Development of Telemetry Ranging for Small Satellites: A Ranging technique for Delfi-PQ

Small satellite systems such as CubeSats and PocketQubes have strict requirements in terms of size, weight, and power available onboard. In light of these constraints, small satellite systems typically omit the inclusion of a ranging system due to its power and specialized hardware requirements. However, new research in satellite ranging...

Neural-Network Based Thermal Modeling of Small Satellites: A First-Principles Approach

The use of small satellites, enabled by the standardization of the CubeSat specifications and miniaturization in electronics, has seen a rapid increase in the past decades. The low-cost and short development time of these satellites has made them an attractive option for both commercial and academic applications, making space exploration more...

Potential Hazardous Asteroids: Efficient orbit and uncertainty propagation

The number of objects in space is increasing over time, and therefore it is desired to find more efficient propagation models in terms of accuracy and computational speed. This thesis project focuses on the propagation of the state and uncertainties of Potential Hazardous Asteroids, to predict potential Earth impacts. A machine learning...

The relation between clouds and surface water on exoplanets

To answer the question of habitability of other planets, it is crucial to find liquid water. As a planet’s surface might be difficult to characterise through observations, the observation of cloud composition and coverage could possibly reveal the presence of large bodies of surface water. Climate code SPEEDY is used to investigate relations...

Cluster-based search space pruning in single leg low-thrust trajectory optimisation problems

Many contemporary interplanetary missions use efficient low-thrust engines to reach the far corners of our Solar System. Their trajectories, however, have proven to be complicated to optimise due to the non-impulsive manoeuvres involved in low-thrust spaceflight. Even though shaping methods have been used extensively to reduce the computational...

Cold Atom Interferometry for enhancing the Radio Science gravity experiment: A Phobos case study

Interplanetary missions have relied on Radio Science (RS) for recovering gravity fields via detecting their signature on the spacecraft’s trajectory. Yet the weak gravitational fields of small bodies, coupled with the prominent influence of confounding accelerations, hinder the efficacy of this method. Meanwhile, quantum sensors based on Cold...

Design of the Nutrient Delivery System for the EDEN NextGen Greenhouse Module

Completely regenerative life support systems are essential to the long-term exploration of far-off locations in space. The shift from physico-chemical to bio-regenerative life support systems has the potential to be a major step towards that goal. The cultivation of plants as part of such a system not only provides life support functions and...

Formation of planets via pebble accretion

Within a Protoplanetary disk (PPD), planets form from micron sized particles, but what are the processes taken for planet formation? How does the evolution of micron sized particles via settlement and coagulation lead to the gigantic planets as the ones in our Solar System? This thesis explores the planet formation process of pebble accretion...

Low-Thrust Interplanetary Trajectory Optimization Using Pre-Trained Artificial Neural Network Surrogates

The use of low-thrust propulsion for interplanetary missions requires the implementation of new methods for the preliminary design of their trajectories. This thesis proposes a method using the Monotonic Basin Hopping global optimization algorithm to find feasible trajectories with optimum use of the mass of fuel for the case in which the...

A Coupled 2D Translational-Rotational-Tidal model on Solar system bodies using a Maxwell viscoelastic rheology

Planetary observational accuracy increases and the dynamical modeling of tidal behaviour has to follow. In this thesis, a newly developed method (Correia et al. 2014; Boue et al. 2016) to deal with tidal interactions in a 2D two body problem is validated and for the first time applied to Solar system dynamics on a short time-scale. This method...

Asteroid characterization through serendipitous detection by the Mid-Infrared Instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope

The interest in asteroids is increasing, due to their promising clues on the origin of the Solar System, e.g. their albedos and sizes can provide insight into the protosolar nebula. The new scientific mission scheduled to launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), provides an opportunity for observation of asteroids. In this thesis,...

An interactive, web-based, near-Earth orbit visualization tool

Even though several orbit visualization tools exist, the ability to compare multiple satellite orbits or manipulate time are not readily available with the current tools. Furthermore, most other visualization tools require additional effort or installations to work properly. To address these issues with other tools an interactive, web-based,...

Transfer of Polarized Light in an (Exo)planetary Atmosphere-Ocean System

Fresnel reflection of starlight in the oceans of exoplanets results in two main phenomena: (1) a glint in the exoplanetary ocean, whose size increases with wind speed, and (2) a maximum degree of polarization at the Brewster angle. The corresponding features in the planetary phase curve, i.e. the flux and degree of polarization of the reflected...

ESS: A Settlement Site Selection Tool for a Human Mars Base

In recent years, private entities have joined the race to send humans to the Red Planet. While Mars is well defined as the next frontier for human space flight, little work has been done towards identifying possible settlement sites on its surface. The current site proposals use a bottom-up approach, that is focusing on one settlement site and...

Applying Reliable Methods to Analyse and Deflect an Asteroid: Design Synthesis Exercise Spring 2016; Group S03: Final review

This report presents the Final design of the Design Synthesis Exercise (DSE) to 'Capture a Small Asteroid and Change its Orbit' at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology. The bachelor programme 'Aerospace Engineering' comprises several projects enabling students to explore aeronautics and space from different...