August 2018
Flying to the stars
... 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...
September 2019
A new era in planetary defence missions
... 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...
September 2020
Tackling space debris - a global priority
... 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...
October 2020
Superconductors - key to unlocking high power space missions
... mass, of such cables increases exponentially, as does the amount of waste heat generated. In the case of nuclear-powered spacecraft, long distances are necessitated due to safety considerations, and the mass of conventional systems becomes even more...
October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
... 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...
August 2016
Rosetta overcomes major setback
... as a failure by the fault detection and recovery logic. Also the whole swing-by scenario had to be re-designed to establish a spacecraft configuration that would minimise power consumption whilst in the shadow. It was not an easy task but we had...
