November 11, 2025

DevelopSpace Initiative, Inc. is pleased to announce the recipients of our Fall 2025 grant awards!

This was our first grants call, and we are quite happy with the number of high-quality proposals that we received for open source space development activities. After careful consideration, we selected a total of 14 projects for full or partial funding in the current round, and provided feedback to a number of other projects which may be candidates for support in the future. These projects will advance Mars science, exploration, and development in a number of ways, including through enhancing our understanding of Martian surface resources, potential sites for further research and exploration, and methods to employ local resources and large mass delivery capabilities to rapidly scale up human activities on Mars.

A key aspect of DevelopSpace’s mission is to encourage the open exchange of information and enable the broadest possible access to the work we support. As their work progresses, grant recipients will post relevant materials online in an openly-accessible format under an open source license, such as those described on our license page. At the conclusion of the work supported by the grants, recipients will provide a final report outlining the overall results of the grant effort and links to relevant results / resources that others can build upon. The report and supporting material will include a description of how the completed work relates to other prior or current work, and suggestions for follow-on activities.

We thank everyone who submitted a proposal and our donors who helped make these grants possible. Congratulations to the selected projects!

Selected Projects

• Planetary Research, a new diamond open access planetary science journal. Planetary Research is a community-led journal that publishes original peer-reviewed scientific work in the broad field of planetary science. All articles are free to access without subscription, and authors pay no fees. Authors retain the copyright to their work which can be used by others under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0) license. The journal will start accepting submissions at the beginning of 2026.

• An Open Kit for Mars Landing‑Site Monitoring & Analog Scouting, led by Jichao Fang at Northern Illinois University. The project delivers a lightweight, open workflow to (1) monitor surface change at candidate Mars landing sites and (2) scout nearby terrain analogs for traverse and operations planning. The effort directly supports human Mars surface planning: rapid change maps help screen hazards (ripples, dust tracks, boulders) at candidate landing sites; analog scouting identifies nearby look‑alike terrains to plan traverses and operations. Everything is open, lightweight, and reusable by a wide-variety of teams, with outputs compatible with open GIS software. Methods extend naturally to the Moon for broader surface development.

• Electromagnetic Simulations of Near-Surface Ice in Martian Glaciers with Drone Radar, led by Roberto Aguilar at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona. Current orbital radars (e.g., SHARAD, MARSIS) cannot resolve the structure of the upper few meters of Martian debris-covered glaciers due to their limited vertical and horizontal resolution. Yet shallow depths are the most critical to map, as they hold the most accessible water ice for life support, fuel production, and construction during future human missions, along with being high value science targets for astrobiology and understanding Mars’ climate history. A drone-based ground-penetrating radar (GPR) platform can bridge the gap between orbital instruments (too coarse for shallow detection) and landed systems (too limited in spatial coverage), providing the spatial resolution and coverage needed to detect and characterize this shallow ice. The project will leverage relevant datasets from terrestrial debris covered glaciers in addition to conducting new electromagnetic simulations.

• Investigating Permeabilities of Mars Analog Brine-Regolith Mixtures at Frozen Temperatures, led by Alexia Kubas at Cornell. This project will experimentally reveal how Mars-relevant ice-brine-regolith mixtures behave at sub-freezing temperatures, unlocking new insights into groundwater flow, pingo formation, and subsurface hydrology. By identifying potential reservoirs of accessible ground ice, our results have strong implications for in situ resource utilization and future human exploration of Mars.

• Unlocking Martian Resources: A Predictive Model for Olivine Minerals ​Processing and Utilization, led by Oscar Lopez in Chihuahua, Mexico, in collaboration with researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and Penn State. This project directly supports Martian in-situ resource utilization by developing a machine learning model for olivine (Mg2−xFexSiO4), an abundant Martian mineral. The predictive tool will rapidly map its properties, enabling the design of novel applications and manufacturing routes—from electronics to building materials. This work is foundational to transforming local Martian geology into essential technological assets for sustainable Mars development.

• Simulated Martian Bricks: Assessing Concrete-Regolith Composite Strength via Microfracture Analysis, led by Caitlin Ahrens at the University of Maryland. This project explores the feasibility of using in-situ Martian resources for construction by developing and analyzing composite bricks made from concrete mix and Mars regolith simulant. The study aims to compare the mechanical performance of two regolith types, assess the effect of regolith concentration on structural resilience, and draw conclusions about optimal mixture compositions for extraterrestrial applications. Findings from this investigation will contribute to the broader understanding of using Martian regolith in additive or prefabricated construction techniques and are intended for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

• Sustainable Mars habitation: Brick by brick, led by Swati Dubey at the University of Florida. The project promotes human Mars exploration and development by advancing sustainable Mars habitation through in-situ resource utilization. It builds on prior work creating Martian bricks using a biocementation-capable bacterium that showed significant resilience in Martian regolith, including perchlorate-rich conditions under Earth atmospheric conditions. The new work studies whether efficient biocementation is feasible under Martian atmospheric pressure. Overall, the project aims to demonstrate a practical, resource-efficient path for infrastructure development – bridging science and engineering towards scalable extraterrestrial settlements.

