June 2020
Titan’s evolving atmosphere
... be hiding beneath its thick atmosphere, scientists will have to wait until Dragonfly, NASA’s fourth New Frontiers mission that will be launched in 2026 for an arrival at Titan in 2034 (https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/). Dragonfly is a mobile, robotic...
April 2021
Satellite servicing comes of age
... in commercial use, opening up a whole new kind of privately funded space market activity The primary mission of the MRV is to deploy Mission Extension Pods (MEPs), which are small (~350 kg) electrically-propelled vehicles about the size of a two...
December 2014
India joins the major league with the Mars Orbiter Mission
... us." India had made it to Mars on the very first attempt – when almost 75 per cent of global missions have failed This mission, launched on 5 November 2013, at India’s vast spaceport Sriharikota near Chennai, had excited everyone, and millions...
October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
... Rosetta landed on a comet. With its micro lander and accompanying flock of CubeSats, AIM will be a technology demonstration mission as well as a science study. Most excitingly, it will observe the collision of a NASA spacecraft with the asteroid and...
March 2022
Smoothing the journey to space with the satellite-as-a-service model
.... Launched in 2019, ESA’s OPS-SAT mini-satellite is a technology demonstrator, developed to test and validate radically new mission control systems and techniques. The satellite has an experimental computer 10 times more powerful than traditional ESA...
July 2014
Space technology transfer portals and the chance progress of innovation
... telescopes that operate together to simulate a single large telescope. This was the idea behind ESA’s Darwin mission concept, which posed a number of engineering challenges, including whether the light from such telescopes could be combined...
