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The recently proposed NASA and ESA missions to Saturn and Jupiter pose difficult tasks to mission designers because chemical propulsion scenarios are not capable of transferring heavy spacecraft into the outer solar system without the use of gravity assists. Thus our developed mission scenario based on the joint NASA/ESA Titan Saturn System Mission baselines solar electric propulsion to improve mission flexibility and transfer time. For the calculation of near-globally optimal low-thrust trajectories, we have used a method called Evolutionary Neurocontrol, which is implemented in the low-thrust trajectory optimization software InTrance. The studied solar electric propulsion scenario covers trajectory optimization of the interplanetary transfer including variations of the spacecraft's thrust level, the thrust unit's specific impulse and the solar power generator power level. Additionally developed software extensions enabled trajectory optimization with launcher-provided hyperbolic excess energy, a complex solar power generator model and a variable specific impulse ion engine model. For the investigated mission scenario, Evolutionary Neurocontrol yields good optimization results, which also hold valid for the more elaborate spacecraft models. Compared to Cassini/Huygens, the best found solutions have faster transfer times and a higher mission flexibility in general.
Solar-electric propulsion (SEP) is superior with
respect to payload capacity, flight time and
flexible launch window to the conventional
interplanetary transfer method using chemical
propulsion combined with gravity assists. This fact
results from the large exhaust velocities of electric
low–thrust propulsion and is favourable also for
missions to the giant planets, Kuiper-belt objects
and even for a heliopause probe (IHP) as shown in
three studies by the authors funded by DLR. They
dealt with a lander for Europa and a sample return
mission from a mainbelt asteroid [1], with the
TANDEM mission [2]; the third recent one
investigates electric propulsion for the transfer to
the edge of the solar system.
All studies are based on triple-junction solar arrays,
on rf-ion thrusters of the qualified RIT-22 type and
they use the intelligent trajectory optimization
program InTrance [3].
The absence of a general method for endotoxin removal from liquid interfaces gives an opportunity to find new methods and materials to overcome this gap. Activated nanostructured carbon is a promising material that showed good adsorption properties due to its vast pore network and high surface area. The aim of this study is to find the adsorption rates for a carboneous material produced at different temperatures, as well as to reveal possible differences between the performance of the material for each of the adsorbates used during the study (hemoglobin, serum albumin and lipopolysaccharide, LPS).
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.
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.