Frontiers in Space Technologies最新文献

{"title":"BepiColombo: A Platform for Improving Modeling of Electric Propulsion-Spacecraft Interactions","authors":"F. Filleul, O. Sutherland, F. Cipriani, C. Charles","doi":"10.3389/frspt.2021.639819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2021.639819","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides the first results of a long-term study aimed at improving the validity of numerical modeling techniques for Electric Propulsion induced Spacecraft Charging using the Spacecraft Plasma Interaction System software. The preflight numerical model of the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo mission and its outputs are presented as a benchmark example of the present capabilities and limitations of the model. It is demonstrated that the code can obtain the spacecraft charging equilibrium by simulating the dynamic interactions between the electric propulsion system, the thruster-generated plasmas, and spacecraft systems exposed to space. The importance of including a physical description of the electron cooling in the freely expanding thruster plasmas is shown by comparing simulations with different polytropic indexes. It particularly highlights the inadequacy of treating the entire plasma as isothermal. The reported variability of the simulation outputs with numerical and physical parameters paves the way for future improvements in preflight design modeling and increased understanding of plasma thruster-induced charging processes through future comparison with available flight telemetries.","PeriodicalId":137674,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Space Technologies","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114256791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Moonshot: Affordable, Simple, Flight Hardware for the Artemis-1 Mission and Beyond","authors":"T. Hammond, P. Allen, H. W. Wells, James M. Russick, C. Nislow, G. Giaever, H. Birdsall","doi":"10.3389/frspt.2020.593523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2020.593523","url":null,"abstract":"Artemis is a NASA initiative to return US astronauts to the moon and beyond. Artemis includes a robust science program. A key to space-based biological science is the ability to construct high-quality, efficacious scientific hardware cheaply, and in a short time frame. We report the design and fabrication of affordable new flight hardware to support the growth of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a single-cell green alga on the Artemis-1 mission. C. reinhardtii produces two products of great interest to space travel—lipids as a source of bioproducts and hydrogen a source of fuel. We will use this hardware to grow a library of mutant strains to identify C. reinhardtii genes that optimize survival and fuel production during exposure to the combined impacts of space radiation and microgravity in the cosmic space environment beyond the Van Allen belts. Using fitness as a readout, a library of mapped insertion mutant strains will be grown competitively during exposure to space radiation and microgravity. This report describes the hardware and the science verification test that validates its utility for missions ahead. This hardware can be easily adapted to a broad range of uses and microbes, and its low cost will make space science affordable and practical.","PeriodicalId":137674,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Space Technologies","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115325598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Current Challenges and Opportunities for Space Technologies","authors":"G. Aglietti","doi":"10.3389/frspt.2020.00001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2020.00001","url":null,"abstract":"With the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the subsequent beginning of the space age, the progression of Space Technologies has, on the one hand, led to the development of hundreds of applications (Pelton et al., 2017) that use satellite data, including devices for everyday use, from satellite televisions to the Satnav in our cars. On the other, it has underpinned scientific progress in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences as well as in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Just to recall some of the highest public profile contributions from the field, satellite measurements showed the extent of the ozone layer depletion in the atmosphere and the existence of exoplanets and black holes have been confirmed, among many other scientific advances. The rapid progress made in Space Technology led to extraordinary accomplishments for the whole human race, such as the Moon landing. At the same time, these space missions have provided powerful iconic imagery for humanity, and photos like the Blue Marble (Wuebbles, 2012) have become universally recognized symbols of our planet and its extraordinary environment and finite resources. Although the spectacular progress in Space Technologies slowed down toward the end of the past century, together with that of the whole Aerospace sector, very important achievements continued to be made. These include the development of the International Space Station and the robotic exploration of other planets and celestial bodies, including landing on a comet! Through the years, space has often been identified as the new frontier, fueling the imagination of writers and film directors, who created visions (more or less plausible) of a future enabled by fantastic developments in Space Technologies. However, consistent with what history has shown us, is the fact that, after an initial phase of “exploration” of a new environment and consolidation of the relevant technologies, what follows is an explosion of businesses to exploit the new opportunities offered by the new environment. This is where we are today. Sometimes