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Traditional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm missions rely heavily on expensive custom-made drones with onboard perception or external positioning systems, limiting their widespread adoption in research and education. To address this…

Interstellar communications are achievable with gram-scale spacecraft using swarm techniques introduced herein if an adequate energy source, clocks and a suitable communications protocol exist. The essence of our approach to the…

This paper presents a navigation strategy to fly to the Moon along a Weak Stability Boundary transfer trajectory. A particular strategy is devised to ensure capture into an uncontrolled relatively stable orbit at the Moon. Both uncertainty…

To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term…

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.…

CubeSats have revolutionized access to space by providing affordable and accessible platforms for research and education. However, their reliance on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components and open-source software has introduced…

The DarkNESS (Dark Matter Nano-satellite Equipped with Skipper Sensors) mission aims to deploy a skipper-CCD CubeSat Observatory to search for dark matter (DM) from Low Earth Orbit. This mission will employ novel skipper-CCDs to investigate…

The idea behind FIRST (Fibered Imager foR a Single Telescope) is to use single-mode fibers to combine multiple apertures in a pupil plane as such as to synthesize a bigger aperture. The advantages with respect to a pure imager are i)…

Ahead of the United States' crewed return to the moon in 2024, Intuitive Machines, under a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract, will land their Nova-C lunar lander in October 2021. At 30 meters altitude during the terminal…

Sloshing Platform for In-Orbit Controller Experimentation is an ambitious, student run mission to design and fly a cubesat to study fluid sloshing in spacecraft. The project will examine zero-g propellant sloshing from an experimental…

AcubeSAT is an open-source CubeSat mission aiming to explore the effects of microgravity and radiation on eukaryotic cells using a compact microfluidic lab-on-a-chip platform. It is developed by SpaceDot, a volunteer, interdisciplinary…

One of the primary objectives of small satellites is to reduce the costs associated with spacecraft development and operations as compared to traditional spacecraft missions. Small satellite missions are generally able to reduce mission…

Modern embedded technology is a driving factor in satellite miniaturization, contributing to a massive boom in satellite launches and a rapidly evolving new space industry. Miniaturized satellites however suffer from low reliability, as…

This study evaluates a technique for determining the mass of a potentially hazardous asteroid from a high-speed flyby in the context of a rapid reconnaissance planetary defense scenario. We consider a host spacecraft that dispenses a small…

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…

We present the validation of ADBSat, a novel implementation of the panel method including a fast pseudo-shading algorithm, that can quickly and accurately determine the forces and torques on satellites in free-molecular flow. Our main…

This paper presents the design of a small aerial robot for inhabited microgravity environments, such as orbiting space stations (e.g., ISS). In particular, we target a fleet of robots, called Space CoBots, for collaborative tasks with…

Femtocells are an emerging technology aimed at providing gains to both network operators and end-users. These gains come at a cost of increased interference, specifically the cross network interference between the macrocell and femtocell…

In recent years the number of CubeSats (U-class spacecrafts) launched into space has increased exponentially marking the dawn of the nanosatellite technology. In general these satellites have a much smaller mass budget compared to…

The Artemis program requires robotic and crewed lunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, construction and maintenance of facilities, and human exploration. These rovers must support navigation for 10s of kilometers (km) from…