Potential Missions Research Articles

Development of High-Altitude Hybrid Fan Centrifugal Compressor System for Turbochargers and Utilization of AI to Improve Combustor Performance

This opinion paper focus on the belief of the authors, that adding a fan or pre-compression stage in front of a centrifugal impeller typically found in commercial turbochargers has the potential to increase the overall pressure ratio of the turbocharger, which help with high-altitude operation. Additionally, this paper address conviction of the authors that the utilization of artificial intelligence and data science will improve combustor performance.  The focus is on the development of high-altitude hybrid fan centrifugal and compressor system for turbochargers. Current attainable flight times of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) at high altitudes greatly hinder potential mission capabilities. Specifically, the US Army’s small UAVs are propelled by automotive compression-ignition (CI) engines, which deliver the required high efficiency and low fuel consumption but lack the ability to ingest an adequate mass flow rate of low-density air into their compression cylinders at high altitudes. A hybrid fan- centrifugal compressor system will be developed and integrated onto these UAV engines to provide the air mass flow rate necessary to operate at 60% of maximum sea-level power while at 30,000 feet altitude; thus, reducing the hindrance of high altitude environmental factors on UAV missions. The combined system will be integrated on a dual shaft to allow for fan and compressor to rotate at different speeds. Dual shafts are, typically, used in turbojet engines for combined fan and axial flow compressors for delivering large air mass flow. This hybrid fan-centrifugal compressor system will offer higher pressure and mass flow rate to the current Army UAV engines than standard turbochargers, while maintaining simplicity and manufacturability.

The search for living worlds and the connection to our cosmic origins

One of the most exciting scientific challenges is to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy and search for evidence of life. During the past 20 years the detection of exoplanets, orbiting stars beyond our own, has moved from science fiction to science fact. From the first handful of gas giants, found through radial velocity studies, detection techniques have increased in sensitivity, finding smaller planets and diverse multi-planet systems. Through enhanced ground-based spectroscopic observations, transit detection techniques and the enormous productivity of the Kepler space mission, the number of confirmed planets has increased to more than 2000. Several space missions, including TESS (NASA), now operational, and PLATO (ESA), will extend the parameter space for exoplanet discovery towards the regime of rocky Earth-like planets and take the census of such bodies in the neighbourhood of the Solar System. The ability to observe and characterise dozens of potentially rocky Earth-like planets now lies within the realm of possibility due to rapid advances in key space and imaging technologies and active studies of potential missions have been underway for a number of years. The latest of these is the Large UV Optical IR space telescope (LUVOIR), one of four flagship mission studies commissioned by NASA in support of the 2020 US Decadal Survey. LUVOIR, if selected, will be of interest to a wide scientific community and will be the only telescope capable of searching for and characterizing a sufficient number of exo-Earths to provide a meaningful answer to the question “Are we alone?”. This contribution is a White Paper that has been submitted in response to the ESA Voyage 2050 Call.

UAVs Support to Naval Operations

Abstract The paper proposes an analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) features that enable them to support naval operations in general, but the focus drawn to the Black Sea basin peculiarities in particular. In the introductory part, the authors succinctly present the Black Sea basin’s physical and strategic characteristics. Then, follows a description of UAVs features and potential missions conducted by these types of robots. In the next section, the article presents the uninhabited aerial vehicle classification and system components. The last chapter analyses the efficiencies and vulnerabilities of these vehicles. The closing section gives some short conclusions regarding the suitability of using such assets to support naval operations and a few further research directions..

293 Predictive utility of a brief scale to identify U.S. Army Soldiers who are genetically vulnerable and resilient to sleep loss

