Explore Engineering

Pulsar-based Navigation and Time Keeping for Space Exploration

Too Distant, Too Uncertain, Too Unforgiving: Assuring Autonomous Space Explorers We’ve Yet to Trust

Hybrid Space-Ground Observatories: Revolutionizing the Search for Earth-Like Exoplanets

One Shot to Glory: Designing Adaptive Missions to the Outer Solar System and Beyond

Interplanetary Laser Trilateration Network

Nano Engineering for Exo Discoveries: Advancing Metasurfaces for Exoplanet Exploration

Sample Return from all across the Solar System

Enabling Fast Response Missions to NEOs, ISOs, and LPCs

Ocean World Microhabitats: Targeting and Life Detection Techniques

Planetary Science of Venus and the Promise of In Situ Sampling Techniques

Building a Tiny Open-Source Space Program: From ChipSats to Autonomous Swarms

The aerospace industry has experienced a dramatic shift over the last decade: Flying a spacecraft has gone from something only government agencies and large corporations could afford to something universities and small startups can accomplish on a shoestring budget. This talk is about pushing these limits – building spacecraft that are dramatically smaller, simpler, and cheaper – and taking advantage of computation, networking, and autonomy to accomplish exciting new science and exploration missions, while also bringing spaceflight within reach of more people. Recent missions that will be highlighted include KickSat-2, which deployed the four-gram Sprite – the world’s smallest spacecraft; V-R3x, which demonstrated mesh networking between a group of CubeSats; and PY4, which demonstrated low-cost attitude control, formation flying, and radio-navigation capabilities on a swarm of two-kilogram satellites. Nearly all of the hardware and software created for these missions is readily available on the internet to be studied, copied, and reimagined by others.

Revolutionizing Astrophysics: How Space and Ground Telescopes Can Work Together

Hybrid observatories, combining space assets and ground-based telescopes, can enable extraordinary advances in capabilities and startling scientific discoveries. Orbiting laser guide stars in high Earth orbit can remain passively within arcseconds of a target area for hours at a time, enabling diffraction-limited adaptive optics imaging at visible wavelengths where the sky is darkest. A test at Keck with the orbiting LCRD satellite has recently demonstrated this capability. With a 30 m telescope, angular resolution of a few milliarcsec is feasible. With point source observing speed scaling as D^4, it would be 20,000x faster than Hubble and 1000 x faster than HWO. Such a guide star working with the DKIST could obtain the first sharp images of the solar corona, with a resolution of 25 km. An orbiting standard light source could improve absolute and color photometric accuracy to better than 1%, with impact on high redshift photometric distance scales, dark energy measurements, and on exoplanet models. An orbiting mm wave antenna working with the Event Horizon Telescope could measure the details of photon rings and hence the spins of black holes. Most extreme, a 30 m class telescope with an orbiting 100 m diameter starshade could image exoplanets directly, if it could be built, with 5x the angular resolution of HWO and 1000 x the observing speed. Except for the starshade, all of these could be built as CubeSat or Explorer-class missions.

Sample Return Missions from Small Bodies – Hayabusa, Hayabusa2, and Beyond

Small bodies such as asteroids and comets are believed to preserve records of the origin and early evolution of the Solar System. To demonstrate their significance, JAXA has conducted two asteroid sample return missions: the Hayabusa mission, which returned samples from the S-type asteroid Itokawa in 2010, and Hayabusa2, which delivered samples from the C-type asteroid Ryugu in 2020. In this talk, Shogo Tachibana will present the findings from these samples, compare them with those from the B-type asteroid Bennu brought back by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, and discuss the achievements of small-body sample return missions. He will also share expectations for future sample return missions.