called Space 4.0, we are in a period that has seen a shift of paradigms, with changes of motivations, actors, and, indeed, technologies (PWC Report, 2019).","PeriodicalId":137674,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Space Technologies","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132927185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Space Debris to NEO, Some of the Major Challenges for the Space Sector","authors":"G. Aglietti","doi":"10.3389/frspt.2020.00002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2020.00002","url":null,"abstract":"Society’s reliance on space assets has grown to the point that today these are part of every modern country’s infrastructure. Services provided thanks to space technologies such as for example, Global Navigation Satellite Systems have become critical (Hesse and Hornung, 2015) for smooth operations in a variety of sectors, from telecommunications to transport to banking, and the list could continue. Even the general public has become accustomed to using satellite services like satellite television or the satnav on mobile phones. Hence, any threat to our space assets is a very significant issue for society. As of February 2020, there were about 5,500 satellites in space1 but only about 2,300 were actually functioning, which means about 3,200 defunct satellites are still orbiting Earth, together with upper stages and fairings of rockets and a variety of smaller objects produced by break-ups, explosions, collisions, degradation or other anomalous events that resulted in the production of fragments. Under the collective name of space debris, these objects have a size distribution that ranges from large intact bodies (e.g., parts of rockets or large satellites with a size larger than 10m and weight of several tons) down to millimeter-sized fragments like scales of paint or solidified droplets of coolant. Early 2020 estimates showed that there were 34,000 objects larger than 10 cm, 900,000 objects from >1 to 10 cm, and a staggering 128 million objects from >1mm to 1 cm. Given their high velocity and consequent high kinetic energy, even small pieces of debris pose a significant threat to operating satellites, as they could hit them with catastrophic consequences and the loss of potentially critical services. At the same time, high energy collisions between larger bodies can produce real explosions that can create thousands of fragments. These, in turn, can collide with other orbiting objects, triggering a chain reaction and a snowball effect that could render whole orbits unusable. This extreme scenario (Kessler Syndrome), initially studied by Kessler in the ’70s (Kessler and Cour-Palais, 1978), is not far from reality, as a handful of collisions have already happened. Perhaps the most famous is the one between Russian military communications satellite Cosmos 2,251 and a satellite of the Iridium constellation (Wang, 2010), which produced a step increase in the debris population. With more satellite applications currently being developed that demand a growing number of satellites (e.g., constellations of hundreds of satellites are being deployed to provide worldwide connectivity or a World Wide Web), the issue of space debris is becoming more significant (Virgili et al., 2016).","PeriodicalId":137674,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Space Technologies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130035877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Space Economy Grand Challenges","authors":"M. Elvis","doi":"10.3389/frspt.2020.00004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2020.00004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":137674,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Space Technologies","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124379693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Estimation of Orbital Parameters of Broken-Up Objects From In-Situ Debris Measurements","authors":"T. Hanada, Koki Fujita, Y. Yoshimura","doi":"10.3389/frspt.2022.867236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2022.867236","url":null,"abstract":"This paper briefly introduces a new approach to estimate some orbital parameters of on-orbit satellite fragmentations (specifically, the direction of angular momentum at a specific time and the time change in direction of angular momentum) from in-situ debris measurements. This approach, as in previous studies, adopts a constraint equation derived from the fact that a piece of debris detected shares the geocentric position vector with an in-situ debris measurement satellite. However, unlike previous studies, this approach does not adopt a constraint equation that can be applied to the rate of change in right ascension of the ascending node of a broken-up object. Instead, this approach determines the inclination of a broken-up object from the maximum or minimum geocentric declination at the time of detection. Then, this approach finds out a candidate for the rate of change in right ascension of the ascending node of a broken-up object by assuming a circular orbit with a radius of the geocentric distance at the time of detection. Finally, using the constraint equation adopted, this approach estimates the right ascension of the ascending node at the time of breakup and calculates a correction for the rate of change in right ascension of the ascending node. This paper also verifies that this new approach works effectively under ideal conditions where all detections are assumed to be at the line of intersection of the two orbital planes of a broken-up object and an in-situ debris measurement satellite.","PeriodicalId":137674,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Space Technologies","volume":"31 8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128783001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}