Showing papers in "Acta Astronautica in 2014"

TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of 3D printing technology for building habitats on the Moon using lunar soil, also called regolith, has been evaluated using a particular patented 3D-printing technology, which is the closest to achieving full scale construction of buildings and the physical and chemical characteristics of lunar regolith and terrestrial regolith simulants have been assessed with respect to the working principles of such technology.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine atmospheric drag models and data usage involved with propagating near-Earth satellites, and quantify sources of uncertainty in satellite propagation resulting from several atmospheric models, or from the treatment of input data indices.

TL;DR: In this article, the impact of vibrational amplitude on the dynamic pull-in instability and fundamental frequency of actuated microbeams by introducing the second order frequency-amplitude relationship was investigated.

TL;DR: In this article, a modified ka-omega turbulence model is used to simulate flame acceleration in the Shchelkin spiral section of the system, and the results of numerical simulations were compared with experiments, which had been performed in the same size detonation chamber and turbulent spiral ring section, and with theoretical data on the Chapman-Jouguet detonation parameters.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of magnesium on the burning characteristics of boron particles was investigated, and the influence of magnesium addition on sample combustion flame, BORON ignition delay time, and initial temperature of Boron oxidation was investigated.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of process parameters (spindle speed, traverse rate, and length of joint) on the wear process of FSW-ed MMC joints is investigated.

TL;DR: Using the Acceleration Reconnection and Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS) mission orbit as a platform, the fundamental behavior of the trajectories is explored using Poincare maps in the circular restricted three-body problem as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: In this review, some recent findings from studies performed in Space or on Earth, simulating space-like levels of radiation with ground-based facilities, are reported to understand the effect of ionizing radiation on mammalian and plant cells.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented an analysis of utilizing an ICAN laser for the purpose of tracking and de-orbiting hyper-velocity space debris, and showed that the kHz repetition rate and kW average power of ICAN would be sufficient to de-orbit small 1-10 cm debris within a single instance via laser ablation.

TL;DR: The error budget reassessment provides adequate information for building guidelines and strategies to effectively improve the navigation accuracies of future deep space missions and the system configurations proposed for the upgrade of ESA's tracking and orbit determination systems are reported.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed a dynamic logistics network formulation for lifecycle optimization of mission sequences as a system-level integrated method to find an optimal combination of technologies to be used at each stage of the campaign.

TL;DR: The Gossamer Deorbiter as mentioned in this paper is a scalable stand-alone system that can be attached to a low-to-medium mass host satellite for end-of-life disposal from low Earth orbit.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the design of the GNC system of a ground testbed for spacecraft rendezvous and docking experiments, which consists of a flat floor and two scaled vehicles, one active chaser and one semi-active target.

TL;DR: In this paper, an active debris removal method is explored that utilizes fuel reserves on a recently launched upper stage to rendezvous with, and tether to, debris, and the system's tethered dynamics are explored using a discretized tether model attached to six degree of freedom end bodies.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors presented a new approach using rapid, head-on interaction in 10-40 seconds rather than 4 minutes, using 20-40kW bursts of 100-ps, 355-nm UV pulses from a space-based station in low Earth orbit (LEO).

TL;DR: In this article, a robust trajectory linearization control (TLC) scheme consisting of five robust subsystem controllers is proposed, and the stability of the overall closed-loop system with the four aforementioned uncertainties and additional singular perturbations is analyzed.

TL;DR: In this paper, a ground-based laser-orbital-debris-removal (LODR) system is proposed to remove both small and large objects from the LEO.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a command shaping technique based on the knowledge of the parameters (inertial and elastics) of the VLSS to reduce the mutual interaction between rigid attitude and flexible dynamics.

TL;DR: In this paper, a nonlinear control technique for coupled orbital and attitude relative motion of formation flying is proposed based on the solution of the State-Dependent Riccati Equation (SDRE), which is one of the more promising nonlinear techniques for regulating nonlinear systems.

TL;DR: In this article, the effects of applying heat generation sources and changing inlet flow total temperature on the starting point of shock, shock strength, minimum pressure, as well as the maximum flow Mach number were investigated.

TL;DR: In this paper, a transverse injection flow field with a freestream Mach number of 35 has been optimized by the NSGA II coupled with the Kriging surrogate model, and the variance analysis method and the extreme difference analysis method have been employed to evaluate the values of the objective functions.

TL;DR: In this article, the pull-in instability characteristics of hydrostatically and electrostatically actuated circular nanoplates including surface stress effect were investigated, and the results indicated that surface stress effects played a more significant role in the pullin phenomenon of lower thicknesses.

TL;DR: In this paper, a cavity flameholder with an upstream injected jet in a Ma 2.52 supersonic flow was investigated numerically, and it was found that the jet-cavity interactions remarkably enhanced the mass exchange between the fluids in and out of the cavity, resulting in reduced residence time of the cavities fluids.

TL;DR: The sample return mission to a primitive Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) MarcoPolo-R proposed to the European Space Agency in December 2010 was selected in February 2011 with three other missions addressing different science objectives for the two-year Assessment Phase of the Medium-Class mission competition of the Cosmic Vision 2 program for launch in 2022 as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this article, a new method is proposed to analyze the dynamic reliability and parameter sensitivity of space manipulator with harmonic drive, which is suitable for reliability apportionment when the design information has not been clearly identified, particularly in early design phrase.

TL;DR: A method to calculate the cable network stretched on the LDA structure is developed, which combines the original force density method and the parabolic surface constraint, and genetic algorithm is applied to ensure that each cable reaches a desired tension, which avoids the non-convergence issue effectively.

TL;DR: In this paper, a modular deployable solar panel system for Cubesats, consisting of a modular hinge and spring system that can be potentially used on-board single (1U), double (2U), triple (3U), and six units (6U) CubesATS, is described.

TL;DR: Simulation results indicate that the proposed filter provides more accurate estimates of relative attitude and position over than the extended Kalman filter.

TL;DR: In this paper, a double-ring deployable truss, prestressed cable nets, and a metallic reflector mesh are used to enhance the stiffness of the entire antenna over single-ring systems with relatively low mass gain.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a concept for a reorbiter to reorbit large GEO debris objects such as satellites and rocket upper stages left in orbit after the ends of their missions, based on the idea of thrusting a debris object by irradiating it with an ion beam.