Refine
Year of publication
- 2009 (40) (remove)
Institute
- IfB - Institut für Bioengineering (40) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (28)
- Conference Proceeding (11)
- Part of a Book (1)
Keywords
- Spacecraft (2)
- Stickstoffmonoxid (2)
- nitric oxide gas (2)
- Adsorption (1)
- Autofluoreszenzverfahren (1)
- Eisschicht (1)
- Elektrodynamik (1)
- Hybrid Propellants (1)
- Hydrodynamik (1)
- Hydrogel (1)
A melting probe equipped with autofluorescence-based detection system combined with a light scattering unit, and, optionally, with a microarray chip would be ideally suited to probe icy environments like Europa’s ice layer as well as the polar ice layers of Earth and Mars for recent and extinct live.
Prolonged operations close to small solar system bodies require a sophisticated control logic to minimize propellant mass and maximize operational efficiency. A control logic based on Discrete Mechanics and Optimal Control (DMOC) is proposed and applied to both conventionally propelled and solar sail spacecraft operating at an arbitrarily shaped asteroid in the class of Itokawa. As an example, stand-off inertial hovering is considered, recently identified as a challenging part of the Marco Polo mission. The approach is easily extended to stand-off orbits. We show that DMOC is applicable to spacecraft control at small objects, in particular with regard to the fact that the changes in gravity are exploited by the algorithm to optimally control the spacecraft position. Furthermore, we provide some remarks on promising developments.
The so-called "compound solar sail", also known as "Solar Photon Thruster" (SPT), holds the potential of providing significant performance advantages over the flat solar sail. Previous SPT design concepts, however, do not consider shadowing effects and multiple reflections of highly concentrated solar radiation that would inevitably destroy the gossamer sail film. In this paper, we propose a novel advanced SPT (ASPT) design concept that does not suffer from these oversimplifications. We present the equations that describe the thrust force acting on such a sail system and compare its performance with respect to the conventional flat solar sail.