76 Insight | Space vehicles The swarm also includes autorotating UAVs that are dropped from the air and collect data as they glide gently to the ground. The elongated bodies are built like seeds with a single wing and rotate on their own axis, allowing them to gently spin downwards. Their flight path can be controlled so they can be distributed over a larger area, and then used as sensor, repeater and navigation networks. The stationary gateway will also be equipped with a camera that keeps an eye on the Martian sky. “All previous Mars missions have focused on the surface of the planet, but we want to look upwards for the first time,” says Prof Kayal. Meteorites the size of a basketball appear to hit Mars almost every day, as the researchers concluded in June from seismic data. “We could further substantiate this with data if we film the entry of meteorites with our camera and correlate these events with the seismic signals,” he says. This Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) camera uses AI to detect unknown celestial phenomena, such as those observed on Earth. The integration of a camera system for sky observation on the gateway represents a significant development step towards a detection system for short-term phenomena in the Martian atmosphere and for research into UAPs. Communications between the elements described and the space segment is a key challenge in the transmission of the scientific data obtained. Due to scarce resources, this applies in particular to communications between the gateway on the surface of Mars and the relay satellites in orbit. Current landers use the S-band or X-band frequencies. However, switching from the X-band to the Ka-band is a decisive step towards increasing the data rate of the transmission channel. IQ Technologies for Earth and Space in Berlin, Germany, is developing a Ka-band capable transceiver for use on landers and small interplanetary satellites, based on its system called XLink, as well as customised and flexible transmission protocols. The robot swarm will be tested next year, when participants will simulate the Mars mission on Earth, probably in a quarry in Germany. The Wuerzburg UAP camera will play an important role as the video recordings from the sky will provide sufficiently large volumes of data to test the resilience of the communications system. Prof Kayal says that “in a possible follow-up project, the hardware would have to be adapted for use on Mars” to handle the thin atmosphere, -63 C average temperature and large dust storms that sweep across the red planet. Deep space Jupiter is about 480 million miles (about 770 million km) away from Earth. The Clipper mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, highlights the challenges of autonomous systems in deep space, particularly with radiation. With its antennas and solar arrays fully deployed, Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft that NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. Bigger than a basketball court, it measures 30.5 m long and 17.6 m wide. The main body consists of its avionics vault, RF module and propulsion module. At launch, it will weigh about 6,000 kg, with nearly half (2,750 kg) as fuel. Mission planners will send Europa Clipper past Mars and then Earth using the planets’ gravity as a slingshot to speed the spacecraft’s trek, and after journeying about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) over five years, it will fire its engines to enter orbit around Jupiter in 2030. Powering those flybys in a region of the solar system that receives only 3-4% of the sunlight that Earth gets is a challenge. The solar arrays need to be huge enough to collect sufficient light to power the craft’s instruments, electronics and other subsystems. Each solar array is composed of five panels, and they were designed and built at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Airbus in Leiden, Netherlands. At Jupiter, Europa Clipper’s arrays will together provide about 700 W, with batteries storing the power to run all of the electronics, a full payload of science instruments, communications equipment, the computer and an entire propulsion system with 24 engines. While doing all of that, the arrays will need to operate in extreme cold conditions, as the hardware’s temperature will plunge to -240 C when in Jupiter’s shadow. To ensure the panels can operate in those extremes, engineers tested them in a specialised cryogenic chamber at Liège Space Centre in Belgium. October/November 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Tenacity under construction (Image courtesy of Sierra Space)
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