November 2016
Rosetta - an eventful cruise phase
...somewhere a leak of the helium gas on-board the spacecraft. The spacecraft was safe at this time, as the potential ..., to analysing, planning and testing a configuration of the spacecraft that would reduce the active units to the absolutely essential ...
June 2017
Bepi-Colombo will unveil Mercury’s secrets
... of Mercury. It was therefore necessary to devise an intricate design of curved mirrors that will discard heat generated by the spacecraft, while simultaneously deflecting the heat coming from the planet. Onwards and upwards Although many issues...
August 2018
Flying to the stars
... needs to have an average velocity of about eight percent of the speed of light. To give an indication of how fast this is, a spacecraft at eight percent of the speed of light would take about 15 seconds to cross the distance between the Earth...
April 2019
The changing economics of space
... the end of their lives with a suite of operational hardware on-board that it still functioning. It’s just that the spacecraft has run out of fuel and can’t be fully controlled. Representation of a mega constellation around Earth. Enabling missions...
September 2020
Tackling space debris - a global priority
... missions to perform deorbiting manoeuvres, and hence self-deorbiting is often not possible. As such, ADR by means of remover spacecraft seems to be inevitable. In the net removal method a net is deployed towards the target which is captured and then...
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...
