Questions tagged [mission-design]
Mission design is the process of designing a space mission to fulfill a particular objective.
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Does NOAA still plan to deploy all twelve Cosmic-2 GPS radio occultation satellites?
In the 2014 Space News interview of Jim Bridenstine (now NASA administrator, then member of the US house of representatives for Oklahoma) Q&A With Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) appears:
Space ...
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How did NASA refer to dates and times of a mission in the 1970s?
Back in the 1970s, how did NASA describe when an event happened during a mission?
For example, when Mariner 10 did its fly-by of Venus, how did the Mariner team refer to that moment in time? Did ...
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Understanding Coefficient of Drag Verses Mach Number for Launch Vehicles
I've been working on a design for a sounding rocket that can go to the Karman line, that I want to make my senior capstone project next year. As a part of this process, I am making a program to ...
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How could a minimal sample return only from the plumes of an ice moon, Ceres or Io be designed?
Would it be feasible and would it make sense to minimalistically design a sample-return-only mission (or class of missions) along these lines:
Light weight plume collecting aerogel (like the Stardust ...
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Could the International Space Station (ISS) be refurbished to save money?
I was reading an old article about deorbiting ISS (Death Star: The ISS Doesn’t Have a Way to Crash Safely) and wondering if we could refurbish ISS instead of deorbiting it? I thought deorbiting it ...
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When was Lucy's mission first scripted in Excel and why is that what Lockheed Martin chose to do it with?
CNBC's NASA spacecraft launches toward Jupiter asteroids on an intricate path charted by Excel
Years before Lucy took off, Lockheed Martin mission architect Brian Sutter used Excel to chart the ...
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What (if any) key mission events ended up falling on birthdays or anniversaries due to fine tuning by Robert Farquhar?
NPR's 2014 news article and audio podcast: Space Thief Or Hero? One Man's Quest To Reawaken An Old Friend says of Robert Farquhar (NASA, Wikipedia):
Farquhar is now 81 years old. He's been called the ...
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Has lithocapture ever been seriously considered as a method of entering orbit around a planet or moon that lacks any atmosphere?
What I mean by lithocapture is an orbital transfer maneuver used to reduce the velocity of a spacecraft from a hyperbolic trajectory to an elliptical orbit around the targeted celestial body where the ...
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Was DART meant to impact dead center?
According to eyes on the solar system, Dimorphos is tidally locked to Didymos.
If DART impact direction is perfectly aligned with Dimorphos center of mass, all of the momentum transfers into orbital ...
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How much more does it cost to produce two identically designed probes/rovers/satellites compared to making only one?
There are a number of historical planetary missions that have produced 2 flying instances. Examples include Voyager, Viking, MERS, some of the Mariners missions. Other missions have only one ...
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Why are the four launch opportunities within each Inspiration4 launch window "about an hour apart"?
In the SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch broadcast at about T-01:31:05 (91 minutes before launch) the process for selection of launch windows for the mission is roughly ...
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Just how much "dumb luck" was reaching the space age during the "Grand Tour" opportunity? Would we have been SOL 1050 or 2100 years before/after?
@OscarLanzi's answer to Why is the gas giant grand tour interval 175 years when the synodic period of Uranus and Neptune is 171 years? is an excellent answer describing a subtle situation; each pair ...
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How efficient was Telstar's solar cell configuration, compared to a flat panel?
Telstar was a series of communication satellites first launched in 1962. The body of the satellite is roughly spherical, with much of the outer surface covered in solar cells. This gives the ...
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Why have astronauts had to take Soyuz capsules "out for a spin" on 15 separate occasions? (move from one Soyuz port to another)
NASA News item Space Station Crew to Relocate Soyuz to Make Room for New Crewmates says:
Three residents of the International Space Station will take a spin around their orbital neighborhood in the ...
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Most open source spaceflight missions revealed unintentionally
As of 2021 there are few fully open source satellites (OSSI-1, UPSat, FossaSat-1, Oresat, some more?) and numerous student groups building and documenting rockets. These projects are intended to be ...