Abstract Introduction Sleep loss that is inherent to military operations can lead to cognitive errors and potential mission failure. Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) allele variations of several genes (COMT, ADORA2A, TNFa, CLOCK, DAT1) have been linked with inter-individual cognitive resilience to sleep loss through various mechanisms. U.S. Army Soldiers with resilience-related alleles may be better-suited to perform cognitively-arduous duties under conditions of sleep loss than those without these alleles. However, military-wide genetic screening is costly, arduous, and infeasible. This study tested whether a brief survey of subjective resilience to sleep loss (1) can demarcate soldiers with and without resilience-related alleles, and, if so, (2) can predict cognitive performance under conditions of sleep loss. Methods Six SNPs from the aforementioned genes were sequenced from 75 male U.S. Army special operations Soldiers (age 25.7±4.1). Psychomotor vigilance, response inhibition, and decision-making were tested after a night of mission-driven total sleep deprivation. The Iowa Resilience to Sleeplessness Test (iREST) Cognitive Subscale, which measures subjective cognitive resilience to sleep loss, was administered after a week of recovery sleep. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine whether the iREST Cognitive Subscale can discriminate between gene carriers, and a cutoff score was determined. Cognitive performance after sleep deprivation was compared between those below/above the cutoff score using t-tests or Mann-Whitney U tests. Results The iREST discriminated between allele variations for COMT (ROC=.65,SE=.07,p=.03), with an optimal cutoff score of 3.03 out of 5, with 90% sensitivity and 51.4% specificity. Soldiers below the cutoff score had significantly poorer for psychomotor vigilance reaction time (t=-2.39,p=.02), response inhibition errors of commission (U=155.00,W=246.00,p=.04), and decision-making reaction time (t=2.13,p=.04) than Soldiers above the cutoff score. Conclusion The iREST Cognitive Subscale can discriminate between those with and without specific vulnerability/resilience-related genotypes. If these findings are replicated, the iREST Cognitive Subscale could be used to help military leaders make decisions about proper personnel placement when sleep loss is unavoidable. This would likely result in increased safety and improved performance during military missions. Support (if any) Support for this study came from the Military Operational Medicine Research Program of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command.

Cross-NASA divisional relevance of an Ice Giant mission.

Robotic space exploration to the outer solar system is difficult and expensive and the space science community works inventively and collaboratively to maximize the scientific return of missions. A mission to either of our solar system Ice Giants, Uranus and Neptune, will provide numerous opportunities to address high-level science objectives relevant to multiple disciplines and deliberate cross-disciplinary mission planning should ideally be woven in from the start. In this review, we recount past successes as well as (NASA-focused) challenges in performing cross-disciplinary science from robotic space exploration missions and detail the opportunities for broad-reaching science objectives from potential future missions to the Ice Giants.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Future exploration of ice giant systems’.

A multidisciplinary design tool for robotic systems involved in sampling operations on planetary bodies

The analysis of robotic systems (e.g. landers and rovers) involved in sampling operations on planetary bodies is crucial to ensure mission success, since those operations generate forces that could affect the stability of the robotic system. This paper presents MISTRAL (MultIdisciplinary deSign Tool for Robotic sAmpLing), a novel tool conceived for trade space exploration during early conceptual and preliminary design phases, where a rapid and broad evaluation is required for a very high number of configurations and boundary conditions. The tool rapidly determines the preliminary design envelope of a sampling apparatus to guarantee the stability condition of the whole robotic system. The tool implements a three-dimensional analytical model capable to reproduce several scenarios, being able to accept various input parameters, including the physical and geometrical characteristics of the robotic system, the properties related to the environment and the characteristics related to the sampling system. This feature can be exploited to infer multidisciplinary high-level requirements concerning several other elements of the investigated system, such as robotic arms and footpads. The presented research focuses on the application of MISTRAL to landers. The structure of the tool and the analysis model are presented. Results from the application of the tool to real mission data from NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander are included. Moreover, the tool was adopted for the definition of the high-level requirements of the lander for a potential future mission to the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, currently under investigation at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This case study was included to demonstrate the tool’s capabilities. MISTRAL represents a comprehensive, versatile, and powerful tool providing guidelines for cognizant decisions in the early and most crucial stages of the design of robotic systems involved in sampling operations on planetary bodies.

Fault Adaptive Mission Planning: Increasing Useful-Life and Reducing Downtime Through Condition-Based Decision-Making

AbstractThis paper presents a novel Fault Adaptive Mission Planning (FAMP) framework for complex systems aimed at increasing useful-life and reducing downtime through condition-based decision-making. A hallmark of complex systems is that they typically have access to multiple mission plans that allow their mission objectives to be accomplished in a variety of ways. In hopes of exploiting this characteristic, FAMP is the process of increasing a system's useful-lifespan by first determining how each potential mission plan affects the system's degradation differently, and then by implementing a planning strategy that utilizes this information to repeatedly recalculate a new mission plan as the system degrades. Fault-augmented physics models identify how component degradation will affect the system's current and future performance for a given mission plan. Then, at various degradation-based thresholds, new mission plans are installed such that whenever possible, the healthiest components are used more, or in different ways, than the more degraded components. This process promotes balanced degradation, preventing useful-life from being wasted and reducing downtime through synchronized maintenance schedules. This work expands the prognostics and health management paradigm by enabling life extension and maintenance reduction through real-time FAMP.

