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This paper examines several technologies currently available in the market to develop a simple and reliable robotic system for a Mars drilling mission, currently proposed by the Northern Light team. Northern Light is a Canadian mission to send one or more landers to the surface of Mars as early as 2011. Northern Light will assist in the international effort to explore Mars and will provide niche science using Canadian expertise. The Northern Light lander will be equipped with sophisticated scientific instruments to examine the Martian environment and surface features. The science goals include the search for water, the search for life, the investigation of the Martian atmosphere, and preparation for sample return. The mission is being developed by a public-private consortium of academic and industrial organizations led by Thoth Technology, Inc., of Kettleby, Ontario, Canada. One of the critical operations in the Northern Light mission is the drilling procedure. Using the drilling tool currently developed ...

In this paper, we review the York University Space Engineering Nanosatellite Demonstration (YuSend) program. We have identified several possible missions for CubeSat-based nanosatellites and associated enabling technologies. The potential applications for the tiny spacecraft (weighing 1kg each) include on-orbit servicing, assembly and monitoring, stereo imaging, formation flying, and GPS occultation experiments. While there are many challenges to be faced in nanosatellite design, the group is focusing on three key areas of research: power management, attitude control and autonomous mission planning. The details of current research related to the above three areas are discussed here. The objective is to demonstrate the technology to perform formation flying and on-orbit servicing using a modular power unit, thruster, and automated mission planner. This paper describes the conceptual design of York’s first satellite, the YuSend-1 spacecraft. In addition, we present the spacecraft engineering facilities at York University including the space environmental test facilities and the ground station.

Northern Light is a Canadian mission to Mars, currently developed by a team of engineers, scientists and industrial organizations. The mission objectives include scientific goals such as the search for life and water, preparation for a sample return and engineering goals including the demonstration of interplanetary travel, an entry, descent and landing system, a rover design, a manipulator/drilling system, and semi-autonomous control in remote operations. The Northern Light team at York University is developing a four degree-of-freedom manipulator system, specifically for this remote operation. The Northern Light manipulator system will be mounted directly on the lander (not on the rover), providing an opportunity to perform scientific missions directly from the lander. The drilling instrument, to be mounted on the manipulator, is currently under development by Dr. Tze Chuen Ng now with the help of Hong Kong’s Polytechnics University. The operation concept is based on a “single command cycle” approach. The operation plans are designed to handle exceptions, failures and unforeseen events using local intelligence and a contingency planner.

Constraints and potential hardware are described outlining both elements of the SMARA scientific microprobe mission to Jupiter. Individual atmospheric probes are possible at masses of 12.5 kg. Such probes would be 0.6 m across and would be capable of carrying at least 1.6 kg of scientific payload. This would enable a broad range of instrumentation to be deployed at Jupiter, though mass spectroscopy would require a slightly more massive probe or some additional miniaturisation. The carrier spacecraft are each responsible for delivering six of the individual atmospheric probes to Jupiter. This requires carrier spacecraft with a mass of at least 60 kg. The entire spacecraft is sufficiently small and modular that upwards of 60 atmospheric entry vehicles could be deployed by a single medium launch to examine 10 distinct locations at Jupiter. Nearly identical probes would be suitable for Saturn, Uranus, Neptune or Venus by modification of the carrier.

A mission concept is presented for several small atmospheric entry vehicles at Jupiter. By relaxing the requirement for substantial penetration into the Jovian atmosphere, the size of the atmospheric entry probes shrinks dramatically. Such atmospheric entry probes would experience much less heating than previous concepts of much larger (~300kg) spacecraft presented as minimum concepts and no parachutes are necessary. This reduces complexity while still permitting over 15 minutes of useable science under free-fall from above the 0.41 bar level to near the 10 bar level of the Jovian Atmosphere during which up to 20 Mbits of data could be returned per probe. By dividing the payload, the risk to the mission is substantially mitigated and ground truth may be obtained from a large part of the entire planetary atmosphere using a single launch.