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Where can I read about Lucy's complete propulsion system?
Wikipedia's /Lucy (spacecraft) says nothing of propulsion, and it's SWRI home page for the spacecraft http://lucy.swri.edu/mission/Spacecraft.html gives specification and enumerates what's on Lucy’s ...
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How are B-Plane parameters actually determined for a planetary flyby?
Reading from this document, I am trying to simulate the New Horizons probe trajectory in GMAT and I am puzzled with how the authors of the original paper (by legendary mission designer Robert W. ...
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How will Perseverance's selfie skills compare to Curiosity's? Will it have any additional selfie-related capabilities?
The design of the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance benefits from years of operational experience with Curiosity. While 2020's instrument suite differs in several ways it looks remarkably similar to ...
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How does the centre of mass of a spacecraft vary in a trajectory?
We all know that rockets have thrust along with a large mass flow, meaning that their mass is constantly depleted. For ground launcher rockets, the propellants form a large part of the mass and this ...
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Why are hexa airfoils used on rockets despite having more drag that diamond airfoils?
I was doing a study on airfoils shape for a rocket. I tested the diamond and the hexagonal airfoil with Missile DatCom, RasAero and the Shock Expansion theory and from my results it seems like the ...
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How to specify constraints for launch windows
I'm trying to learn trajectory design and optimization, and I'm struggling to understand how one determines the launch window using trajectory design programs.
I know that my satellite's initial ...
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What are the major tradeoffs for a launch vehicle having either one 400 kN engine or eight 50 kN engines?
Given the problem of choosing to build and launch a small rocket to put a smallsat into orbit with either of these two configurations, what are the major tradeoffs between them?
For specific issues ...
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How is the moon's orbital motion accounted for in determining the best observation platform/location for JWST at L2?
The moon's periodic motion would appear to impose a perturbation to the otherwise equilibrium state of the solar/earth L2 point.
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How the number of Sun sensors is chosen for a given spacecraft and mission?
I have to study an ADCS sensors suite and I am struggling to find a criteria to decide how many and in which directions the sun sensors shall be mounted, considering that they are coupled with star ...
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Design and optimization of a Sun-synchronous repeating ground track orbit constellation
I am currently researching about this topic and am very new to this.
Have no clue how to go about designing a group of imaging satellites (constellation) that are sun synchronous with repeating ground ...
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Most dog-legged launch?
There are enough questions about dogleg maneuvers that there is now a dogleg tag, but the definitive dogleg answer is @JakeBlockers (linked below) which includes images of a dogleg from Florida that ...
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How might one redesign a "Curiosity-class" rover for a mission to Vesta or Ceres?
Vishnu Reddy (1, 2, 3) and their research group are quite active in space exploration both in Earth-based observation and now in the design of future spacecraft, and have recently pseudo-confirmed ...
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Tools for high-thrust trajectory optimization
I've tried using some of the freely available tools for making pork chop plots to explore the potential of transfers between planets.
But as far as I can tell, these really are not designed for and do ...
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Has budgetary support for Juno been extended, or is it running out?
The Yahoo news article NASA’s Juno snapped another photo of Jupiter that looks like a watercolor painting is a reminder that Juno is generating plenty of data and beautiful images.
The Juno ...
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Why isn't the Europa mission more ambitious given the capacity of SLS?
SLS Block I will have about three and Block II five times more capacity in terms of payload mass to LEO, than any launcher which has been used for an interplanetary mission to date. But the mission ...
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How is the trajectory of a gravitational assist flyby mission computed?
Based on much research after posing my previous question, as well as the discussions with the rest of the community, I now (think I have) a deeper understanding of how mission planning works.
Based on ...
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Beginner to simulating communications systems of space missions. I have GMAT, MATLAB and NASA's SPICE library. Where would I start?
I recently managed to load SPICE kernels into GMAT to simulate the trajectories of real missions, and got its MATLAB interface working (still trying to understand how to use the two software together)....
