working on robot swarms and Mars rovers,” he said. “I came across a research article on how spiders use atmospheric electricity to fly. I thought it might be worth it to combine these ideas together.”
The Phase One portion of Gu’s project will end in February.
“By that time, we will submit a proposal to compete for the Phase Two award,” he said. “Overall, this is a preliminary concept study for a future mission that may happen in 20 years.”
