Nebula Public Library

The activities carried out in the phase 0 deal with the mission concept and, in particular, with the interplanetary analysis and contributions to the mission requirements. The activities can be summarized as follows:
- study of the state of the art of Mars landers, with focus on issues such as the launcher, the interplanetary trajectory, the type of planetary approach, the design of the spacecraft, the layout, the mass and power budgets, the aerodynamic parameters, the entry, descent & landing strategy;

This document describes the activities and the findings performed in the frame of the ODET-μ (Optical DETection in Microfluidics) project by Kayser Italia, a SME enterprise.
In this project, technologies for the integration of optical components were reviewed to define the “state of the art” in the field of integrated optics for detection on Lab On a Chip devices (LoCs).
LoCs are microfluidics based systems aiming at the miniaturization onto a single substrate (chip) of several functionalities that typically would require an entire biological laboratory.

Low energy transfers have shown that it is possible to reduce the ∆v cost (and therefore the propellant mass) for a number of transfer types. This is possible by exploiting the natural n-body dynamics characterizing the spacecraft motion within the Solar System. In particular, the concept of ballistic capture makes it possible to reduce the hyperbolic excess velocity upon moon/plant arrival, and allows the spacecraft to perform few orbits at zero cost. Low energy transfers are designed by using impulsive maneuver, and therefore they inherently use chemical propulsion (Figure 1).