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It is widely assumed that human exploration beyond Earth's orbit will require vehicles capable of providing long-duration habitats that simulate an Earthlike environment: consistent artificial gravity, breathable atmosphere, and sufficient…
Advanced space technology systems often face high fixed costs, can serve limited non-government demand, and are significantly driven by non-market motivations. While increased entrepreneurial activity and national ambitions in space have…
In recent years, robotic exploration has become increasingly important in planetary exploration. One area of particular interest for exploration is Martian lava tubes, which have several distinct features of interest. First, it is theorized…
The memo is exploring possibilities to set up extraterrestrial experimental facilities to study particles physics. The Moon is considered as the most promising location for artificial particle sources outside the Earth. This natural…
Several commercial telecommunication ventures together with a well funded US military program make it a likely possibility that an autonomous, high-altitude, light-than-air (LTA) vehicle which could maneuver and station-keep for weeks to…
To-date, all human economic activity has depended on the resources of a single planet, and it has long been recognized that developments in space exploration could in principle open our closed planetary economy to external resources of…
October 1957, and the successful launch of Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit, marked the dawn of the Space Age. The first of the 'fellow travellers' - humanity's first artificial satellite - orbited for a mere three months before re-entering the…
From ancient times, humans have been using cables and ropes to tie, carry, and manipulate objects by folding knots. However, automating knot folding is challenging because it requires dexterity to move a cable over and under itself. In this…
The regain of interest in Moon exploration has substantially grown in the last years. For this reason, the space agencies consider the development of a precise navigation and positioning service similar to the Earth GNSS. Aiming at some…
Levitation of objects with action at a distance has always been intriguing to humans. Several ways to achieve this, such as aerodynamic, acoustic, or electromagnetic methods, including radiation pressure, stable potential wells, and quantum…
In the nearly 60 years of spaceflight we have accomplished wonderful feats of exploration that have shown the incredible spirit of the human drive to explore and understand our universe. Yet in those 60 years we have barely left our solar…
Mapping our universe in 3D by imaging the redshifted 21 cm line from neutral hydrogen has the potential to overtake the cosmic microwave background as our most powerful cosmological probe, because it can map a much larger volume of our…
In this paper, we explore from a conceptual standpoint the possibility of using natural astrophysical sources to accelerate spacecrafts to relativistic speeds. We focus on light sails and electric sails, which are reliant on momentum…
Close planetary flybys are frequently employed as a technique to place spacecraft on extreme solar system trajectories that would otherwise require much larger booster vehicles or may not even be feasible when relying solely on chemical…
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…
Cosmology is a field of physics in which the use of General Relativity theory is indispensable. However, a cosmology based on Newtonian gravity theory for gravity is possible in certain circumstances. The applicability of Newtonian theory…
Consuming long-range interplanetary medium with fuel for driving plasma thrust is vital. Methods of capturing the space environment depending on its density and the ship velocity are indispensable issues to extract the space environment as…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Matija Cuk et.al (2016) have proposed a new model for the birth and tidal evolution of our natural satellite Moon, born from impact generated terrestrial debris in the equatorial plane of high obliquity, high angular momentum Earth. This…
In this paper, we present a physical modeling activity whose objective is to allow students to determine the differences between a disk and a sphere using pure scientific criteria. Thereunto, we reproduce the Sun-Earth-Moon system with…