Related papers: A Fast Response Mission to Rendezvous with an Inte…
The capability of maintaining two satellites in precise relative position, stable in a celestial coordinate system, would enable major advances in a number of scientific disciplines and with a variety of types of instrumentation. The common…
In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI) applications…
The concept of putting a neutrino detector in close orbit of the sun has been unexplored until very recently. The primary scientific return is to vastly enhance our understanding of the solar interior, which is a major NASA goal.…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will perform a two-year survey of nearly the entire sky, with the main goal of detecting exoplanets smaller than Neptune around bright and nearby stars. There do not appear to be any…
The ISOPHOT Serendipity Survey (ISOSS) covered approximately 15 % of the sky at a wavelength of 170 micron while the ISO satellite was slewing from one target to the next. By chance ISOSS slews went over many solar system objects (SSOs). We…
Direct-sampling observations of interstellar neutral (ISN) species and their secondary populations give information about the physical state of the local interstellar medium and processes occuring in the outer heliosheath. Such observations…
A classic task in robotics is tracking a target in the external environment. There are several well-documented approaches to this problem. This paper presents a novel approach to this problem using infrared time of flight sensors. The use…
Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are emerging as a key enabler of next-generation communications, offering global coverage and significantly lower latency compared to traditional terrestrial networks and geostationary…
Remote-sensing observations of Solar System objects with a space telescope offer a key method of understanding celestial bodies and contributing to planetary formation and evolution theories. The capabilities of Twinkle, a space telescope…
The contemporary landscape of wireless technology underscores the critical role of precise localization services. Traditional global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)-based solutions, however, fall short when it comes to indoor…
New means of interstellar travel are now being considered by various research teams, assuming lightweight spaceships to be accelerated via either laser or solar radiation to a significant fraction of the speed of light (c). We recently…
In this paper, we detail the scientific objectives and outline a strawman payload of the SOLAR sail Investigation of the Sun (SOLARIS). The science objectives are to study the 3D structure of the solar magnetic and velocity field, the…
Issues with tracking, precision pointing, and Doppler shift are the major sources of performance loss in laser inter-satellite communication that can severely decrease the coverage and overall performance of satellite constellations. As a…
Capturing disused satellites in orbit and their controlled reentry is the aim of the DEOS space mission. Satellites that ran out of fuel or got damaged pose a threat to working projects in orbit. Additionally, the reentry of such objects…
The primary challenge of rocket propulsion is the burden of needing to accelerate the spacecraft's own fuel, resulting in only a logarithmic gain in maximum speed as propellant is added to the spacecraft. Light sails offer an attractive…
We present results from the Large Adaptive optics Survey for Substellar Objects (LASSO), where the goal is to directly image new substellar companions (<70 M$_{Jup}$) at wide orbital separations ($\gtrsim$50 AU) around young ($\lesssim$300…
Interstellar objects (ISOs), the parent population of 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, are abundant in the interstellar medium of the Milky Way. This means that the interstellar medium, including molecular cloud regions, has three components:…
The StarLight program conceptualizes fast interstellar travel via small wafer satellites (wafersats) that are propelled by directed energy. This process is wildly different from traditional space travel and trades large and slow spacecraft…
This letter presents an effective method for assessing the feasibility of detecting ocean ships using spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The technique employs the minimum detectable radar cross-section criterion under specified…
The concept for space interferometry from Polar or Equatorial Circular Medium Earth Orbits (the PECMEO concept) is a promising way to acquire the image of the "shadow" of the event horizon of Sagittarius A* with an angular resolution of…