Related papers: Europa Exploration Philosophy
From the 1940's to the present, space explorations, which is a highly important topic for the world and human beings, penetrate into many areas from the communication to the national security as well as from the discovery of exoplanets and…
Observations over the past few decades have found that planets are common around nearby stars in our Galaxy, but little is known about planets that formed outside the Milky Way. We describe the design and early implementation of a survey to…
The purpose of this dissertation is to present an overview of the operational and financial performance of airports in Europe. In benchmarking studies, airports are assessed and compared with other airports based on key indicators from a…
Robotic exploration of unknown environments is fundamentally a problem of decision making under uncertainty where the robot must account for uncertainty in sensor measurements, localization, action execution, as well as many other factors.…
Many rocky exoplanets are heavier and larger than the Earth, and have higher surface gravity. This makes space-flight on these worlds very challenging, because the required fuel mass for a given payload is an exponential function of…
The composition of Europa's trailing hemisphere reflects the combined influences of endogenous geologic resurfacing and exogenous sulfur radiolysis. Using spatially resolved visible-wavelength spectra of Europa obtained with the Hubble…
This work presents an innovative solution for robotic odometry, path planning and exploration in wild unknown environments, focusing on digital modelling. The approach uses a minimum cost formulation with pseudo-randomly generated…
Small telescopes equiped with modern instrumentation are gaining on importance, especially, in the era of exoplanetary space missions such as TESS, PLATO and ARIEL. Crucial part of every planet hunting mission is now a ground-based…
The LUXE experiment, currently in design and planning, aims to perform analyses of strong-field quantum electrodynamics interactions by colliding the high-quality high-energy EU.XFEL electron beam with a powerful laser. With the ability to…
Space interferometry is the inevitable endpoint of high angular resolution astrophysics, and a key technology that can be leveraged to analyse exoplanet formation and atmospheres with exceptional detail. However, the anticipated cost of…
For over half a century, scientists have contemplated the potential existence of life within the clouds of Venus. Unknown chemistry leaves open the possibility that certain regions of the Venusian atmosphere are habitable. In situ…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that can utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying or rolling can overcome these limitations.…
The Euclid space mission proposes to survey 15000 square degrees of the extragalactic sky during 6 years, with a step-and-stare technique. The scheduling of observation sequences is driven by the primary scientific objectives, spacecraft…
We present near-infrared high-dispersion spectroscopic observations of Europa using the Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS) onboard the Subaru Telescope, seeking direct evidence of water plumes on Europa and exploring spatial variations…
Creatures in the real world constantly encounter new and diverse challenges they have never seen before. They will often need to adapt to some of these tasks and solve them in order to survive. This almost endless world of novel challenges…
Over two hundred years ago Capt. James Cook sailed up Whitsunday Passage, just a few miles where we now sit, on a voyage of astronomical observation and discovery that remains an inspiration to us all. Since the prospects of our visiting…
As an end-member of terrestrial planet formation, Mercury holds unique clues about the original distribution of elements in the earliest stages of solar system development and how planets and exoplanets form and evolve in close proximity to…
To perform tasks well in a new domain, one must first know something about it. This paper reports on a robot controller for navigation through unfamiliar indoor worlds. Based on spatial affordances, it integrates planning with reactive…
The European Large Logistics Lander (EL3) is being designed to carry out cargo delivery missions in support of future lunar ground crews. The capacity of virtual reality (VR) to visualize and interactively simulate the unique lunar…
As natural access points to the subsurface, lava tubes and other caves have become premier targets of planetary missions for astrobiological analyses. Few existing robotic paradigms, however, are able to explore such challenging…