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Unity 22's ground track; which direction was it moving horizontally at 1085 kph during its weightless phase?
update: According to The Newyorker's The Red Warning Light on Richard Branson’s Space Flight there is FR24 data available.
A quick check of the videos shows Virgin Galactic's Unity 22's apogee of ...
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How often are fewer than three astronauts present when moving a Soyuz spacecraft from one docking port to another?
CNN's Astronauts relocated a spacecraft outside the International Space Station (was it inside before?) says:
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, along with NASA astronaut ...
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NASA Project Management Wall Chart
As an Undergraduate student and new to the field of Space mission design and systems etc, I want to know is there any detail explanation with examples of the jargon terms mentioned in the chart below? ...
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What ways can a University Student get involved in Trajectory Design?
As a physics student (not an engineer) in India, I can't seem to find a lot of opportunities to involve myself in what I find most appealing about what I'm studying in University i.e. astrodynamics. ...
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Can the different "additional" demands on the Space Shuttle be broken down in terms of additional demands on hardware? How so?
Related: Could Space Shuttle's wings be diminished?
During the sanctioning and early development of the Space Shuttle, things got somewhat budget-political, and a number of additional design ...
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Name any misssions which were conducted due to urgency or due to some emergency in a very limited time?
I would like to know if there were any space missions which were conducted due to an immediate emergency and I wish to know how they were managed.
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Compressible foam in space
I've started looking into the use of compressible foams used in space (specially in approximately 500 km SS orbit). I've tried to find some form of heritage or proof of concept missions that have used ...
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Optimal Propulsion Strategy for a Mars Mission
I am designing a mission to Mars for a class project aimed at studying Mars' space weather. The mission is constrained to use a single Vega-C launch.
I need to determine whether using a propulsion ...
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Hawkeye 360 Triangular Formation Flying Design
I recently chanced upon the paper Making the Invisible Visible: Precision RF-Emitter Geolocation from Space by the HawkEye 360 Pathfinder Mission (32nd Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites) ...
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What resources are available to turn into storable hypergolic on the Jovian moons
I was thinking about whether a mission utilizing ISRU on a lander to refuel a transfer craft.
However, I don't know how to figure out what materials are available in large quantity ON THE EQUATORIAL ...
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Installation procedure for NASA's Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG)?
I am doing trajectory optimization, and want to use NASA's Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) software to investigate dates for various trajectories. However, this software does not come ...
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NASA GMAT Hardware in the Loop testing
We are currently evaluating various Mission Analysis & Simulation tools, one of which is NASA's GMAT (2020). One of our requirements is for the tool to support HITL testing. However, i am unable ...
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More advanced alternatives to Trajectory Optimization Tool?
I've been using Arrowstar's Trajectory Optimization Tool to plan interplanetary transfers, and it works well. The next thing I want to do is plan gravity assists from the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point ...
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Solar Sail mission
Sorry for my English. I'm not native speaker
I would like your advice in solar sail mission simulation. The purpose is to compare results with results in Wolfram Mathematica.
We have CubeSat with ...
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How do I construct halo orbits around the Sun-Earth L2 point in GMAT? What should the state vector of the spacecraft be?
I am new to trajectory design, and have been using GMAT to learn it since it's free, unlike STK. I have been trying to design a script that takes a spacecraft from Earth orbit to a halo orbit around ...
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Closest distance that two unrelated spacecraft have come while both in heliocentric orbits?
In 2015 STEREO A and B passed each other passing roughly behind the Sun at the same time from opposite directions as seen from Earth. But these two are part of a single mission, put into these orbits ...
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Did JUNO adjust it's orbit in order to fly over Clyde's spot again?
Phys.org's Juno returns to 'Clyde's Spot' on Jupiter says:
The feature is informally named for amateur astronomer Clyde Foster of Centurion, South Africa, who discovered it in 2020 using his own 14-...
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Did/do the current Mars missions coordinate?
The answer to the question why there are several Mars missions under way concurrently is that orbital mechanics offer an advantageous launch window of a few weeks every 26 months. With more than one ...
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