Field Exploration and Life Detection Sampling through Planetary Analogue Research (FELDSPAR)

Planetary exploration missions rely on orbiters to collect large-scale data, while landed missions, constrained to footprints of a rover or lander, collect data from individual samples on the mm to cm scale. It is currently not well-constrained how biosignatures, or even habitable zones, are distributed over these spatial scales. FELDSPAR has sought to conduct field studies analogous to Mars sample return from landing site selection, in-field sample selection, remote or stand-off analysis, in situ analysis, and home laboratory (sample return) analysis. This talk will present an overview of the data collected throughout the six years of FELDSPAR studies. Volcanic regions, particularly in Iceland, have similarities to Martian terrains spectroscopically and can have exceptionally low biomass. The four field sites studied include two recent lava fields at Fimmvörðuháls and Holuhraun, a recently deglaciated plain (Mælifellssandur), and an alluvial plain (Dyngjusandur), with samples collected in nested triangular grids every order of magnitude from the 10 cm scale to the 1 km scale. In-field analyses included overhead imagery at 1 m to 200 m elevation, in-field reflectance spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence. ATP content was analyzed in a field lab, and Raman spectroscopy, DNA content, metagenomic sequencing, and qPCR for fungal, bacterial, and archaeal DNA are ongoing in the home lab(s). Lessons learned from the various FELDSPAR rocky terrains will be presented, and their potential applicability, or lack thereof, to icy terrains will be discussed.

Webinar: Interstellar Comets – Visitors from Another Solar System – Natural or Artificial?

The recent discovery of the first interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, passing through the solar system in 2017 has provoked intense, sustained interest by the scientific community – but the interest has not always been purely scientific. `Oumuamua was visible to ground based telescopes for less than a month, and a little longer from space. After this short period of study `Oumuamua’s characteristics were quite different from what scientists expected from the first interstellar object (ISO). There have been a huge number of papers written about this one object, energizing a new interdisciplinary discussion about planet formation. ISOs enable the close up study of material from other planetary systems, allowing us to assess similarities and differences in the chemistry and physical processes driving planetary growth in other planetary systems. The second ISO, 2I/Borisov, was discovered less than 2 years after the first, much sooner than expected, and has characteristics which are very different from the first ISO, looking more like a solar system comet.

Tyranny of the Rocket Equation

The rocket equation, a simple momentum balance that defines the performance of a rocket, holds a tyrannical grip on the design of these machines. From this equation it becomes apparent that the giant leap for mankind was not the first step on the Moon but attaining Earth orbit. A rocket ready to launch into earth orbit is 85 to 90 percent propellant and less than 2 percent useful payload. Humanity may visit other planetary surfaces but will never have thriving outposts if the paradigm of taking everything from planet Earth is kept. One possible way to break this tyranny is to use planetary resources at location for the materials needed by the hundreds of metric tons. These materials derive their utility from their bulk chemical composition or mechanical properties (rocket fuel, life support, construction materials like bricks and cement). The need to find new places to live and resources to use will eventually beckon humanity off the planet.

Airships: A New Horizon for Science

Over the last decade, a few commercial telecommunication ventures as well as several well-funded military programs have attempted to develop autonomous, solar powered, high-altitude light-than-air (LTA) vehicles known as airships, which could maneuver and station-keep for weeks, months, or even years.

Titan: A Strange Yet Familiar New World

The Cassini mission to Titan has unveiled a world that experiences surface temperatures about 200 degrees colder than Earth's, receives 100 times less sunlight, where hydrocarbon molecules rain from the sky and water ice is as hard as rock. But for all of its strange thermophysical and chemical state, Titan exhibits landforms remarkably familiar to our own: extensive dunes in the dry regions, braided channel networks draining from mountains to large basins, and perhaps most astonishingly, large seas and lakes in the high latitudes filled with liquid methane and ethane. Professor Ahronson will review the discoveries of the recent flybys of Titan with a focus on what has been learned about its lakes, their seasonal evolution, and the hypothesis that they undergo periodic change over tens of thousands of years, analogous to (Croll) Milankovitch climate cycles on Earth.

Single Photon Detectors – from A to B (from Astronomy to Biology, and Beyond)

Professor Daniel Prober describes the development and uses of single photon detectors, covering photon energies from MeV to meV, and wavelengths from 1 picometer to 1 mm. The developments have been driven by many applications, drawn from astronomy, biology, communications, and materials analysis. Intended for a general scientific audience, Professor Prober presents a selection of these developments and applications.