Designing the Brain of an Intelligent Lunar Nano-rover

As the Moon reemerges as a renewed fronteer in space exploration, the Lunar Zebro project proposes to deploy a swarm of miniature rovers for efficient lunar surface exploration. One of their goals is to leverage recent advancements in deep learning and AI-accelerating hardware, in conjunction with Commercial Off-The-Shelf technologies and the...

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Designing Spacecraft Trajectories

This thesis proposes an unsupervised Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) for solving optimal control problems with the direct method to design and optimize transfer trajectories. The network adheres analytically to boundary conditions and includes the objective fitness as regularization in its loss function. A test scenario of a planar Earth...

Consensus-based single-score life cycle assessment for space missions

With a continuously growing number of satellites in orbit, it becomes increasingly important to assess their impacts on the Earth's environment in a standardised manner. While interest in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for space missions has gained in strength in the past few years – particularly in Europe – no consensus has yet been reached on a...

Online Surrogate Models for the Constrained Optimization of Interplanetary Low-Thrust Trajectories

The optimization of interplanetary, low-­thrust trajectories is a computationally expensive aspect of preliminary mission design. To reduce the computational burden associated with it, surrogate models can be used as cheap approximations of the original fitness function. Training the surrogate models in a fully online manner can be done to...

Optimum On-board Abort Guidance based on Successive Convexification for Atmospheric Re-Entry Vehicles

Space safety and hazards reduction techniques are each day becoming more important in the design and operation of space transportation vehicles. One way to mitigate risks is to use advanced guidance strategies to centralise mission planning and guidance-navigation and control. Successive convexification is a technique suitable for this purpose...

Investigating the use of neural network surrogate models in the evolutionary optimization of interplanetary low-thrust trajectories

Building on recent advances in the fields of low-thrust trajectory optimization based on shaping methods, Artificial Neural Networks, and surrogate models in Evolutionary Algorithms, an investigation into a novel optimization routine is conducted. A flexible Python tool to evaluate linked trajectories in a two-body model based on the hodographic...

Targeting a Mars science orbit from Earth using dual chemical-electric propulsion and ballistic capture

Ballistic capture is a relatively novel concept in interplanetary mission design with the potential to make Mars and other targets in the Solar System more accessible. A complete end-to-end interplanetary mission from an Earth-bound orbit to a stable science orbit around Mars (in this case, an areostationary orbit) has been conducted using this...

Asteroid Muography: Design feasibility of a hodoscopic, spacecraft-based, detector intended for muon tomography of asteroid interiors.

Asteroids, or more formally, Small Solar System Bodies, offer a wealth of scientific knowledge and, increasingly, economic potential. Regrettably, because of their small size and the fact that the largest groups of asteroids in the solar system are situated tens of millions of kilometers from Earth, ground based observations yield limited data,...

Space Missions with SOKS: The First Complete Overview of Space Missions with Sub One Kilogram Spacecraft Launched in the Past (1957-2016)

The success of CubeSat, after 2005, resulted in bright future expectations of Spacecraft with a mass below one kilogram. Although these spacecraft are usually known as Pico and FemtoSat, their ambiguous nature and inconsistent use in literature resulted in the use of an alternative, namely Sub One Kilogram Spacecraft, or simply said SOKS....

Supported independence on Mars: Design and evaluation of model-based ePartner support for astronauts on Mars

For manned missions to Mars, one of the challenges is to maintain safety in the complex and dynamic space environment. Communication to Mars will suffer from significant delays, potentially endangering a mission if assistance is needed immediately; therefore a high level of independence from ground control is necessary to be able to cope with...

Filtering techniques for orbital debris conjunction analysis

The steadily growing amount of orbital debris increases the probability and amount of collisions between two objects in orbit about the Earth. These collisions in turn create even more debris, and it is therefore important to keep track of future conjunctions. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) uses ground- and space-based sensors to...