Related papers: A New Method of Atmospheric Reentry for Space Ship…
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…
Atmospheric water harvesting is urgently needed given increasing global water scarcity. Current sorbent-based devices that cycle between water capture and release have low harvesting rates. We envision a radically different multi-material…
For near-Sun missions, the spacecraft approaches very close to the Sun and space environmental effects become relevant. Strong restrictions on how much close it can get derive from the maximum temperature that the used materials can stand,…
Laser sail-based spacecraft -- where a powerful earth-based laser propels a lightweight outer-space vehicle -- have been recently proposed by the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative as a means of reaching relativistic speeds for interstellar…
Historically, materials such as lead, tungsten, and iron have been used in spacecraft to shield scientific detectors from Cosmic Rays. These materials work well when reentry to Earth is not an issue. The typical strategy is to have a…
The new camera system of the shuttle Discovery on STS-114 that blasted off at 10:39am, Tuesday, July 26, 2005, after 906 days of grounding since the Columbia accident, has produced high resolution data of foam sheddings. The 0.9 lbs piece…
Sub-{\mu}m thin samples are essential for spectroscopic purposes. The development of flat micro-jets enabled novel spectroscopic and scattering methods for investigating molecular systems in the liquid phase. However characterization of the…
Oxygen isotopes in marine cherts have been used to infer hot oceans during the Archean with temperatures between 60{\deg}C (333 K) and 80{\deg}C (353 K). Such climates are challenging for the early Earth warmed by the faint young Sun. The…
One-third of Mars' surface has shallow-buried H$_2$O, but it is currently too cold for use by life. Proposals to warm Mars using greenhouse gases require a large mass of ingredients that are rare on Mars' surface. However, we show here that…
Porous carbon ablators offer cost-effective thermal protection for aerospace vehicles during re-entry into planetary atmospheres. However, the exploration of more distant planets requires the development of ablators that are able to…
A propulsion concept in which a spacecraft interacts with high-velocity pellets and the interstellar medium is proposed. The pellets are slower than the spacecraft and are accelerated backwards as they are overtaken, imparting a forward…
Mid-Air Deployment (MAD) of a rotorcraft during Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) on Mars eliminates the need to carry a propulsion or airbag landing system. This reduces the total mass inside the aeroshell by more than 100 kg and simplifies…
The solar photon pressure provides a viable source of thrust for spacecraft in the solar system. Theoretically it could also enable interstellar missions, but an extremely small mass per cross section area is required to overcome the solar…
We describe the SPIDER flight cryostat, which is designed to cool six millimeter-wavelength telescopes during an Antarctic long-duration balloon flight. The cryostat, one of the largest to have flown on a stratospheric payload, uses liquid…
Results are presented from a 3-D Pluto general circulation model (GCM) that includes conductive heating and cooling, non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) heating by methane at 2.3 and 3.3 microns, non-LTE cooling by cooling by…
Small-satellites and CubeSats offer a low-cost pathway to access Low Earth Orbit at altitudes of 450 km and lower thanks to miniaturization and advancement in reliability of commercial electronics. However, at these low altitudes,…
In the distant future, humans will surely fly to Mars. Even today, probes and vehicles are carrying out measurements on the surface of Mars. However, most landings on Mars cannot be carried out with parachutes alone. Instead, landing…
Challenging space missions include those at very low altitudes, where the atmosphere is source of aerodynamic drag on the spacecraft. To extend the lifetime of such missions, an efficient propulsion system is required. One solution is…
We present a publicly-available toolkit of flight-proven hardware and software to retrieve 5 TB of data or small physical samples from a stratospheric balloon platform. Before launch, a capsule is attached to the balloon, and rises with it.…
Space debris larger than 1 cm can damage space instruments and impact Earth. The low-Earth orbits (at heights smaller than 2000 km) and orbits near the geostationary- Earth orbit (at 35786 km height) are especially endangered, because most…