WISE is a software platform that enables easy authoring and exchange of educational materials amongst learning science researchers. This paper charts the recent evolution of the WISE technology, sharing lessons learned and describing a new open source framework called SAIL. We identify key challenges and design principles for technologyenhanced learning environments, and describe how we applied...

The ultra-lightweight construction of large, deployable space structures is a fundamental prerequisite for the realization of Solar Sail propulsion concepts. In addition to the functionality of the deployment technique and the development of control concepts, lightweight aspects and their technical implementation play a key role in future Solar Sail missions. A further development of the set-up...

Fast sample return from the outer Solar System would open an entirely new avenue for space science, but the vast distances make this a daunting task. The achievable transit velocity and the need for extra propellant on the return trip limit the feasibility of returning extraterrestrial samples to Earth. To keep the mission duration short enough to be of interest, sample return from objects fart...

Plasma sail technology, in which an artificial magnetosphere is generated around a spacecraft and is coupled to and dragged by the solar wind, has been proposed as a propulsion technique to rapidly travel to the outer regions of the solar system and heliosphere. An examination of the physics and planned implementation of plasma sail propulsion indicates that the proposed technology does not pro...

The aerodynamic behavior of a 48’ yacht rig 3D scale model was characterized by means of wind tunnel tests. The experimental program, performed in the Politecnico di Milano Twisted Flow Wind Tunnel, allowed the aerodynamic forces to be characterized using forced motion tests and the aeroelastic behavior of the sail plan to be studied. Preliminary results are presented with reference to the typi...

Typical square solar-sail design is characterised by a central hub with four-quadrant sails, conferring to the spacecraft the classical X-configuration. One of the critical aspects related to this architecture is due to the large deformations of both membrane and booms, which leads to a reduction of the performance of the sailcraft in terms of thrust efficiency. As a consequence, stiffer sail a...

Information-theoretic K-means (Info-Kmeans) aims to cluster high-dimensional data, such as images featured by the bag-of-features (BOF) model, using K-means algorithm with KL-divergence as the distance. While research efforts along this line have shown promising results, a remaining challenge is to deal with the high sparsity of image data. Indeed, the centroids may contain many zero-value feat...

Speaking of a fully submerged hydrofoil craft, all the hydrofoils attached to the foilstruts of the craft body are fully submerged in the water, so that the disturbing wave forces acting on the hydrofoils are very small in their foilborne cruising compared with the forces on the surface piercing hydrofoils. Therefore, the fully submerged hydrofoil craft gives us a very comfortable riding. On th...

The paper discusses the coupled attitude-orbit dynamics and control of an electric-sail-based spacecraft in a heliocentric transfer mission. The mathematical model characterizing the propulsive thrust is first described as a function of the orbital radius and the sail angle. Since the solar wind dynamic pressure acceleration is induced by the sail attitude, the orbital and attitude dynamics of ...