Bouncing robots capable of exploring planets, a giant pinhole camera in space, and genetically engineered crops that could grow on other worlds are just three of the ideas proposed by scientists funded by NASA's forward-thinking Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC).

Now, NIAC, the organisation that first backed research into space elevators (think of a satellite tethered to Earth by a giant cable, dispensing with a rocket launch to attain orbit) has again made its annual call for revolutionary ideas lurking in the laboratories, or even just in the imagination, of US space scientists.

"NIAC was created to identify new and revolutionary concepts for Nasa that go well beyond what Nasa is currently doing," said Robert Cassanova, director of NIAC, set up in 1998 as an independent, and, in effect, brainstorming institute.

The dozen or so projects chosen each year for funding tend to be long-term, perhaps coming to fruition within 10 to 40 years, according to Sharon Garrison, NIAC's co-ordinator at NASA.

Cassanova added: "NIAC is looking for grand ideas and grand visions big ideas that might inspire new enabling technologies. We state explicitly that the concept or architectural system does not have to have the enabling technology available to make it work. And the science does not have to be totally understood."

The deadline for out-of-this-world proposals this year is midnight, February 13.

At a recent meeting in Colorado, scientists heard about the projects funded after last year's NIAC call. One microbiologist, Amy Grunden, at North Carolina State University, reported that she had been working on a way to grow food in harsh conditions on other planets. Her inspiration came from extremophiles, microscopic organisms that live in the most extreme environments on Earth.

"We can actually pinpoint particular genes that are responsible for providing adaptations for these organisms that are living in extreme environments," said Professor Grunden. "Given our current biochemical and physiological knowledge of some of these adaptive pathways, can we put them in other plant systems to help them deal with extremes?"

Her idea is to put "extreme survival" genes into crops such as rye; astronauts on long missions would take the seeds with them, saving on the cost of taking food supplies into space.

Penelope Boston, of New Mexico Tech, and Steven Dubowsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's space robotics laboratory, looked at space exploration. Their idea was to beef up the capabilities of probes orbiting planets, and of robotic rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity, which have been trundling across Mars for two years with thousands of 10-centimetre-wide ball shaped robots scattered on the planet's surface.

"The microbots employ hopping, bouncing, and rolling as a locomotion mode to reach scientifically interesting features in very rugged terrain," said the scientists. Powered by fuel cells, the microbots would explore, sharing information so as to build up a map of the planetary surface. Each robot could be customised, equipped, Professor Dubowsky said, with "a suite of miniaturised instruments for each specific mission [with] imagers, spectrometers or chemical detection sensors."

Source: China Daily