Related papers: Scientific Return of a Lunar Elevator
As humankind prepares to establish outposts and infrastructure on the Moon, the ability to manufacture parts and buildings on-site is crucial. While transporting raw materials from Earth can be costly and time-consuming, in-situ resource…
The Mars Life Explorer (MLE) mission concept offers a critical opportunity to investigate whether extant life exists within the mid-latitude ice deposits of Mars. However, MLE's current science traceability matrix emphasizes habitability…
The development and deployment of interstellar missions will without doubt require orders of magnitude more resources than needed for current or past megaprojects (Apollo, Iter, LHC,...). Question is how enough resources for such…
As natural access points to the subsurface, lava tubes and other caves have become premier targets of planetary missions for astrobiological analyses. Few existing robotic paradigms, however, are able to explore such challenging…
Recently, we witnessed how the synergy of small satellite technology and solar sailing propulsion enables new missions. Together, small satellites with lightweight instruments and solar sails offer affordable access to deep regions of the…
Cislunar space is emerging as a critical domain for human exploration, requiring robust infrastructure to support spatial users-spacecraft with navigation and communication demands. Deploying satellites at Earth-Moon three-body orbits…
The lunar geological record contains a rich archive of the history of the inner Solar System, including information relevant to understanding the origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system, the geological evolution of rocky planets, and…
Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery (MAHD) is a new Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) architecture to enable in situ mobility for Mars science at lower cost than previous missions. It uses a jetpack to slow down a Mars Science Helicopter (MSH) after…
Robotics plays a pivotal role in planetary science and exploration, where autonomous and reliable systems are crucial due to the risks and challenges inherent to space environments. The establishment of permanent lunar bases demands robotic…
The Spitzer Space Telescope operated for over 16 years in an Earth-trailing solar orbit, returning not only a wealth of scientific data but, as a by-product, spacecraft and instrument engineering data which will be of interest to future…
In March 2009, NASA will launch the Kepler satellite -- a mission designed to discover habitable Earth-like planets around distant Sun-like stars. The method that Kepler will use to detect distant worlds will only reveal the size of the…
Motivated by efforts to return humanity to the Moon, three cases are reviewed for X-ray astronomy from the lunar surface: (1) Facilitation of ambitious engineering designs including high throughput telescopes, long focal length optics and…
Based on technical work and development conducted under the LunA-10 study, I have identified six hypotheses where, if revolutionary improvements in technology can be made, I assess that a direct acceleration to the fielding of a lunar…
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites undergo a period of rapid development driven by ever-increasing user demands, reduced costs, and technological progress. Since there is a paucity of literature on the security and reliability issues of LEO…
The trajectory design for the Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE) mission con-cept involves launching the DARE spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) as a secondary payload. From GTO, the spacecraft then transfers to a lunar…
Wheeled planetary rovers such as the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) have provided unprecedented, detailed images of the Mars surface. However, these rovers are large and are of high-cost as they need to…
The sixth-generation (6G) network is expected to achieve global coverage based on the space-air-ground integrated network, and the latest satellite network will play an important role in it. The introduction of inter-satellite links (ISLs)…
The scientific mission of ESTCube-1, launched in May 2013, is to measure the Electric solar wind sail (E-sail) force in orbit. The experiment is planned to push forward the development of E-sail, a propulsion method recently invented at the…
The Moon is a unique platform for fundamental astrophysical measurements of gravitation, the Sun, and the Universe. Lacking a permanent ionosphere and, on the farside, shielded from terrestrial radio emissions, a radio telescope on the Moon…
Rocket technology, originally developed for military applications, has provided a low-cost observing platform to carry critical and rapid-response scientific investigations for over 70 years. Even with the development of launch vehicles…