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Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
Special Regions on Mars are defined as environments able to host liquid water that meets certain temperature and water activity requirements that allow known terrestrial organisms to replicate, and therefore could be habitable. Such regions…
We describe how meteors recorded at the Earth can be used to partly reconstruct the meteoroid environments of the planets if a large sample (i.e. millions of orbits at a minimum) is available. The process involves selecting from the…
In this paper, we assess the scientific promise and technology feasibility of distributed instruments for planetary science. A distributed instrument is an instrument designed to collect spatially and temporally correlated data from…
Social media provides many opportunities to monitor and evaluate political phenomena such as referendums and elections. In this study, we propose a set of approaches to analyze long-running political events on social media with a real-world…
Trust and confidence in democratic institutions is at an all-time low. At the same time, many of the complex issues faced by city administrators and politicians remain unresolved. To tackle these concerns, many argue that citizens should,…
The low temperatures and high ultraviolet (UV) radiation levels at the surface of Mars today currently preclude the survival of life anywhere except perhaps in limited subsurface niches. Several ideas for making the martian surface more…
The Multi-valued Action Reasoning System (MARS) is an automated value-based ethical decision-making model for artificial agents (AI). Given a set of available actions and an underlying moral paradigm, by employing MARS one can identify the…
This thesis work aims to study the possibility of energy production on Martian soil and, in particular, to establish what might be an optimal configuration for an energy system. This goal has been contextualized in the will to feed a…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
The Ingenuity helicopter test flights on Mars in April 2021 marked the first time a powered aircraft has flown on another world. Students who have access to model helicopters and drones may wonder, how well could those hover on the Red…
The debate over the early Martian climate is among the most intriguing in planetary science. Although the geologic evidence generally supports a warmer and wetter climate, climate models have had difficulty simulating such a scenario,…
Any rotorcraft on Mars will fly in a low pressure and dusty environment. It is well known that helicopters on Earth become highly-charged due, in part, to triboelectric effects when flying in sandy conditions. We consider the possibility…
Orbit-use management efforts can be structured as binding national regulatory policies or as self-enforcing international treaties. New treaties to control space debris growth appear unlikely in the near future. Spacefaring nations can…
We review the abundance and diversity of terrestrial rock hosted life, the environments it inhabits, the evolution of its metabolisms, and its fossil biomarkers to provide guidance in the search for the biomarkers of rock hosted life on…
Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with…
This work focuses on autonomous contingency planning for scientific missions by enabling rapid policy computation from any off-nominal point in the state space in the event of a delay or deviation from the nominal mission plan. Successful…
We advocate for establishing key scientific priorities for the future of Mercury exploration, including the development of specific science goals for a landed mission. We support the Mercury science community in fostering closer…
To-date, all human economic activity has depended on the resources of a single planet, and it has long been recognized that developments in space exploration could in principle open our closed planetary economy to external resources of…
Technologies are increasingly enrolled in projects to involve civilians in the work of policy-making, often under the label of 'civic technology'. But conventional forms of participation through transactions such as voting provide limited…