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Cube satellites, or CubeSats, are small satellites commonly used to perform Earth imaging and on-orbit scientific experiments. CubeSats are often powered using expensive, inflexible commercial-off-the-shelf solar panels, largely due to a…
Asteroid restructuring uses robotics, self replication, and mechanical automatons to autonomously restructure an asteroid into a large rotating space station. The restructuring process makes structures from asteroid oxide materials; uses…
Interest in the exploration of, and the establishment of a human settlement, on Mars is rapidly growing. To achieve this, rapid transit will be required to bring crucial cargo. Current missions to Mars take 150 days, which would be too long…
We discuss the possibility of an autonomous navigation system for spacecraft that is based on pulsar timing data. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that are observable as variable celestial sources of electromagnetic radiation.…
Gaps in space weather observations that can be addressed with small satellites are identified. Potential improvements in solar inputs to space weather models, space radiation control, estimations of energy budget of the upper Earth's…
The robotics community is increasingly interested in autonomous aerial transportation. Unmanned aerial vehicles with suspended payloads have advantages over other systems, including mechanical simplicity and agility, but pose great…
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.…
The aim of the chapter is to summarize our understanding of the compositional distribution across the different reservoirs of small bodies (main belt asteroids, giant planet trojans, irregular satellites of the giant planets, TNOs, comets).…
Planetary bodies such as asteroids, comets, and planetary moons are high-value science targets as they hold important information about the formation and evolution of our solar system. However, due to their low-gravity, variable sizes and…
Small solar system bodies are becoming increasingly important as missions like NASA's OSIRIS-REx show. However, the study of the characteristics and behavior of these objects on Earth is a challenge as the simulation of their environmental…
As the space domain becomes increasingly congested, autonomy is proposed as one approach to enable small numbers of human ground operators to manage large constellations of satellites and tackle more complex missions such as on-orbit or…
An effective method for detailed observation of the Solar System planets is the use of vehicles that can perform flight in their atmospheres, with the most promising of them being Flyers (aircraft for other planets atmospheres). Besides the…
Laser-accelerated lightsails enable new types of missions that are very different from the Breakthrough Starshot mission to the Centauri system that aims to send 1 gram of payload at 0.2 c. The present work widens the mission design space…
Studies of future space- and ground-based exoplanet surveys often rely on models of planetary systems to simulate instrument response, estimate scientific yields, perform trade analyses, and study efficient observation strategies. Until…
Cooperative transportation by multi-aerial robots has the potential to support various payloads and improve failsafe against dropping. Furthermore, changing the attachment positions of robots according payload characteristics increases the…
Deploying large, complex space structures is of great interest to the modern scientific world as it can provide new capabilities in obtaining scientific, communicative, and observational information. However, many theoretical mission…
There is an every-growing need to construct large space telescopes and structures for observation of exo-planets, main-belt asteroids and NEOs. Space observation capabilities can significant enhanced by large-aperture structures. Structures…
We have explored a method for finding giant planets in the outer Solar System by detecting their thermal emission and proper motion between two far-infrared all-sky surveys separated by 23.4 years, taken with the InfraRed Astronomical…
Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos - the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the Solar system), we now know of thousands,…
Imagine a robot that can assemble a functional product from the individual parts presented in any configuration to the robot. Designing such a robotic system is a complex problem which presents several open challenges. To bypass these…