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...
October 2017
Exploring Jupiter’s icy moons
... life?’ The JUICE payload consists of 10 state-of-the-art instruments plus one experiment that uses the spacecraft telecommunication system with ground-based telescopes. This payload, summarised in Table 1, is capable of addressing all of the mission...
