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Three Indian Americans among NASA Innovation Grant recipients
The researchers are among 18 recipients of NASA's 2026 NIAC Phase I awards for early-stage space technology concepts.
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Malvika Choudhary - Thu, 30, Jul 2026
- 15:26 EDT
- 23
(L-R) A.C. Charania/ Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay/ Anish Damodaran / LinkedIn
NASA has named threeIndian American researchers among the recipients of its 2026 Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I awards for early-stage technologies that could shape future space missions.
Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, A.C. Charania of Zeno Power Systems, and Anish Damodaran of the University of Central Florida will receive up to $175,000 for their respective projects as part of the award.
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Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, received funding for "Dimming the Sun Using Controllable Dust Cloud to Reduce Solar Insolation (DimSun)," a concept that explores whether spaceborne dust clouds could reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth.
A graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he co-founded the student satellite project Pratham, Bandyopadhyay earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He previously became a NASA NIAC Fellow in 2020 for his Lunar Crater Radio Telescope concept.
Charania, senior vice president of Space Business Development at Zeno Power Systems in Washington, was selected for "Extended Astronaut Radioisotope-EVA in Nighttime and Deep-space Icy Landscapes (EARENDIL)." The project explores incorporating radioisotope heat sources into astronaut suits to help keep crews warm during the Moon's nearly two-week-long nights and other icy deep-space environments.
A former NASA chief technologist, Charania previously advised the agency's leadership on technology strategy and research priorities. His career has also included leadership roles at Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Reliable Robotics, and SpaceWorks Enterprises.
Anish Damodaran of the University of Central Florida received funding for "PS21: Transforming Submillimeter Space Interferometry with Photonic Technologies," a concept aimed at advancing space-based interferometry for astronomical observations.
An experimental radio astrophysicist, Damodaran is a research professor at the Florida Space Institute and previously served as senior observatory scientist at the Arecibo Observatory. He earned his engineering degree from the University of Kerala and began his research career at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research's National Centre for Radio Astrophysics before holding research positions in both India and the United States.
The U.S. space agency announced 18 NIAC Phase I awards worth a combined $3.2 million. Each project will receive up to $175,000 for a nine-month study to assess the feasibility of high-risk, high-reward concepts. NASA said the projects support early-stage technology development and are not official agency missions.
The 2026 NIAC selections include concepts ranging from lunar exploration systems and planetary science missions to interstellar propulsion, black hole observations, and technologies designed to improve understanding of Earth's climate and orbital environment. Researchers, known as NIAC Fellows, will spend the next nine months evaluating the technical potential and challenges of their proposed concepts.
"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 NASA's Research and Technology Mission Directorate. "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."
Phillip Williams, NIAC's acting program executive, said the program supports ideas with the potential to become transformative technologies.
"Every innovation, every leap in technology, starts with a seed of an idea," Williams said. "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."
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