Related papers: Weiche Landung auf dem Mars
The Curiosity rover is one of the most complex systems successfully deployed in a planetary exploration mission to date. It was sent by NASA to explore the surface of Mars and to identify potential signs of life. Even though it has limited…
Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with…
Space weathering is an important surface process occurring on the Moon and other airless bodies, especially those that have no magnetic field. The optical effects of the Moon's space weathering have been largely investigated in the…
NASA's InSight mission on Mars continues to record seismic data over 3 years after landing, and to date, over a thousand marsquakes have been identified. With only a single seismic station, the determination of the epicentral location is…
The energetic particle environment on the Martian surface is influenced by solar and heliospheric modulation and changes in the local atmospheric pressure (or column depth). The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) on board the Mars Science…
The novel propellantless electric solar wind sail concept promises efficient low thrust transportation in the Solar System outside Earth's magnetosphere. Combined with asteroid mining to provide water and synthetic cryogenic rocket fuel in…
A mathematical model and software implementation developed to predict trajectories of single lunar dust particles acted on by a high velocity gas flow is discussed. The model uses output from a computation fluid dynamics (CFD) or direct…
Global dust storms are the most thermodynamically significant dust events on Mars. They are produced from the combination of multiple local and regional lifting events and maintained by positive radiative-dynamic feedbacks. The most recent…
Landing is a challenging part of autonomous drone flight and a great research opportunity. This PhD proposes to improve on fiducial autonomous landing algorithms by making them more flexible. Further, it leverages its location, Iceland, to…
Ultrafast Kelvin Waves (UFKWs) have been recently discovered at Mars using measurements by the Mars Atmosphere and Evolution (MAVEN) Accelerometer (ACC) instrument and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Mars Climate Sound (MCS)…
Aims. Particles ejected from the lunar surface via hypervelocity impacts form a torus between the Earth and the Moon. According to our previous study (Yang et al., A\&A, 659, A120), among them about $2.3\times10^{-4}\,\mathrm{kg/s}$…
The extremely small accelerations of objects required for the the onset of modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, makes testing the hypothesis in conventional terrestrial laboratories virtually impossible. This is due to the large background…
Since the beginning of robotic interplanetary exploration nearly six decades ago, successful atmospheric entry has been accomplished at Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan. More entry probe missions are planned to Venus, Titan, and…
We show here that the recent claim of a test of the Lense-Thirring effect with an error of 0.5% using the Mars Global Surveyor is misleading and the quoted error is incorrect by a factor of at least ten thousand. Indeed, the simple error…
Mars is the Solar System's canonical small, rocky planet that transitioned from early geologic activity and surface liquid water to a cold and arid planet with a thin, cold, CO$_2$-dominated atmosphere. The evolution of Mars, in the context…
Space agencies have been incessantly working to propose a sustainable architecture for human Mars mission. But, before proceeding to a giant leap and accomplishing those mission intent, it is significant to know the extent of possibility to…
In this Letter, we make use of sophisticated 3D numerical simulations to assess the extent of atmospheric ion and photochemical losses from Mars over time. We demonstrate that the atmospheric ion escape rates were significantly higher (by…
At low ambient pressure, temperature gradients in porous soil lead to a gas flow, called thermal creep. With this regard, Mars is a unique as the conditions for thermal creep to occur in natural soil only exist on this planet in the solar…
Establishing a human settlement on Mars is an incredibly complex engineering problem. The inhospitable nature of the Martian environment requires any habitat to be largely self-sustaining. Beyond mining a few basic minerals and water, the…
A potential crewed mission to Mars would require us to solve a number of problems, including how to protect astronauts against the devastating effects of energetic charged particles from Solar and Galactic sources. The radiation environment…