Found 7 talks width keyword Space missions

Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative by the Breakthrough Foundation to prove ultra-fast ultra-light nanospacecraft can be launched by laser radiation pressure to nearby stars, and will lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Designs for a 0.2c Alpha Centauri mission minimize beam director capital cost by accelerating a ~4 m, several gram diameter sailcraft for ~10 min. A number of hard engineering challenges remain to be solved before these missions can become a reality: Large coherent laser arrays are required. No consensus has been reached on the most suitable sail geometry for stable flight, “beam-riding”. The sail itself requires major advances in materials science and photonic design to produce materials with the required absorptance, emittance, reflectance, areal density and operating temperature. Along the way, the project will enable increasingly fast outer solar system and interstellar precursor missions. Breakthrough Starshot will pave the way for multi-lightyear pipelines of sailcraft that fly past each target star every few weeks. Beams such as Starshot will produce an extremely observable transient feature of Earth and therefore could be an observable of extraterrestrial advanced civilizations.

A major goal for NASA's human spaceflight program is to send astronauts to the Moon and beyond in the coming decades. The first missions would focus on exploration of the Moon with the intent of developing the technologies and capabilities to then proceed on to Mars.  

However, there are many objects that show promise as future destinations beyond the Moon, which do not require the extensive mission capabilities or durations required for Mars exploration. These objects are known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and would undoubtedly provide a great deal of technical and engineering data on spacecraft operations for future human space exploration and serve as stepping stones for NASA’s efforts to reach Mars.  A subset of these objects has been identified within the ongoing investigation of the NASA Near-Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets Study (NHATS).

Information obtained from a human investigation of a NEO, together with ground-based observations and prior spacecraft investigations of asteroids and comets (e.g., Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx), will provide a real measure of ground truth to data obtained from terrestrial meteorite collections.  In addition, robotic precursor and human exploration missions to NEOs would allow NASA and its international partners to gain operational experience in performing complex tasks (e.g., sample collection, deployment of payloads, retrieval of payloads, etc.) with crew, robots, and spacecraft under microgravity conditions at or near the surface of a small body.  This would provide an important synergy between the worldwide Science and Exploration communities, which will be crucial for development of future international deep space exploration architectures and has potential benefits for future exploration of destinations beyond the Earth-Moon system (e.g., Mars).

BRITE-Constellation (BRight Target Explorer) consists of six nano-satellites aiming to study of variability of the brightest stars in the sky. Austria, Poland, and Canada contribute two spacecraft each all launched into low earth orbits. The satellites have the same structure: they are 20 cm cubes, 7kg mass, with a CCD photometer fed by 3 cm aperture telescopes. The main difference between pairs of satellites is the instrument passband which set to blue (400-450nm) or red (550-700nm). The core scientific objective is to obtain high precision two color photometry, with a time base of up to 180 days, of stars brighter than 4.5 mag in order to study stellar pulsations, spots, and granulation, eclipsing binaries, search for planets and more.
Since the launch of the first two BRITE satellites in February 2013 more than 5 and a half years of experiences in space have been gathered to run the mission and a summary of lessons learned will be presented.  By now more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific articles have been published based on data collected by BRITE-Constellation satellites in space and most results presented therein benefitted greatly from supplementary spectroscopy by meter size telescopes obtained on ground.

Series: XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics: Solar System Exploration

Topic: Exploration of the Solar System by the European Space Agency

Lecture 2: European exploration of Mars

In this second talk Dr. Cardesín reviews the ESA program for Mars exploration, describing the Mars Express mission and its scientific goals, as well as the ExoMars mission and its current status. 

Series: XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics: Solar System Exploration

Topic: Cometary Science and the Rosetta Mission.

Lecture 2: Rosetta, a voyage to a comet and to our origins.

In this second talk, Dr. Küppers gives an overview of the Rosetta mission, from its launch in 2004 until the end of the mission, in September 2016, only a month before the celebration of this Winter School. The talk includes information on the instruments on-board the spacecraft, the two fly-byes to asteroids Steins and Lutetia, and the results obtained from the observations of comet 67P/C-G. 

Series: XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics: Solar System Exploration

Topic: Cometary Science and the Rosetta Mission.

Lecture 1: Comets and the Rosetta mission. 

Dr. Küppers gives a general overview on comets in the context of the formation of the Solar System, describing their physical, dynamical, and compositional properties. The speaker describes cometary missions that have been sent before the Rosetta mission and lists some of the most important cometary science questions that are still unsolved or under debated.

Series: XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics: Solar System Exploration

Topic: Exploration of the Solar System by the European Space Agency

Lecture 1: Overview of ESA Solar System Missions 

Dr. Cardesin introduces in this talk the European Space Agency, describing the agency's structure, budget, and activites. Particular atention is paid to the ESA Science Program and to the role of ESAC (Madrid), with a description of all past, present, and future space missions in which the ESA has been/is/will be involved related to Solar System exploration.