Related papers: Target selection for a small low-thrust mission to…
Transiting exoplanet atmospheric characterization is currently in a golden age as dozens of exoplanet atmospheres are being studied by NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. This trend is expected to continue with NASA's Pandora…
This study evaluates a technique for determining the mass of a potentially hazardous asteroid from a high-speed flyby in the context of a rapid reconnaissance planetary defense scenario. We consider a host spacecraft that dispenses a small…
The rapid increase in the deployment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, catering to diverse applications such as communication, Earth observation, environmental monitoring, and scientific research, has significantly amplified the…
Low-thrust engines for interplanetary spacecraft transfers allow cost-effective space missions with flexible launch and arrival dates. To find fuel-optimal trajectories, an optimal control problem is to be solved. Pontryagin's Maximum…
Interstellar comets arrive with key ingredients for deep-space platforms already in place: volatile inventories convertible to propellant, natural rotation providing continuous attitude variation, and hyperbolic trajectories that carry them…
We aim at providing a preliminary approach on the dynamics of a spacecraft in orbit about the asteroid (99942) Apophis during its Earth close approach. The physical properties from the polyhedral shape of the target are derived assigning…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
We present the solution approach developed by the team `TheAntipodes' during the 12th edition of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GTOC 12). An overview of the approach is as follows: (1) generate asteroid subsets, (2) chain…
We propose a direct imaging method for the detection of exoplanets based on a combined low-rank plus structured sparse model. For this task, we develop a dictionary of possible effective circular trajectories a planet can take during the…
The large number of new planets expected from wide-area transit surveys means that follow-up transmission spectroscopy studies of their atmospheres will be limited by the availability of telescope assets. We argue that telescopes covering a…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…
Comet Interceptor is an ESA science mission with payload contributions from ESA Member States and with an international participation by JAXA. It is the first mission that is being designed, built, and potentially launched before its target…
Asteroids and comets are of strategic importance for science in an effort to understand the formation, evolution and composition of the Solar System. Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are of particular interest because of their accessibility from…
The Gateway will represent a primary space system useful for the Artemis program, Earth-Moon transportation, and deep space exploration. It is expected to serve as a staging location on the way to the lunar surface. This study focuses on…
Gateway will represent a primary logistic infrastructure in cislunar space. The identification of efficient orbit transfers capable of connecting Earth, Moon, and Gateway paves the way for enabling refurbishment, servicing, and utilization…
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is the first full-scale test of an asteroid deflection technology. Results from the hypervelocity kinetic impact and Earth-based observations, coupled with LICIACube and the later Hera mission,…
The low-rank approximation is a complexity reduction technique to approximate a tensor or a matrix with a reduced rank, which has been applied to the simulation of high dimensional problems to reduce the memory required and computational…
We report on the serendipitous observations of Solar System objects imaged during the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS) 2014 observation campaign. Data from this high cadence, wide field survey was originally analyzed for finding…
The optimization of low-thrust, multi-revolution orbit transfer trajectories is often regarded as a difficult problem in modern astrodynamics. In this paper, a flexible and computationally efficient approach is presented for the…
The perturbative integral method was applied to quantify the contribution of external forces during a specific interval of time in trajectories of spacecraft around asteroids and under the Luni-solar influence. However, this method has not…