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Mitigation of the threat from airbursting asteroids requires an understanding of the potential risk they pose for the ground. How asteroids release their kinetic energy in the atmosphere is not well understood due to the rarity of…
After the initial fast spiral-in phase experienced by a common-envelope binary, the system may enter a slow, self-regulated phase, possibly lasting 100s of years, in which all the energy released by orbital decay can be efficiently…
The 99942 Apophis close encounter with Earth in 2029 may provide information about asteroid's physical characteristics and measurements of Earth's effects on the asteroid surface. In this work, we analysed the surface and the nearby…
We have empirically estimated how often fireball shocks produce overpressure at the ground sufficient to damage windows. Our study used a numerical entry model to estimate the energy deposition and shock production for a suite of 23…
Earthquake is one of the natural disasters which cannot be either controlled or predicted absolutely. Since preventing earthquake is impossible, preventing its damages is also difficult. Unfortunately, after each earthquake and its…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
The habitability of planets is strongly affected by impacts from comets and asteroids. Indications from the ages of Moon rocks suggest that the inner Solar System experienced an increased rate of impacts roughly 3.8 Gya known as the Late…
The Sun is expected to increase its radiant output by about 10% per billion years. The rate at which the radius of the Earth's orbit would need to increase in order to keep the present value of the Sun's radiant flux at the Earth constant…
We present a new approach for designing risk-bounded controllers for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Existing frameworks for assessing risk of UAV operations rely on knowing the conditional probability of an incident occurring given…
During the late stage of terrestrial planet formation, hit-and-run collisions are about as common as accretionary mergers, for expected velocities and angles of giant impacts. Average hit-and-runs leave two major remnants plus debris: the…
Performing orbital insertion around Mars using aerocapture instead of a propulsive orbit insertion manoeuvre allows to save resources and/or increase the payload mass fraction. Aerocapture has never been employed to date because of the high…
International and U.S. strategies and protocols have identified the need to develop rapid-response spacecraft reconnaissance capabilities as a priority to advance planetary defense readiness. A space-based reconnaissance response is…
When autonomous robots interact with humans, such as during autonomous driving, explicit safety guarantees are crucial in order to avoid potentially life-threatening accidents. Many data-driven methods have explored learning probabilistic…
A new idea for reusing rockets, based on the Energia 2 launch vehicle, using deployable wings is proposed. A mission design is planned with an expected maximum altitude of 500 m. Following that systems engineering was used to manage the…
The world is changing fast, and so is the space sector. Planning for large scientific experiments two decades ahead may no longer be the most sensible approach. I develop the argument that large science experiments are becoming comparable…
The commercial space industry is launching more satellites into Low Earth Orbit every year. Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) has a thriving dairy and cattle industry. Unfortunately, these industries could come into (high speed) cow-llision, as the…
Near-Earth space continues to be the focus of critical services and capabilities provided to the society. With the steady increase of space traffic, the number of Resident Space Objects (RSOs) has recently boomed in the context of growing…
The growth of the population of space debris in the geostationary ring and the resulting threat to active satellites require insight into the dynamics of uncontrolled objects in the region. A Monte Carlo simulation analyzed the sensitivity…
Every year, more and more objects are sent to space. While staying in orbit at high altitudes, objects at low altitudes reenter the atmosphere, mostly disintegrating and adding material to the upper atmosphere. The increasing number of…
Based on telescopic observations of Jupiter-family comets (JFCs), there is predicted to be a paucity of objects at sub-kilometre sizes. However, several bright fireballs and some meteorites have been tenuously linked to the JFC population,…