This contribution reassesses progress in the development of satellite laser ranging (SLR) technology and its scientific and societal applications in South Africa. We first highlight the current global SLR tracking stations within the framework of the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) and the artificial satellites currently being tracked by these stations. In particular, the present wor...

The Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA) is a softball-sized flying robot designed to operate autonomously onboard manned spacecraft in pressurized micro-gravity environments. We describe how the Brahms multi-agent modeling and simulation environment in conjunction with a KAoS agent adjustable autonomy and teamwork approach will be used to support human-centered design and operation of

We consider the possible detection of parity violation at the linear level in gravity using polarized anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. Since such a parity violation would lead to nonzero TB and EB correlations, this makes those odd-parity angular power spectra a potential probe of parity violation in the gravitational sector. These spectra are modeled incorporating the impact of...

During its tour of the Saturn system, Cassini performed two close flybys of Rhea dedicated to gravity investigations, the first in November 2005 and the second in March 2013. This paper presents an estimation of Rhea’s fully unconstrained quadrupole gravity field obtained from a joint multi-arc analysis of the two Cassini flybys. Our best estimates of the main gravity quadrupole unnormalized co...

Three GOCE-based gravity field solutions have been computed by ESA’s high-level processing facility and were released to the user community. All models are accompanied by variance-covariance information resulting either from the least squares procedure or a Monte-Carlo approach. In order to obtain independent external quality parameters and to assess the current performance of these models, a s...