Lunar meteoroid impacts have caused in the past a substantial change in the lunar surface. With no atmospheric shield, the Moon is subject to many impacts from meteoroids, ranging from a few grams to a few kilograms. The high impact rate on the lunar surface has important implications for future human and robotic assets that will inhabit the Moon for significant periods of time. Therefore, a better understanding of the meteoroid population in the cislunar environment is required for future exploration of the Moon. Moreover, refining current meteoroid models is of paramount importance for many applications, including planetary science investigations. Studying meteoroid impacts can help deepening the understanding of the spatial distribution of near-Earth objects in the Solar System. The ability to predict impacts is therefore critical to many applications, both related to engineering aspects of space exploration, and to more scientific investigations regarding evolutional processes in the Solar System. The Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to observe, quantify, and characterise lunar meteoroid impacts, by detecting their impact ashes on the far-side of the Moon. This complements the information available from Earth-based observatories, which are bounded to the lunar near-side, with the goal of synthesising a global recognition of the lunar meteoroid environment. LUMIO envisages a 12U CubeSat form-factor placed in a halo orbit at Earth-Moon L2. The detections are performed using the LUMIO-Cam, an optical instrument capable of detecting light ashes in the visible spectrum (450-950 nm). LUMIO has successfully passed the PDR and is currently moving towards Phase C. We present the latest results on the modelling of the meteoroid environment in the Earth-Moon system, including an estimate of LUMIO's potential impact on our existing knowledge of meteoroids, supported by high-fidelity simulation data. An overview of the present-day LUMIO CubeSat design is also given, with a focus on the latest developments involving both the ongoing/planned scientific activities and the development of the payload. ... Read more

NASA's ICE, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) has been measuring the topography of the Earth's surface since its launch in September 2018. Equipped with a single instrument, namely, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), ICESat-2 is able to acquire the along track vertical profiles of its laser footprints. While satellite based land classification has traditionally been performed with the use of multi-spectral data, which doesn't consider the vertical structure of the surface in question, the three-dimensional Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) product provided by ATLAS allows for the observation of the vertical structure of the illuminated surface. This provides information for the discrimination of surfaces that are only distinctly different from one another in this dimension, such as different types of vegetative species. Moreover, a greater understanding of how the signal interacts with different land types will benefit current and future users of the data. This study presents a first look at the potential of the base scientific data set provided by ATLAS, "ATL03", as a means of land type classification. Features extracted from ATL03 vertical profiles are used to classify multiple land types in The Netherlands, namely, "Artificial Surfaces", "Agricultural Areas", "Forest and Semi-Natural Areas", "Wetlands" and "Water Bodies". 100m grid cells were classified and validated with the CORINE land cover database. The overall classification accuracy was 71.2%, however, after a visual inspection of the misclassification errors it was found that that the actual accuracy was a minimum of 5.5% higher, that is, 76.7%. 51 features were created to discriminate between land classes and their importance per class was analysed. In general, simple statistical parameters, such as the standard deviation and percentile ranges worked well in distinguishing between classes. For the classes with a greater vertical range, such as "Artificial Surfaces", features that described the height and prominence of its scattering surfaces were most important.



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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 kinds of perspectives. The Design Synthesis Exercise serves as the conclusion to this programme. During this final project students integrate their previously obtained knowledge and skill to examine a specific design problem in groups of ten students for the duration of eleven weeks. This final report is the last in a series of four and documents the detailed design of the concept that was chosen in the mid-term report. ... Read more