Related papers: Nanosatellite Design Considerations for a Mission …

This paper presents a design for a drop tower test to evaluate a numerical model for a structurally reconfigurable spacecraft with actuatable joints, referred to as a transformable spacecraft. A mock-up robot for a 3U-sized transformable…

Recent miniaturization of electronics in very small, low-cost and low-power configurations suitable for use in spacecraft have inspired innovative small-scale satellite concepts, such as ChipSats, centimeter-scale satellites with a mass of…

This paper presents a system-level engineering approach for the preliminary coverage performance analysis and the design of a generic Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellation. This analysis accounts for both the coverage…

Recent studies of optimization methods and GNC of spacecraft near small bodies focusing on descent, landing, rendezvous, etc., with key safety constraints such as line-of-sight conic zones and soft landings have shown promising results;…

Dynamic targeting (DT) is a spacecraft autonomy concept in which sensor data is acquired and rapidly analyzed and used to drive subsequent observation. We describe the low Earth orbit application of this approach in which lookahead imagery…

Artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous edge computing in space are emerging areas of interest to augment capabilities of nanosatellites, where modern sensors generate orders of magnitude more data than can typically be transmitted to…

The MICROSCOPE space mission aims to test the Equivalence Principle with an accuracy of $10^{-15}$. The drag-free micro-satellite will orbit around the Earth and embark a differential electrostatic accelerometer including two cylindrical…

This paper develops a robust optimization based method to design orbits on which the sensory perception of the desired physical quantities are maximized. It also demonstrates how to incorporate various constraints imposed by many spacecraft…

We study the problem of controlling the free surface for a two dimensional solid container in the context of the gravity waves and the sloshing problem. By using conformal maps and the Dirichlet-Neumann operator, the problem is formulated…

The dynamics of droplets on substrates has a strong impact on microfluidic systems ranging from commercially available lab-on-chip systems to state of the art developments in open microfluidics. Coalescence of micro and nano droplets on a…

Space observatories for gravitational radiation such as LISA are equipped with dedicated on-board instrumentation capable of measuring magnetic fields with low-noise conditions at millihertz frequencies. The reason is that the core…

This study describes the development and validation of a novel microgravity experimental platform that is mainly applied to small robots such as modular self-reconfigurable robots. This platform mainly consists of an air supply system, a…

In an effort to better understand the early stages of planet formation, we have developed a 1.5U payload that flew on the International Space Station (ISS) in the NanoRacks NanoLab facility between September 2014 and March 2016. This…

The recent explosive growth of small satellite operations driven primarily from an academic or pedagogical need, has demonstrated the viability of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in space. They have also leveraged and shown the need…

The recent increase in yearly spacecraft launches and the high number of planned launches have raised questions about maintaining accessibility to space for all interested parties. A key to sustaining the future of space-flight is the…

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the number of CubeSats and other small satellites in orbit - these have highly constrained computational and communication resources, but still require robust secure communication to operate…

This paper discusses translation and attitude control in spacecraft rendezvous and soft docking. The target spacecraft orbit can be either circular or elliptic. The high fidelity model for this problem is intrinsically a nonlinear system…

As the space domain becomes increasingly congested, autonomy is proposed as one approach to enable small numbers of human ground operators to manage large constellations of satellites and tackle more complex missions such as on-orbit or…

We introduce a multi-sensor navigation system for autonomous surface vessels (ASV) intended for water-quality monitoring in freshwater lakes. Our mission planner uses satellite imagery as a prior map, formulating offline a mission-level…

In this paper, the trajectory planning problem for autonomous rendezvous and docking between a controlled spacecraft and a tumbling target is addressed. The use of a variable planning horizon is proposed in order to construct an appropriate…