Importance of mineralogical spectroscopy on planetary exploration.

Enabling New Exploration Opportunities on Planetary Surfaces

Motivation Recent observations of planetary bodies have revealed surface activities that have intrigued the science community. Image sequences of Saturn’s moon Enceladus have shown what appears to be icy particles ejecting from its south polar regions. High resolutions images from the Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have captured recent activities on the interior of cra...

Planetary Exploration Using Biomimetics

The Mars environment, particularly the low atmospheric density, makes flight much more difficult than on Earth, requiring an aircraft to fly within a very low Reynolds number/high Mach number regime. A possible solution is the use of an entomopter, a mechanical flying machine utilizing insect flight characteristics. Their similar Reynolds number flight regime indicates air vehicle system potent...

Planetary Laser Raman Spectroscopy for Surface Exploration on C/d-type Asteroids – a Case Study

Planetary Exploration Using Hopping Robots

The recent trend towards small and frequent space mission to Mars and other celestial bodies such as moons, asteroids, and comets has sparked new interest towards multi-functional vehicles, capable of providing excellent mobility to dedicated scientific packages. Currently, the only deployed, and actively engineered, mobility paradigm is a 6-wheeled rover, as seen in the Pathfinder mission's So...

Planetary exploration: learning from bats

Bats’ double frequency band bio-sonar served as an inspiration for two researchers of the University of Trento. They established a new data processing technique to improve geophysical observation based on the interpretation of bi-dimensional subsurface images acquired by means of radars. Bio-inspired radars manage to obtain more accurate information regarding the composition and structure of pl...