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Register a new userExploration of the outer solar system with fast and small sailcraft
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Two new interplanetary technologies have advanced in the past decade to the point where they may enable exciting, affordable missions that reach further and faster deep into the outer regions of our solar system: (i) small and capable interplanetary spacecraft and (ii) light-driven sails. Combination of these two technologies could drastically reduce travel times within the solar system. We discuss a new paradigm that involves small and fast moving sailcraft that could enable exploration of distant regions of the solar system much sooner and faster than previously considered. We present some of the exciting science objectives for these miniaturized intelligent space systems that could lead to transformational advancements in the space sciences in the coming decade.
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Astrophysical measurements away from the 1 AU orbit of Earth can enable several astrophysical science cases that are challenging or impossible to perform from Earthbound platforms, including: building a detailed understanding of the extragalactic background light throughout the electromagnetic spectrum; measurements of the properties of dust and ice in the inner and outer solar system; determinations of the mass of planets and stellar remnants far from luminous stars using gravitational microlensing; and stable time-domain astronomy. Though potentially transformative for astrophysics, opportunities to fly instrumentation capable of these measurements are rare, and a mission to the distant solar system that includes instrumentation expressly designed to perform astrophysical science, or even one primarily for a different purpose but capable of precise astronomical investigation, has not yet been flown. In this White Paper, we describe the science motivations for this kind of measurement, and advocate for future flight opportunities that permit intersectional collaboration and cooperation to make these science investigations a reality.
We discuss the in-flight autonomous assembly as the means to build advanced planetary science payloads to explore the outer regions of the solar system. These payloads are robotically constructed from modular parts delivered by a group of smallsats (< 20 kg) which are placed on fast solar system transfer trajectories while being accelerated by solar sail propulsion to velocities of ~10 AU/yr. This concept provides the planetary science community with inexpensive, frequent access to distant regions of the solar system with flexible, reconfigurable instruments and systems that are assembled in flight. It permits faster revisit times, rapid replenishment and technology insertions, longer mission capability with lower costs. It also increases the science capabilities of smallsats via the use of modular, redundant architectures and allows for proliferation of sensing instrumentation throughout the solar system.
We describe a simple method for simulating the dynamics of small grains in a dusty gas, relevant to micron-sized grains in the interstellar medium and grains of centimetre size and smaller in protoplanetary discs. The method involves solving one extra diffusion equation for the dust fraction in addition to the usual equations of hydrodynamics. This diffusion approximation for dust is valid when the dust stopping time is smaller than the computational timestep. We present a numerical implementation using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) that is conservative, accurate and fast. It does not require any implicit timestepping and can be straightforwardly ported into existing 3D codes.
The growing field of large-scale time domain astronomy requires methods for probabilistic data analysis that are computationally tractable, even with large datasets. Gaussian Processes are a popular class of models used for this purpose but, since the computational cost scales, in general, as the cube of the number of data points, their application has been limited to small datasets. In this paper, we present a novel method for Gaussian Process modeling in one-dimension where the computational requirements scale linearly with the size of the dataset. We demonstrate the method by applying it to simulated and real astronomical time series datasets. These demonstrations are examples of probabilistic inference of stellar rotation periods, asteroseismic oscillation spectra, and transiting planet parameters. The method exploits structure in the problem when the covariance function is expressed as a mixture of complex exponentials, without requiring evenly spaced observations or uniform noise. This form of covariance arises naturally when the process is a mixture of stochastically-driven damped harmonic oscillators -- providing a physical motivation for and interpretation of this choice -- but we also demonstrate that it can be a useful effective model in some other cases. We present a mathematical description of the method and compare it to existing scalable Gaussian Process methods. The method is fast and interpretable, with a range of potential applications within astronomical data analysis and beyond. We provide well-tested and documented open-source implementations of this method in C++, Python, and Julia.
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for observational astronomy. Small satellites offer complementary cost-effective capabilities to both ground-based astronomy and larger space missions. Compared to ground-based astronomy, these advantages are not just in the accessibility of wavelength ranges where the Earths atmosphere is opaque, but also in stable, high precision photometry, long-term monitoring and improved areal coverage. Astronomy has a long history of new observational parameter spaces leading to major discoveries. Here we discuss the potential for small satellites to explore new parameter spaces in astrophysics, drawing on examples from current and proposed missions, and spanning a wide range of science goals from binary stars, exoplanets and solar system science to the early Universe and fundamental physics.
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