October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
... a fundamental level. In recent years the combination of in-situ missions, ground-based observations, meteorite analysis and software modelling has revealed the striking variety of asteroids in terms of size, shape and constituent materials. But what...
October 2015
Growing space businesses in the UK: from incubation centres to public funding
...of Europe. Business growth for space companies inevitably translates to new technology development, whether it’s new hardware, software and applications, or services. For many space companies, there are many barriers to commercial success: Developing...
February 2016
Protecting Earth from cosmic disasters
... key principles for building such a service. The most important element of the service is the hardware and software suite (HSS) that combines a number of catastrophe scenario simulation programs for cases of asteroid or comet danger. A demo...
February 2016
A Self-Deployable Habitat for Extreme Environments (SHEE)
... MIL-STD-810F. Structural verification performed by means of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) using PTC Creo Simulate software informed the preliminary design and validated design hypotheses along the way. Analysis of the structure took...
March 2016
Resource Prospector – a Lunar Pathfinder
... around humans, which saves a considerable amount of labour attempting to qualify a new battery design. Furthermore, the RP flight software is based on that built and successfully flown on the LADEE mission. Another topic affecting both cost and...
March 2016
The Use of 3D Printing for Space Applications
... structural elements - both for spacecraft and launcher applications - the use of 3D printing combined with topology optimisation software has allowed a move from traditional to ‘bionic’ design, placing material in response to loads borne by the item...
