Related papers: Conceptual Design of Mars Sample Return Mission Us…
Small satellites have proven to be viable Earth observation platforms. These satellites operate in regimes of increased trajectory uncertainty where traditional planning approaches can lead to sub-optimal task plans, limiting science…
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…
By volume, more than 99% of the solar system has not been imaged at radio frequencies. Almost all of this space (the solar wind) can be traversed by fast electrons producing radio emissions at frequencies lower than the terrestrial…
Nowadays, autonomous cars can drive smoothly in ordinary cases, and it is widely recognized that realistic sensor simulation will play a critical role in solving remaining corner cases by simulating them. To this end, we propose an…
Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs.…
Mars is the next frontier for the space explorers to demonstrate the extent of human presence in space beyond low-earth orbit. Both government and private space industries have been fascinated by Mars quest to attempt a crewed expedition to…
This paper proposes a systematic method for generating practical and robust low-thrust spacecraft trajectories. One contribution is to consider the change in mass of the spacecraft at two levels: a) the propulsive acceleration and b) the…
Wheeled planetary rovers such as the Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) have provided unprecedented, detailed images of the Mars surface. However, these rovers are large and are of high-cost as they need to…
Here we discuss one of the current reservoirs of water on Mars, the regolith and rocks exposed at the surface. This reservoir is characterized by the presence of H_{2}O- and OH- bearing phases that produce a broad absorption at a wavelength…
This paper presents a novel 3D myopic coverage path planning algorithm for lunar micro-rovers that can explore unknown environments with limited sensing and computational capabilities. The algorithm expands upon traditional non-graph path…
In addition to conventional ground rovers, the Mars 2020 mission will send a helicopter to Mars. The copter's high-resolution data helps the rover to identify small hazards such as steps and pointy rocks, as well as providing rich textual…
Human long duration exploration missions (LDEMs) raise a number of technological challenges. This paper addresses the question of the crew autonomy: as the distances increase, the communication delays and constraints tend to prevent the…
One of the frontier research fields of exoplanetary science is the study of the composition and variability of exoplanetary atmospheres. This field is now moving from the gas giant planets towards the smaller and colder telluric planets,…
Mid-Air Helicopter Delivery (MAHD) is a new Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) architecture to enable in situ mobility for Mars science at lower cost than previous missions. It uses a jetpack to slow down a Mars Science Helicopter (MSH) after…
Aims: To predict the cruise radiation environment related to future human missions to Mars, the correlation between solar modulation potential and the dose rate measured by the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) has been analyzed and…
Exposure to cosmic radiation is a major concern in space exploration. On the Martian surface, a complex radiation field is present, formed by a constant influx of galactic cosmic radiation and the secondary particles produced by their…
Low-mass probes propelled by directed energy from earth are an early option for exploration of nearby star systems. A challenging aspect of such technology is returning scientific observational data to earth. We compare two configurations…
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…
Highly accurate real-time localization is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of planetary rovers exploring the surface of Mars. Mars rover operations rely on vision-based systems to avoid hazards as well as plan safe…
We assess the possibility of reducing the travel time of a crewed mission to Mars by examining four different propulsion methods and keeping the mass at departure under 2500 tonne, for a fixed architecture. We evaluated representative…