... flat at 500 in any given year in the range. Therefore, we have 10 ‘serious anomaly’ debris strikes on 5,000 available spacecraft overall in this 10-year period. This gives us a ‘ballpark’ serious historical anomaly rate of one in 500 satellites per...
.... Engineer Joel Steinkraus uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Interplanetary challenges Interplanetary CubeSats, thanks to their low-cost, could perform highrisk...
... needs to have an average velocity of about eight percent of the speed of light. To give an indication of how fast this is, a spacecraft at eight percent of the speed of light would take about 15 seconds to cross the distance between the Earth...
... near-Earth asteroids), planetary defence efforts have not risen to the level, or the budgets, of having dedicated spacecraft missions. The most immediately relevant objects for planetary defence are asteroids of an intermediate scale, ones on the...
... missions to perform deorbiting manoeuvres, and hence self-deorbiting is often not possible. As such, ADR by means of remover spacecraft seems to be inevitable. In the net removal method a net is deployed towards the target which is captured and then...
... mass of 800kg – less than a third of Rosetta’s launch mass. Measuring 1.8 x 2.0 x 2.1m across with solar arrays stowed, the spacecraft design is a simple one with fixed solar arrays, a fixed high-gain antenna and a bipropellant propulsion system...