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Exploration of terrestrial planets such as Mars are conducted using orbiters, landers and rovers. Cameras and instruments onboard orbiters have enabled global mapping of Mars at low spatial resolution. Landers and rovers such as the Mars…
Future missions to Mars and Venus will make use of aerobraking and aerocapture in order to gain mass through the saving of fuel at planetary arrival. So far only aerobraking has been demonstrated, if the Mars Premier project has paved the…
Performing orbital insertion around Mars using aerocapture instead of a propulsive orbit insertion manoeuvre allows to save resources and/or increase the payload mass fraction. Aerocapture has never been employed to date because of the high…
Space exploration has witnessed a steady increase since the 1960s, with Mars playing a significant role in our quest for further knowledge. As the ambition to colonize Mars becomes a reality through the collaboration of private companies…
An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations…
Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of…
Small-satellites and CubeSats offer a low-cost pathway to access Low Earth Orbit at altitudes of 450 km and lower thanks to miniaturization and advancement in reliability of commercial electronics. However, at these low altitudes,…
Planetary exploration using aerial assets has the potential for unprecedented scientific discoveries on Mars. While NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity proved flight in Martian atmosphere is possible, future Mars rotorcraft will require…
Rover localization is one of the perquisites for large scale rover exploration. In NASA's Mars 2020 mission, the Ingenuity helicopter is carried together with the rover, which is capable of obtaining high-resolution imagery of Mars terrain,…
CubeSats and small satellites are emerging as low-cost tools for performing science and exploration in deep space. These new classes of satellite exploit the latest advancement in miniaturization of electronics, power systems, and…
Mars has been a prime candidate for planetary exploration of the solar system because of the science discoveries that support chances of future habitation on this planet. Martian caves and lava tubes like terrains, which consists of uneven…
Mars, lacking an intrinsic dynamo, is an ideal laboratory to comparatively study induced magnetospheres, which can be found in other terrestrial bodies as well as comets. Additionally, Mars is of particular interest to further exploration…
This study proposes a schematic plan for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) in Martian volcanic terrains. The work investigated the complexity of volcanic terrains and Martian environmental hazards and suggested comprehensive engineering…
In addition to conventional ground rovers, the Mars 2020 mission will send a helicopter to Mars. The copter's high-resolution data helps the rover to identify small hazards such as steps and pointy rocks, as well as providing rich textual…
The ability to launch small secondary payloads to Mars on future science missions present an exciting opportunity for demonstration of advanced technologies for planetary exploration such as aerocapture. Over the years, several aerocapture…
In the future, extraterrestrial expeditions will not only be conducted by rovers but also by flying robots. The technical demonstration drone Ingenuity, that just landed on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era of exploration…
The aim of this work is to introduce MaRF, a novel framework able to synthesize the Martian environment using several collections of images from rover cameras. The idea is to generate a 3D scene of Mars' surface to address key challenges in…
The exponential rise in small-satellites and CubeSats in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) poses important challenges for future space traffic management. At altitudes of 600 km and lower, aerodynamic drag accelerates de-orbiting of satellites.…
One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of…
We present an approach to enhance wheeled planetary rover dead-reckoning localization performance by leveraging the use of zero-type constraint equations in the navigation filter. Without external aiding, inertial navigation solutions…