PolyRad \u2013 Protection Against Free Radical Damage

The effects of elevated levels of radiation contribute to the instability of pharmaceutical formulations in space compared to those on earth. Existing technologies are ineffective at maintaining the therapeutic efficacies of drugs in space. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop novel space-hardy formulations for preserving the stability and efficacy of drug formulations. This work aims to develop a novel approach for the protection of space pharmaceutical drug molecules from the radiation-induced damage to help extend or at least preserve their structural integrity and potency. To achieve this, free radical scavenging antioxidant, Trolox was conjugated on the surface of poly-lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) nanoparticles for the protection of a candidate drug, melatonin that is used as a sleep aid medication in International Space Station (ISS). Melatonin-PLGA-PLL-Trolox nanoparticle as named as PolyRad was synthesized employing single oil in water (o/w) emulsion solvent evaporation method. PolyRad is spherical in shape and has an average diameter of ~600 nm with a low polydispersity index of 0.2. PolyRad and free melatonin (control) were irradiated by UV light after being exposed to a strong oxidant, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Bare melatonin lost ~80% of the active structure of the drug following irradiation with UV light or treatment with H2O2. In contrast, PolyRad protected >80% of the active structure of melatonin. The ability of PolyRad to protect melatonin structure was also carried out using 0, 1, 5 and 10 Gy gamma radiation. Gamma irradiation showed >98% active structures of melatonin encapsulated in PolyRads. Drug release and effectiveness of melatonin using PolyRad were evaluated on human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) in vitro. Non-irradiated PolyRad demonstrated maximum drug release of ~70% after 72 h, while UV-irradiated and H2O2-treated PolyRad showed a maximum drug release of ~85%. Cytotoxicity of melatonin was carried out using both live/dead and MTT assays. Melatonin, non-radiated PolyRad and irradiated PolyRad inhibited the viability of HUVEC in a dose-dependent manner. Cell viability of melatonin, PolyRad alone without melatonin (PolyRad carrier control), non-radiated PolyRad, and irradiated PolyRad were ~98, 87, 75 and 70%, respectively at a concentration sim 0.01 {mg}/{ml} (10mu g/{ml}). Taken together, PolyRad nanoparticle provides an attractive formulation platform for preventing damage to pharmaceutical drugs in potential space mission applications.

МОРАЛЬНО-ПСИХОЛОГІЧНЕ ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ У ЗБРОЙНИХ СИЛАХ УКРАЇНИ: ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ ТЕРМІНОЛОГІЇ (1991–2019)

A retrospective analysis of the main trends in the development of structures of moral and psychological influence in the Armed Forces of Ukraine during the period of development, reformation and construction of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, their application in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a new model of the Armed Forces at the present stage shows that in everyday life combat activities of military organisms, the activities of structures of moral and psychological influence are firmly in use a significant number of concepts, terms, definitions of both purely moral and psychological importance, despite different views and approaches to the content and organization of work in the troops (forces) on the moral and psychological readiness to perform tasks for the purpose and development of structures of social and psychological service, educational and socio-psychological work, educational work, structures on humanitarian issues and moral and psychological support. The issue of integration of the Armed Forces of Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has long been on the agenda. The experience of the countries that have recently joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization shows that accession requires not only political and economic conditions, but also purely military ones. One of these conditions is military standardization, an activity that is to lay down provisions for common and repeated use of existing or potential missions and aimed at achieving an optimal degree of orderliness in the defense field.The article deals with the basic terms and concepts of moral and psychological influence that defined in 1991-2018 the essence, main components and directions of activity of bodies and officials of structures of moral and psychological influence in the process of their formation, development and transformation in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.The focus is on defining terms and concepts (definitions), explaining them, or interpreting meanings (meaning). The meaning of these terms and concepts from English-language sources and NATO standards is also given.

