Related papers: Wind--Pellet Shear Sailing
The electric solar wind sail (E-sail) propellantless propulsion device uses long, charged metallic tethers to tap momentum from the solar wind to produce spacecraft propulsion. If flying through planetary or moon eclipse, the long E-sail…
Marine debris pollution is a growing problem impacting aquatic ecosystems, coastal recreation, and human society. Beaches are known to be a sink for debris, and beaching needs to be accounted for in marine debris mass balances. The process…
Aims. Based on measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft and high-resolution modelling of the motion of interstellar dust (ISD) through the heliosphere we predict the ISD flow in the inner planetary system and on to the Earth. This is the…
The electric solar wind sail (E-sail) is a way to propel a spacecraft by using the natural solar wind as a thrust source. The problem of secular spinrate change was identified earlier which is due to the orbital Coriolis effect and tends to…
Solar sails enable missions to observe the solar environment from unique vantage points, such as sustained observations away from the Sun-Earth line; sub-L1 station keeping; high inclination solar orbits; Earth polar-sitting and…
High-mass microquasars consist of a massive star and a compact object, the latter producing jets that will interact with the stellar wind. The evolution of the jets, and ultimately their radiative outcome, could depend strongly on the…
In high-mass microquasars (HMMQ), strong interactions between jets and stellar winds at binary system scales could occur. In order to explore this possibility, we have performed numerical 2-dimensional simulations of jets crossing the dense…
A typical young pulsar slows down at an imperceptible rate, its spin period increasing by less than 10 microseconds over the course of a year. However, the inertia of a pulsar is so extreme that to effect this tiny change in rotation rate,…
We discuss a possibility to survey many Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) with a single launch using a few smallscale spacecraft, each equipped with solar sails, which could be unfurled from a single interplanetary bus at the perihelion of that…
It is a well-documented yet counterintuitive fact that wind-driven vehicles (with no onboard power source) can travel directly downwind faster than the wind itself. This effect is not paradoxical once one recognizes that the vehicle is not…
We examine two means by which wind can impart energy to waves: sheltering and deposition of material upwards from windward surface shear. The shear driven deposition is shown to be the more efficient process. Lengthening of waves to match…
The solar wind (SW) is an outflow of the solar coronal plasma, expanding supersonically throughout the heliosphere. SW particles interact by charge exchange with interstellar neutral atoms and on one hand, they modify the distribution of…
The Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) enables resolved imaging and spectroscopy of nearby terrestrial exoplanets, but useful science begins only after a spacecraft reaches roughly 650-900 astronomical units (AU). A 20 yr lower-bound trip to…
High-mass microquasar jets propagate under the effect of the wind from the companion star, and the orbital motion of the binary system. The stellar wind and the orbit may be dominant factors determining the jet properties beyond the binary…
New measurements using radio and plasma-wave instruments in interplanetary space have shown that nanometer-scale dust, or nanodust, is a significant contributor to the total mass in interplanetary space. Better measurements of nanodust will…
Magnetic field fluctuations measured in the heliosheath by the Voyager spacecraft are often characterized as compressible, as indicated by a strong fluctuating component parallel to the mean magnetic field. However, the interpretation of…
The solar wind, a stream of charged particles originating from the Sun and transcending interplanetary space, poses risks to technology and astronauts. In this work, we develop a prediction model to forecast the solar wind speed at the…
We analyse the potential of the electric solar wind sail for solar system space missions. Applications studied include fly-by missions to terrestrial planets (Venus, Mars and Phobos, Mercury) and asteroids, missions based on non-Keplerian…
At present, the heliosphere is embedded in a warm low density interstellar cloud that belongs to a cloud system flowing through the local standard of rest with a velocity near ~18 km/s. The velocity structure of the nearest interstellar…
The first computation of the compressible energy transfer rate from $\sim$ 0.2 AU up to $\sim$ 1.7 AU is obtained using PSP, THEMIS and MAVEN observations. The compressible energy cascade rate $\varepsilon_C$ is computed for hundred of…