Related papers: Propellantless space exploration
Electric propulsion requires exhaustive ground test campaigns to obtain an accurate characterization of the propulsion devices, or thrusters, used by the spacecraft. Among the many plasma parameters, accurately measured during the tests,…
(abridged) Pulsar activity and its related radiation mechanism are usually explained by invoking some plasma processes occurring inside the magnetosphere. Despite many detailed local investigations, the global electrodynamics around those…
The exploration of the lunar poles and the collection of samples from the martian surface are characterized by shorter time windows demanding increased autonomy and speeds. Autonomous mobile robots must intrinsically cope with a wider range…
Although the origin of cosmic rays (CRs) remains an open question, collisionless magnetized shock waves are widely regarded as key sites for particle acceleration. Recent theories further suggest that shock-shock collisions in stellar…
Radiation pressure exerted by solar photon output is salient to the motion of primary neutral hydrogen atoms streaming into the inner heliosphere directly from the Local Interstellar Medium (LISM). The action of a time-dependent radiation…
Collisionless shocks play a key role in the heliosphere at planetary bow shocks by governing the conversion of the upstream bulk kinetic energy of the solar wind flow to other forms of energy in the downstream, including bulk plasma heat,…
We study the physics of electron acceleration at collisionless shocks that move through a plasma containing large-scale magnetic fluctuations. We numerically integrate the trajectories of a large number of electrons, which are treated as…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
We study two limiting cases of turbulence forcing in numerical experiments: solenoidal (divergence-free) forcing, and compressive (curl-free) forcing, and compare our results to observations reported in the literature. We solve the…
Black holes drive powerful plasma jets to relativistic velocities. This plasma should be collisionless, and self-consistently supplied by pair creation near the horizon. We present general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulations of…
Plane symmetric cosmological models are investigated with or without any dark energy components in the field equations. Keeping an eye on the recent observational constraints concerning the accelerating phase of expansion of the universe,…
We present a space-velocity theory of gravitation in a 4-dimensional curved space. The solutions of the field equations yield 3 possibilities for the universe expansion but only the accelerating one is possible. Although the theory has no…
In this paper the planar orbit and attitude dynamics of an uncontrolled spacecraft is studied, taking on-board a deorbiting device. Solar and drag sails with the same shape are considered and separately studied. In both cases, these devices…
Laser propulsion has been proposed for relativistic interstellar flights, but it faces the significant challenge of requiring extremely powerful laser radiation due to the inherently low momentum transfer between the beam and the sail. The…
A deuterium-tritium (DT) nuclear pulse propulsion concept for fast interplanetary transport is proposed utilizing almost all the energy for thrust and without the need for a large radiator: 1. By letting the thermonuclear micro-explosion…
We perform full 3D numerical simulations of compact objects, such as black holes or neutron stars, boosted through an ambient force-free plasma that posses a uniform magnetization. We study jet formation and energy extraction from the…
It is shown that the gravity acceleration just above a chamber filled with gas or plasma at ultra-low pressure can be strongly reduced by applying an Extra Low-Frequency (ELF) electromagnetic field across the gas or the plasma. This…
Typically the motion of self-propelled active particles is described in a quiescent environment establishing an inertial frame of reference. Here we assume that friction, self-propulsion and uctuations occur relative to a non-inertial frame…
We hypothesize a simple scenario to associate spiral-shaped trajectories and asymptotic tangential velocities according to observations found on deep space scales. As a difference with alternative Modified Newton Dynamics (MoND), in our…
Time is arguably the key limiting factor for interstellar exploration. At high speeds, flyby missions to nearby stars by laser propelled wafersats taking 50-100 years would be feasible. Directed energy launch systems could accelerate on the…