Medical Event Management for Future Deep Space Exploration Missions to Mars

BackgroundLong-duration exploration missions (LDEMs), such as voyages to Mars, will present unique medical challenges for astronaut crews, including communication delays and the inability to return to Earth early. Medical events threaten crewmember lives and increase the risk of mission failure. Managing a range of potential medical events will require excellent technical and nontechnical skills (NTSs). We sought to identify medical events with potential for rescue, range them according to the potential impact on crew health and mission success during LDEMs, and develop a list of NTSs to train for management of in-flight medical events. Materials and methodsTwenty-eight subject matter experts with specializations in surgery, medicine, trauma, spaceflight operations, NTS training, simulation, human factors, and organizational psychology completed online surveys followed by a 2-d in-person workshop. They identified and rated medical events for survivability, mission impact, and impact of crewmember NTSs on outcomes in space. ResultsSudden cardiac arrest, smoke inhalation, toxic exposure, seizure, and penetrating eye injury emerged as events with the highest potential mission impact, greatest potential for survival, and that required excellent NTS for successful management. Key NTS identified to target in training included information exchange, supporting behavior, communication delivery, and team leadership/followership. ConclusionsWith a planned Mars mission on the horizon, training countermeasures need to be developed in the next 3-5 y. These results may inform policy, selection, medical system design, and training scenarios for astronauts to manage in-flight medical events on LDEMs. Findings may extend to surgical and medical care in any rural and remote location.

Towards silent micro-air vehicles: optimization of a low Reynolds number rotor in hover

The demand in micro-air vehicles is increasing as well as their potential missions. Either for discretion in military operations or noise pollution in civilian use, noise reduction of micro-air vehicles is a goal to achieve. Aeroacoustic research has long been focusing on full scale rotorcrafts. At micro-air vehicle scales however, the hierarchization of the numerous sources of noise is not straightforward, as a consequence of the relatively low Reynolds number that ranges typically from 5000 to 100,000 and low Mach number of approximately 0.1. This knowledge, however, is crucial for aeroacoustic optimization and blade noise reduction in drones. This contribution briefly describes a low-cost, numerical methodology to achieve noise reduction by optimization of micro-air vehicle rotor blade geometry. Acoustic power measurements show a reduction of 8 dB(A). The innovative rotor blade geometry allowing this noise reduction is then analysed in detail, both experimentally and numerically with large eddy simulation using lattice Boltzmann method. Turbulence interaction noise is shown to be a major source of noise in this configuration of low Reynolds number rotor in hover, as a result of small scale turbulence and high frequency unsteady aeroadynamics impinging the blades at the leading edge.

Identifying sufficient deception in military logistics

In the context of modern warfare, military forces are faced with challenges that threaten their power projection operations. Adversarial strategies could hinder the actions of the forces within operational areas by inferring and anticipating a military’s potential mission objectives including military logistics and transportation activities. Thus, this research investigates the potential ways of incorporating two military deception strategies into the military logistics decision making process: (i) falsifying signifies including empty convoys on routes on which commodities are being hauled, and (ii) hiding refers to concealing routes in the logistics network. Assuming that the adversaries can monitor the shipments in the transportation network, we develop a two-stage integer linear programming model that quantifies the sufficient amounts of each deception needed to deceive the adversaries. In addition, the mathematical model accurately captures several other military logistics challenges, such as satisfying the demands for military commodities at destinations subject to limited capacities at supply points, deciding the best route option, and respecting the time limit constraint. However, the two-stage model is non-convex and therefore, reformulation and linearization steps are applied to convert it to a convex single-stage model. Due to the computational complexity in solving the single-stage model for realistic-size instances, two greedy heuristics are developed that can efficiently solve those instances. Moreover, the computational experiments reveal that the greedy heuristics obtain near optimal solutions when compared to the solutions of the smaller instances solved to optimality via a commercial solver.

Assimilation of Satellite Altimetry Data for Effective River Bathymetry

AbstractOne of the main problems of hydrologic/hydrodynamic routing models is defining the right set of parameters, especially on inaccessible and/or large basins. Remote sensing techniques provide measurements of the basin topography, drainage system, and channel width; however current methods for estimating riverbed elevation are not as accurate. This paper presents methods of altimetry data assimilation (DA) for estimating effective bathymetry of a hydrodynamic model. We tested past altimetry observations from satellites ENVISAT, ICESAT, and JASON 2 and synthetic altimetry data from satellites ICESAT 2, JASON 3, SARAL, and Surface Water and Ocean Topography to assess future/present mission's potential. The DA methods used were direct insertion, linear interpolation, the Shuffled Complex Evolution‐University of Arizona optimization algorithm, and an adapted Kalman filter developed with hydraulically based variance and covariance introduced in this paper. The past satellite altimetry DA was evaluated comparing simulated and observed water surface elevation while the synthetic altimetry DA were assessed through a direct comparison with a true bathymetry. The Shuffled Complex Evolution‐University of Arizona and hydraulically based Kalman filter methods presented the best performances, reducing water surface elevation error in 65% in past altimetry data experiment and reducing biased bathymetry error in 75% in the synthetic experiment; however, the latter method is much less computationally expensive. Regarding satellites, it was observed that the performance is related to the satellite intertrack distance, as higher number of observation sites allows more accurate bed elevation estimation.

