Related papers: Propelling Interplanetary Spacecraft Utilizing Wat…
Water is fundamental to our understanding of the evolution of planetary systems and the delivery of volatiles to the surfaces of potentially habitable planets. Yet, we currently have essentially no facilities capable of observing this key…
To world-wide notice, in 2002 the ATHENA collaboration at CERN (in Geneva, Switzerland) announced the creation of order 100,000 low energy antihydrogen atoms. Thus, the concept of using condensed antihydrogen as a low-weight, powerful fuel…
Water photolysis and hydrogen loss from the upper atmospheres of terrestrial planets is of fundamental importance to climate evolution but remains poorly understood in general. Here we present a range of calculations we performed to study…
Achieving relativistic flight to enable extrasolar exploration is one of the dreams of humanity and the long term goal of our NASA Starlight program. We derive a fully relativistic solution for the motion of a spacecraft propelled by…
Surface liquid water is essential for standard planetary habitability. Calculations of atmospheric circulation on tidally locked planets around M stars suggest that this peculiar orbital configuration lends itself to the trapping of large…
A spacecraft pushed by radiation has the major advantage that the power source is not included in the accelerated mass, making it the preferred technique for reaching relativistic speeds. There are two main technical challenges. First, to…
Rising water demands and depleting freshwater resources have brought desalination and wastewater treatment technologies to the forefront. For sustainable water management, there is a global push towards Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) with the…
Understanding the set of conditions that allow rocky planets to have liquid water on their surface -- in the form of lakes, seas or oceans -- is a major scientific step to determine the fraction of planets potentially suitable for the…
Liquid water oceans are at the center of our search for life on exoplanets because water is a strict requirement for life as we know it. However, oceans are dynamic habitats---and some oceans may be better hosts for life than others. In…
Pumping water using multiple energy sources is the ideal solution for supplying of potable water in isolated or arid areas. In this paper, an effective control and energy management strategy for a stand-alone photovoltaic-batteries water…
Mars is the next destination after Earth to support terrestrial life. Decades of Mars exploration has fascinated space explorers to endeavour for a human expedition. But human Mars enterprise is complicated than conventional mission as the…
The modeling and simulation of heat source trajectories through phase-change materials is a relevant problem both for space exploration and for terrestrial climate research, among other fields. In space, the DLR and NASA are both interested…
Planet 9 is an hypothetical object in the outer Solar system, which is as yet undiscovered. It has been speculated that it may be a terrestrial planet or gas/ice giant, or perhaps even a primordial black hole (or dark matter condensate).…
Planets that are embedded in the changing magnetic fields of their host stars can experience significant induction heating in their interiors caused by the planet's orbital motion. For induction heating to be substantial, the planetary…
Attempts to use Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow for propulsion have been made since the last century [1]. Limited success has been registered particularly due to the inhomogeneous generation of the thrust, and also the very light weight and…
Most water in the universe may be superionic, and its thermodynamic and transport properties are crucial for planetary science but difficult to probe experimentally or theoretically. We use machine learning and free energy methods to…
Operating satellites in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) benefits the already expanding New Space industry in applications including Earth Observation and beyond. However, long-term operations at such low altitudes require propulsion systems to…
Synchronously orbiting, tidally-locked exoplanets with a dayside facing their star and a permanently dark nightside orbiting dim stars are prime candidates for habitability. Simulations of these planets often show the potential to maintain…
Liquid water is a critical component of habitability. However, the production and stability of surficial liquid water can be challenging on planets outside the Habitable Zone and devoid of adequate greenhouse warming. On such cold, icy…
The third interstellar object to be discovered, 3I/ATLAS, has a unique and continually unfolding story to tell about its nature and origin as it is monitored by telescopes on Earth, orbiting Earth and around the Solar System. Previous…