Related papers: Planetary Exploration Using CubeSat Deployed Sailp…
Efficient exploration of unknown environments is crucial for autonomous robots, especially in confined and large-scale scenarios with limited communication. To address this challenge, we propose a collaborative exploration framework for a…
Remote sensing observations and Mars rover missions have recorded the presence of beaches, salt lakes, and wind erosion landforms in Martian sediments. All these observations indicate that Mars was hydrated in its early history. There used…
Given the increasing number of space-related applications, research in the emerging space industry is becoming more and more attractive. One compelling area of current space research is the design of miniaturized satellites, known as…
We present a modular, full-stack autonomy system for lunar surface navigation and mapping developed for the Lunar Autonomy Challenge. Operating in a GNSS-denied, visually challenging environment, our pipeline integrates semantic…
Over the history of planetary exploration, atmospheric entry vehicles have been used to deliver probes and landers to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan. While the entry vehicles are tools for furthering scientific exploration, by delivering…
Planetary surfaces are typically analyzed using high-level semantic concepts in natural language, yet vast orbital image archives remain organized at the pixel level. This mismatch limits scalable, open-ended exploration of planetary…
This paper is devoted to exploring how we can discover and study nearby (< 1-2 kpc) planetary and binary systems by observing their action as gravitational lenses. Lensing can extend the realm of nearby binaries and planets that can be…
Automatic terrain recognition in Mars rover images is an important problem not just for navigation, but for scientists interested in studying rock types, and by extension, conditions of the ancient Martian paleoclimate and habitability.…
The martian atmosphere hosts dynamical phenomena ranging from planet-encircling dust storms to mesoscale orographic clouds and nocturnal low-level jets. General circulation model show capability to simulate these phenomena, but is…
LaRa (Lander Radioscience) is an experiment on the ExoMars 2020 mission that uses the Doppler shift on the radio link due to the motion of the ExoMars platform tied to the surface of Mars with respect to the Earth ground stations (e.g. the…
Many environments, such as unvisited planetary surfaces and oceanic regions, remain unexplored due to a lack of prior knowledge. Autonomous vehicles must sample upon arrival, process data, and either transmit findings to a teleoperator or…
The traditional celestial navigation system (CNS) is used the moon, stars, and planets as celestial guides. Then the star tracker (i.e. track one star or planet or angle between it) and star sensor (i.e. sense many star simultaneous) be…
Machine learning, and eventually true artificial intelligence techniques, are extremely important advancements in astrophysics and astronomy. We explore the application of deep learning using neural networks in order to automate the…
Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…
Remote sensing can provide crucial information for planetary rovers. However, they must validate these orbital observations with in situ measurements. Typically, this involves validating hyperspectral data using a spectrometer on-board the…
After many years of flying in space primarily for educational purposes, CubeSats - tiny satellites with form factors corresponding to arrangements of "1U" units, or cubes, each 10 cm on a side - have come into their own as valuable…
This work is devoted to the capabilities analysis of constellation and small spacecraft developed using CubeSat technology to solve promising problems of the Earth remote sensing in the area of greenhouse gases emissions. This paper…
Earth's magnetosphere is vital for today's technologically dependent society. To date, numerous design studies have been conducted and over a dozen science missions have own to study the magnetosphere. However, a majority of these solutions…
Exploration of the lunar south pole with a solar-powered rover is challenging due to the highly dynamic solar illumination conditions and the presence of permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). In turn, careful planning in space and time is…
For over a decade, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have been recording measurements from the Martian surface as a part of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. One quantity of interest has been the opacity of Mars's…