New Space and Tech

Planetary Exploration Horizon 2061 Report Chapter 5: Enabling Technologies For Planetary Exploration

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
March 1, 2023
Filed under ,
Planetary Exploration Horizon 2061 Report Chapter 5: Enabling Technologies For Planetary Exploration
CONSERT-like configuration, with a bistatic radar operating in transmission between a lander and an orbiter. Artist view developed from CONSERT/Rosetta (credit: CGI/Remy Rogez; shape model: Mattias Malmer CC BY SA 3.0

The main objective of this chapter is to present an overview of the different areas of key technologies that will be needed to fly the technically most challenging of the representative missions identified in chapter 4 (the Pillar 2 Horizon 2061 report).

It starts with a description of the future scientific instruments which will address the key questions of Horizon 2061 described in chapter 3 (the Pillar 1 Horizon 2061 report) and the new technologies that the next generations of space instruments will require (section 2).

From there, the chapter follows the line of logical development and implementation of a planetary mission: section 3 describes some of the novel mission architectures that will be needed and how they will articulate interplanetary spacecraft and science platforms;

section 4 summarizes the system-level technologies needed: power, propulsion, navigation, communication, advanced autonomy on board planetary spacecraft;

section 5 describes the diversity of specialized science platforms that will be needed to survive, operate and return scientific data from the extreme environments that future missions will target;

section 6 describes the new technology developments that will be needed for long-duration missions and semi-permanent settlements;

finally, section 7 attempts to anticipate on the disruptive technologies that should emerge and progressively prevail in the decades to come to meet the long-term needs of future planetary missions.

Manuel Grande (1), Linli Guo (2), Michel Blanc (3), Advenit Makaya (4), Sami Asmar (5), David Atkinson (5), Anne Bourdon (6), Pascal Chabert (6), Steve Chien (5), John Day (5), Alberto G. Fairen (7), Anthony Freeman (5), Antonio Genova (8), Alain Herique (9), Wlodek Kofman (9), Joseph Lazio (5), Olivier Mousis (10), Gian Gabriele Ori (11 and 12), Victor Parro (7), Robert Preston (5), Jose A Rodriguez-Manfredi (7), Veerle Sterken (13), Keith Stephenson (4), Joshua Vander Hook (5), Hunter Waite (14), Sonia Zine (9)

Comments: 100 pages, 23 figures, Horizon 2061 is a science-driven, foresight exercise, for future scientific investigations
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Geophysics (physics.geo-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2302.14832 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2302.14832v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Veerle Sterken J
[v1] Tue, 28 Feb 2023 18:29:08 UTC (3,054 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.14832

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