Deep Space Craft

Abstract

Front cover illustrations: (Upper) Artist's rendition of the Dawn spacecraft operating its ion propulsion system upon arrival at the main-belt asteroid Vesta in 2011. Image courtesy McRel, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning. (Next lower) Artist's concept of the Phoenix lander operating in the Martian Arctic, as it did from May to November 2008. Image courtesy University of Arizona. (Lower left) Artist's concept of the Cassini spacecraft as it operates in Saturn orbit July 2004 through the present day. Back cover illustrations: (Left) A near-duplicate of the Mars Phoenix lander used in developing command sequences before being sent to the spacecraft. Here, members of the Robotic Arm Engineering Team test the arm's motorized raft in the Payload Interoperability Testbed at the University of Arizona, Tucson in July 2008. Image courtesy University of Arizona. (Right) Rob Manning, Chief Engineer of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, cheers along with other team members as the ®rst images from rover Spirit come back from Mars. Courtesy NASA/Bill Ingalls.

Microbial applications for sustainable space exploration beyond low Earth orbit

“…Martian and lunar basalt are known to contain many valuable metals, such as iron, nickel, copper, vanadium, and many others, that are suitable substrates that can be biomined by microbes 156,157 . Biomining of these metals from Martian and lunar surfaces could provide the necessary materials for the in-situ construction of buildings, electrical systems, spacecraft equipment, solar cells, and heating and lighting systems in human habitats beyond LEO 158 .…”

The vectorial photoelectric effect under solar irradiance and its application to sun sensing

“…In cases of failure, when the control system has lost attitude knowledge, the sun vector is directly used as input to the safe mode control system. When only a fractional area of the celestial sphere is covered, an autonomous recovery operation is used to rotate the spacecraft until the sun sensor has acquired the sun in its field of view [5]. Satellites operating in a geostationary orbit (GEO) are usually launched into a geosynchronous transfer orbit from where they are transferred to their final GEO position via apogee boost motor (ABM) firings.…”