Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 20 of 33 for “"Small Spacecraft"”.
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Exploring the Concept of a Deep Space Solar-Powered Small Spacecraft
… Voyager 1 & 2, and Pioneer 10 & 11 are the only spacecraft to ever venture past Pluto and provide information about space at those large distances. These spacecraft were very expensive and primarily designed to study planets during gravitational assist maneuvers. They were not designed to explore …
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A Novel Magnetorheological Fluid Damper for a Small Spacecraft with Flexible Appendages
<p>Small satellites have become increasingly popular over the past thirty years, particularly since the adoption of the common CubeSat architecture early this century. Because of their restricted volume and electrical budgets however, there are practical limits to the missions that small satellites …
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Small Spacecraft Design & Machine Learning-based Approaches To Lunar Robotics Navigation
… This can be facilitated by two key technologies: small satellites and machine learning (ML). Nowadays, satellite technologies have progressed to the point where off-the-shelf components can be purchased for small-satellite missions, greatly reducing the time and cost needed to prepare a new …
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A real time thermal simulator for small spacecraft in an orbital environment
Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2024-09-16 without embargo terms
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Application of ion electrospray propulsion to lunar and interplanetary missions
… are difficult to scale down, meaning the spacecraft are relatively massive and expensive. The Space Propulsion Lab (SPL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is developing compact, high specific impulse ion electrospray thrusters which do not suffer from the same sizing …
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Exploration of Planetary Bodies with Electrospray Thrusters
… current paradigm of using a single, monolithic, spacecraft limits the number of asteroid visits to one every few years. By using fleets of standardized small spacecraft, the frequency of asteroid visits could be dramatically increased while simultaneously decreasing the cost per visit. With the …
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Small Satellite Closed Ecosystems as Enabling Platforms for Low-Cost In-Space Biological Research
Over the past two decades, the popularity of small spacecraft has taken off, with nearly 200 CubeSats launched in 2019 alone. The objectives for these CubeSats have typically been Earth observation, communication, technology demonstration, or education. Very few CubeSats are launched with …
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Electrospray Thrusters in Chemical-Electric Multimode Propulsion for Small Satellites
Propulsion for small spacecraft is typically one of two modes, chemical or electric. These modes offer complementary propulsive performance: chemical propulsion provides high thrust and low specific impulse, while electric propulsion provides the inverse. As such, having access to both modes on the …
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Solid-State Flow Control for Ion Electrospray Propulsion
… ion extraction from ionic liquid propellants, to small spacecraft that exceed the capabilities of conventional chemical propulsion. Two shortcomings of such propulsion systems is their lack of lightweight propellant management due to the restrictive sizing and weight criteria for small spacecraft …
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Designing, constructing, and testing an X-ray polarimeter
… at a specific grazing angle. A design for a small spacecraft incorporating this type of instrument has been proposed, but the effectiveness of using multilayer mirrors as polarization filters has never been tested in a laboratory setting. A design for using an existing X-ray beamline as a …
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Digital Sun Sensor Design for Nanosatellite Applications
… applicable for nanosatellites and other small spacecraft is proposed. A common and well-known strategy of application of a geometrical aperture mask on the light detectors is improved upon and utilised in a non-conventional fashion in the design presented in this thesis. The main …
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Ground Station Mixed-Signal PCB and SFP Ethernet-to-Optical Connector for the Deployable Optical Receiver Aperture (DORA) CubeSat
… data rate for crosslink communications among small spacecraft. There are numerous applications for this technology, including satellite swarms/ constellations, and surface to orbit communications. DORA allows a satellite’s primary mission to continue without requiring the satellite to reorient …
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Planar Ion Probe for Low-Latitude Ionosphere/Thermosphere Enhancements in Density Cubesat Mission
… the ion saturation region, i.e. negative w.r.t. spacecraft chassis. Operating the Langmuir probe in the ion saturation region avoids excessive spacecraft charging on small spacecraft platforms, while also avoiding high-risk deployables. Specific emphasis is placed on minimizing the physical …
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A compressive sensing algorithm for attitude determination
… RN be an N-pixel image, consisting of a small number of local distinguishable objects plus noise. Our goal is to design an m x N measurement matrix A with m << N, such that we can recover an approximation to x from the measurements Ax. We construct a matrix A and recovery algorithm with …
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Design considerations for a space-based transit search for Earth analogs
… proposed concept of operations envisions thirty small spacecraft in low Earth-orbit, each individually targeted onto a bright star. Over the course of four years, these spacecraft will able to observe a sufficient number of solar-like stars to expect the detection of three habitable-zone Earths …
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Study of optical propulsion concepts and techniques for small-satellites
… a higher-fidelity model of a recently envisioned small spacecraft propulsion system for precision pointing and proximity control. Plasmonic force propulsion harnesses solar light focused onto plasmon reactive sub-wavelength nanostructures to generate polarized oscillations of electrons on the …
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Design and analysis of a stage-based electrospray propulsion system for CubeSats
The standardization of small spacecraft through CubeSats has allowed for more affordable space exploration. This progress in affordability has been limited to Earth orbit due in part to the lack of high [delta]V propulsion systems that are compatible with the small form factor. The ion Electrospray …
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Spacecraft formation flight at sun-earth/moon libration points
<p>"Formations of spacecraft, positioned near the libration points of the Sun- Earth/Moon system, have recently received an increase in interest in response to a variety of mission needs. Specifically, missions such as the Micro Arcsecond X-Ray Imaging Mission (MAXIM), Terrestrial Pathfinder (TPF), …
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Theoretical and experimental application of neural networks in spaceflight control systems
… for translational and attitude control of two small spacecraft in a deep space environment, where they provide improved position and attitude control performance as compared to a traditional control method. This work demonstrates, through simulation and hardware testing, that the two neural …
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Design of a Bimodal Chemical-Electrospray Propulsion System using Ionic Liquid Monopropellants
Two primary propulsion modes currently exist for spacecraft: chemical (e.g. monopropellant, cold gas, solid propellant) and electric (e.g. Hall thruster, ion engine, electrospray). Chemical propulsion typically offers high thrust and low specific impulse, while electric propulsion provides the …
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