Measuring Soluble Properties of Planetary Science Samples: Sensor and System Development Since the Wet Chemistry Laboratory

The measurement of the soluble properties (pH, eH, conductivity, specific ion concentrations, etc.) of planetary science samples provides important information on the habitability of a location, the bulk components of a sample, the potential for undesired effects on analysis protocols, and the history/preservation of the sample (e.g., geologic weathering, radiation processing, etc.). Electrochemical sensors are an ideal means to measure soluble properties because they excel at detecting ionic species in solution. The Wet Chemistry Lab (WCL) on the 2007 Mars Phoenix Lander was the first planetary science instrument to focus on soluble inorganic ion measurements and used an array of electrochemical sensors. WCL’s discovery of significant quantities of perchlorate salts in the Martian regolith helped reshape our understanding of Martian chemistry and the search for past or present life there. As NASA starts on a new chapter of exploration with potential missions to further out locations like the Ocean Worlds of Europa and Enceladus, it is a natural fit to adapt the successful WCL instrument for operation on bodies where the samples could be ice or liquid. Since the successful operation of WCL on Mars there have been a number of projects to improve sensor capabilities, develop microfluidic implementations, and prepare for Ocean World mission scenarios. This work has led to a number of developments, including: 1. Production of Ag/AgCl reference electrodes that are stable for use during flight missions. 2. Cyclic voltammetry methods for the specific detection of SO4 2- and NO3 -. 3. Adaptation of hydrogel-based ion-sensitive electrodes (ISEs) for use in microfluidic arrays. 4. The development of solid-contact ISEs for use during flight missions. 5. Radiation testing of ISE ionophores. 6. The development of microfluidic infrastructure based on successful small satellite payloads. The combination of all this work has led to a significant increase in sensor/system performance and robustness in preparation for potential missions to Ocean Worlds.

Design and Performance of a Prototype Magnetic Calorimeter Array for the Lynx X-Ray Microcalorimeter

We describe a small-scale demonstration of an X-ray microcalorimeter using metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) that consist of superconducting meander-shaped sensor coils with very fine pitches. These devices are being developed for potential future astrophysics missions, such as Lynx. Because Lynx requires more than 100 000 pixels on a pitch of around 50 μm, the pixels and array designs are challenging to fabricate. We have fabricated prototype superconducting Nb meander coils with pitches of 0.8, 1.2, 1.6, and 5.0 μm to determine the most optimal geometry for coupling the MMC magnetization signal to the SQUIDs used to read them out. The Nb sensor coils and microstrip wiring are buried beneath the surface of a planarized silicon wafer. There are four buried Nb layers, and these are connected through superconducting Nb vias. We have observed a large critical current of ~ 30 mA for pixels with the finest pitch meander, which have a Nb width of 0.4 μm. We have characterized each pixel geometry from the magnetization, heat capacity, and thermal conductance measurements. The preliminary measured energy resolution from pixels in these geometries is also discussed.

Icy giant planet exploration: Are entry probes essential?