• Closing the Carbon Loop: Cupriavidus necator for functional biopolymer-based carbon storage, led by Jackson Bland at the University of Florida. One of the most important resources not widely available on Mars is carbon, and while it is possible to harvest carbon from several sources, these methods are typically energy intensive and low yield. C. necator will be modified via metabolic engineering to produce the polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) poly(lactic acid) from organic and plastic waste streams, allowing for the production of a biodegradable polymer with improved thermal and mechanical properties. The resulting polymer can then be used for the production of tools, parts, and structures that can subsequently be recycled and used as feedstock for other biomanufacturing processes.

• Two projects by Nexus Aurora: support for a Martian Optimal Nuclear Study (MONS) effort led by Sam Ross and the Space Calcs website led by James Boullion. The Space Calcs website provides various tools for calculating parameters for space missions, and is actively looking for contributors of new tools or improvements to existing tools. MONS aims to build a single-tool optimiser for megawatt-scale nuclear reactors and power conversion systems enabled by large mass Mars landing systems, and integrate the tools into the Space Calcs website.

• Azure Kinect à La Luna (AKALL), led by Don D. Haddad at MIT & NASA Ames. The AKALL project develops an open-source software framework for affordable, low-bandwidth 3D imaging, reconstruction and analysis tailored to planetary exploration. Originally created as a payload for the NASA CLPS IM-2 mission onboard the Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover, AKALL adapts and extends Microsoft’s Azure Kinect Time of Flight (ToF) RGB-Depth camera to operate in planetary analog and mission environments. This research expands to inform future strategies and methods for locating and characterizing water ice and other critical resources on planetary surfaces by analyzing the depth camera’s native Near Infrared (NIR) images captured at 850nm. AKALL has been validated in NASA Ames analog Lunar Lab and is actively maintained in open repositories. The software’s lightweight reconstruction engine and standardized data formats could support Mars surface science, mobility studies, and site evaluation, areas where low-cost, modular, and reproducible tools are urgently needed, blending the canvases of Science and Exploration.

• Adapting Autonomous Systems on Mars to Dust Storm Conditions through Robust LiDAR Perception, led by Priyanka Supraja Balaji in California. This project develops LiDAR-based filtering algorithms to help autonomous rovers and scientific payloads navigate safely during Martian dust storms. By simulating sensor degradation across varying storm intensities and defining noise thresholds where obstacle detection fails, the work aims to enhance rover reliability and extend mission lifetimes under extreme conditions.

• Lunabotics Astro-Huskies team, a student organization at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan that participates in NASA’s annual Lunabotics Challenge. The competition objective is to build a rover that autonomously excavates and deposits regolith simulant while traversing through a variety of obstacles. The Astro-Huskies will be building a prototype lunar rover completely from scratch to meet these challenge objectives. By building a rover that can autonomously traverse, excavate, and deposit lunar regolith simulant, the Astro-Huskies will provide inspiration and guidance for future space technologies with similar applications on both the Moon and Mars. In order to benefit the broader space development community, after the 2025-26 competition key code and artifacts related to development, integration, and debugging of the rover and onboard software will be published in a publicly accessible repository under an open source license.

• A LibreCube project to develop an upgraded CubeSat Power Module. LibreCube is creating an open-source ecosystem of modular, adaptable components that can be combined together to form larger systems, including small satellites, rovers, and drones. The electrical power subsystem is an essential building block for any such autonomous or remotely operated systems. While LibreCube’s existing power system works well and has flight heritage from two academic CubeSat missions, this project will provide a number of upgrades. The updated version will add much needed features to make it a reliable, scalable, and adaptable solution to supply power to rovers, satellites, and other systems, while remaining compatible with the CubeSat specification, such that the board is available to the entire CubeSat community (and beyond). Key building blocks (power conditioning, battery charge/discharge, etc) will be re-designed to use modern components, and a dual redundant microcontroller layout will be added with SpaceCAN interface support. An MPPT tracker will be added to improve the solar cell power extraction, along with sensors for temperature and current measurements.

More Information

Please contact us at info@developspace.org for more information about the overall grants program or specific projects. In a number of cases, projects may be seeking additional support, including through volunteering, funding, advising, or other in-kind contributions, and we may be able to help facilitate if you are interested in contributing to these or other projects.

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