Related papers: Ion Beam Shepherd for Asteroid Deflection

We propose an interferometric measurement of weak forces using a single ion subjected to designed time-dependent spin-dependent forces. Explicit expressions of the relation between the unknown force and the final populations are found…

All known interstellar transportation methods encounter monumental technological or engineering roadblocks, or even rely on speculative unknown science. In particular light of the recent public excitement and ensuing disappointment…

Ion Beam Sputtering (IBS) is a cost-effective technique able to produce ordered nanopatterns on the surfaces of different materials. To date, most theoretical studies of this process have focused on systems which become amorphous under…

Ion pickup at the outer planets' active moons is a fundamental plasma process in which newly ionized particles from moon exospheres interact with the ambient corotating plasma and are accelerated to match the background flow. Spacecraft…

We investigate the performance of different control techniques for ion transport in state-of-the-art segmented miniaturized ion traps. We employ numerical optimization of classical trajectories and quantum wavepacket propagation as well as…

Tumbling asteroids belong to a small group of objects, whose angular velocity vector is unaligned with any of its principal axes of inertia. This leads to challenging efforts to model the trajectory of any spacecraft designed to orbit these…

Challenging space missions include those at very low altitudes, where the atmosphere is source of aerodynamic drag on the spacecraft. To extend the lifetime of such missions, an efficient propulsion system is required. One solution is…

Atomic interferometers measure forces and acceleration with exceptional precision. The conventional approach to atomic interferometry is to launch an atomic cloud into a ballistic trajectory and perform the wave-packet splitting in momentum…

Low-thrust orbital transfers are difficult to optimize by indirect methods. The main issues come from the costate guess and from the numerical propagation accuracy required by the shooting method. In the case of a coplanar minimum-time…

Dynamical models of the asteroid delivery from the main belt suggest that the current impact flux of diameter D>10 km asteroids on the Earth is 0.5-1 per Gyr. Studies of the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) population find a much higher flux, with…

Optical pulling with tractor beams is so far highly dependent on (i) the property of embedding background or the particle itself , (ii) the number of the particles and/or (iii) the manual ramping of beam phase. A necessary theoretical…

Fermi acceleration by collisionless shocks is believed to be the primary mechanism to produce high energy charged particles in the Universe,where charged particles gain energy successively from multiple reflections off the shock…

There are thousands of asteroids in near-Earth space and millions expected in the Main Belt. They are diverse in their physical properties and compositions. They are also time capsules of the early Solar System making them valuable for…

Challenging space missions include those at very low altitudes, where the atmosphere is source of aerodynamic drag on the spacecraft that finally defines the missions lifetime unless way to compensate for it is provided. This environment is…

It is now possible to partially deflect gravitation away from an object so that the gravitational attraction on the object is reduced. That effect makes it possible to extract energy from the gravitational field, which makes the generation…

We present a novel method for extracting moving objects from TESS data using machine learning. Our approach uses two stacked 3D U-Nets with skip connections, which we call a W-Net, to filter background and identify pixels containing moving…

Exploration of asteroids and small-bodies can provide valuable insight into the origins of the solar system, into the origins of Earth and the origins of the building blocks of life. However, the low-gravity and unknown surface conditions…

A deep-space exploration mission with low-thrust propulsion to rendezvous with multiple asteroids is investigated. Indirect methods, based on the optimal control theory, are implemented to optimize the fuel consumption. The application of…

This work introduces a novel approach for Titan exploration based on soft morphing aerial robots leveraging the use of flexible adaptive materials. The controlled deformation of the multirotor arms, actuated by a combination of a pneumatic…

Spin orbit torque driven switching is a favourable way to manipulate nanoscale magnetic objects for both memory and wireless communication devices. The critical current required to switch from one magnetic state to another depends on the…