“Flyby, orbit, land” has been the guiding philosophy of planetary exploration. This systematic approach has been highly successful in addressing the most fundamental questions of the origin, evolution, and habitability of the solar system. For the giant planets, entry probes take the place of “landers”, since the “land” of the gas and icy giant planets, their solid core, lies some tens of thousands of kilometers beneath their cloud tops, hence impractical to reach. On the other hand, during a planet's accretionary heating phase the volatiles trapped in the core material would have been released, forming the atmosphere, together with the most volatile of the gases, hydrogen, helium and neon, that were captured gravitationally when the core became massive enough. Those atmospheric volatiles would thus be accessible by entry probes deployed to relatively shallow depths in the upper troposphere, allowing the determination of the abundances and isotopes of at least the most critical of the “heavy elements” (mass greater than helium). The heavy elements are key constraints to planetary formation and evolution models [1]. Entry probes are essential to retrieve their abundances, which are feasible only in situ at probe depths. That was the rationale behind NASA's 1995 Galileo probe mission at Jupiter and the Saturn Probe mission in NASA's New Frontier 4 candidate list of science themes. Saturn probe proposals to ESA's Cosmic Vision Program are similarly inspired. In 2015, NASA commissioned an Ice Giant Planets Study to recommend a comprehensive set of science goals and objectives, and further to develop potential mission architectures for accomplishing them in the 2023–2033 decade. The most highly rated mission from that study is an orbiter with probe to either Uranus or Neptune [2]. While remote sensing observations from the orbiter will yield the composition, structure and the distribution of neutral and charged particles in the magnetosphere and the upper atmosphere, the entry probe will determine the abundances and isotopic ratios of the noble gases (He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe), H, C, and possibly N and S. The noble gases, in particular, are key to discriminating among formation models, and their values from the probe entry location would represent global values as they are unaffected by meteorology, dynamics or chemistry. We will elaborate on these issues and then briefly discuss possible scenario/s for a mission to the icy giant planets, with particular focus on entry probes.

End-to-end mission design for microbial ISRU activities as preparation for a moon village

In situ resource utilization (ISRU) increasingly features as an element of human long-term exploration and settlement missions to the lunar surface. In this study, all requirements to test a novel, biological approach for ISRU are validated, and an end-to-end mission architecture is proposed. The general mission consists of a lander with a fully autonomous bioreactor able to process lunar regolith and extract elemental iron. The elemental iron could either be stored or directly utilized to generate iron wires or construction material. To maximize the success rate of this mission, potential landing sites for future missions are studied, and technical details (thermal radiation, shielding, power-supply) are analyzed. The final section will assess the potential mission architecture (orbit, rocket, lander, timeframe). This design might not only be one step further towards an international “Moon Village”, but may also enable similar missions to ultimately colonize Mars and further explore our solar system.

Possible Trajectories for Electric Solar Wind Sail Validation

The aim of this paper is to analyze a potential mission scenario that could be used to perform an in situ test of the Electric Solar Wind Sail. Such an advanced propulsive system works only outside the Earth’s magnetosphere; so, a translunar mission (where the spacecraft is supposed to be inserted as a secondary “piggyback” payload) is hypothesized, in which at least a part of the spacecraft trajectory is around or beyond the Moon’s orbit. The analysis of possible selenocentric trajectories is conducted with a three-dimensional generalization of the classical patched conic approximation. In particular, two cases are considered: a closed selenocentric orbit, and a Moon flyby that inserts the spacecraft on a post-flyby geocentric orbit with at least some branches outside the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Multi-criteria GIS analysis of the topography of the Moon and better solutions for potential landing

Abstract During the past twenty years, the need to reach theMoon by the private space missions has been growing. Some of the private missions are supported by Google Lunar X-prize and Space-X. In the period between 2020 and 2050 private companies will be planning landing to the Moon with their own capacity. These missions can send new geodesy and cartography data. Lunar topography modelling with new satellite and remote sensing data gives plenty of possibilities for its exploration. GIS (Geographical Information System) may be successfully to the Moon topography analysis. According to the results after GIS numerical analysis 30% of the territory of the Moon showed excellent characteristics for landing. The most useful parts of the Moon for potential landing belong to the altitude between 2,000 and 3,000 m and on the plateaus with the north-east direction of azimuth. These plateaus have an excellent inclination of 3° and azimuth of 120°. The main aim and goal of this investigation would be in better understanding of Moon topography and relief. With help of GIS numerical methods, the astronomical geodesy may be applied in better way. A potential mission to the Moon can use this topography investigation, presented maps and results.

Benchmarking the human exploration of Mars Design Reference Architecture

This research benchmarks the Mars DRA 5.0 by quantifying its mission utility in satisfying mission objectives derived from human exploration of Mars community consensus. Acolytion's Progspexion is utilised for modelling and simulation of the DRA in determination of potential mission outcomes and computation of crewed mission to Mars metrics. While establishing a baseline performance, the research determines the DRA's mission utility is limited due to a lack of its consideration during design. In addition, the research indicates the DRA simultaneously contains an overwhelming number of single points of failure with high criticality and lacks an adequate hierarchy of contingency and abort strategies to preclude loss of mission and crew fatality.