NIAC 2021 - Direct Multi-pixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of Exoplanets with a Mission to the Focal Region of the Solar Gravitational Lens

 Slava G. Turyshev

Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of Exoplanets with a Mission to the Focal Region of the Solar Gravitational Lens

Notes by Paul Fischer

Our Challenge: all exoplanets are far, therefore amplification

They are also too small, therefore increased resolution is needed

Direct imaging: only super Jupiters, not suitable to discover an exoearth

The telescope would need to be 90km in diameter, which is not feasible

The solar gravitational lens is therefore is being proposed

SGL provides high-resolution imaging, and this is apparent

Realistic model of the sun

Previous work (1911-2021)

The sun was modeled as a spherically-symmetric point-mass body

The harmonics function effectively with the gravitational field

Astroid caustic and imaging point sources.. allowing image deconstruction

Addressing temporal variability 

Over the diurnal rotation of the image reconstruction, interesting and exciting and can be fully captured in the analysis

Image of the exoplanets-orbital inclination and the required velocity Ono the spacecraft to capture an image

Look at well at the acceleration, 5 microns per second, velocity of 20 meters per second

Essentially the space information is available on the space craft to provide high quality imaging

Scientific req doc can guide the mission documents, and helps lend real mission information there

Image deconstruction and spectroscopy

…

Solar sailing allows the approach of 20-30 astronomical units per year

To explore this possibility the mission will arrive in 2022, voyager one

Flights in 2023 and 2024

Trajectory designed will begin with high earth orbit and tacking against the solar wind like a sailboat, at this point system checks must be performed before moving to autonomous operations

Through the perihelion maximum thermal load will be reached before egress allow return to power and comm

The next year will bring steerable solar sails and the mission will be shown to be realistic and affordable

Q: the studies are essential, what about a planet mixing with the stars in the deep space light across another planet?

A: The narrow field of view of the SGL will allow discovery of many of these planets

Q: How will we know where to look?

A: this will provide a sort of Einstein beacon as the planet emerges from the corona behind the star, the spacecraft will be positioned precisely on the exoplanet

Q: what are the reasons for the original vein-based solar sail design?

A: the design was proposed by an explorer incorporated as an industrial corporate partner. The benefits are obvious, the steering and graceful tacking are not possible with other designs of solar sails, a full analogy to the sail boat is possible

This design essentially uses solar craft anywhere on the solar system this design can also be used to go back and forth between earth, and explore the deep solar systems, and look to interstellar objects

Q: will the solar craft require a jib?

A: all sizable across the different planes of veins and allow steering in the direction that you want to go

Q: what is the next big thing for this study?

A: sagan: “every extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence” we will move full speed to make a reality of this mission, and we will move from public-private partnership into embracing multiple organizations to develop flights in the near future, we will be able to bring pictures back of a planet and demonstrate that it is inhabited, all thanks to NIAC

Q: Have there been any surprises?

A: there has been a very good present from the slow gravitational lens itself, enabling a revelation that the lens gave us, and can follow the ever moving target, seeing the life on an alien planet within our neighborhood.

NIAC 2021 - Construction of CubeSat for Test of Neutrino Detector in Space

 Nickolas Solomey

Notes by Paul Fischer

Wichita State University

Construction of CubeSat for Test of Neutrino Detector in Space

In collaboration with Wichita St. U, UMinn and …

The phase 1 conclusion would determine that you only need a kg or less

The neutrinos on the sun would react with germanium 61 after reaction of galactic rays and cosmic gamma rays, looking for the double delayed incidence, that coincidinnced 

Improve simulations of detector

Build and test prototypes

First neutrino space fraft mission analysis

Constraints of 350 million and less than five years

Prototype detector was surrounded by a veto array and operate in the cosmic ray test stand 

We found exceptional rejection and resolution

Phase 2 demonstrated good energy resolution for gamma and depending on the thresholds in the liquid simulator with less than 2% veto failure rate

Thus the coincidence of the  galactic cosmic events was favorable for use

Distance of spacecraft from sun, as cosmic backgrounds are dominant on earth but neutrino signals exist closer to the sun, allowing exceptionally good science performance

The development of the solar probe plus spacecraft was one and a half billion dollars, and we felt that this detector in space would be functional

In the mid 80’s we designed and launched the gammaray observatory, 25 years later, the galactic plot demonstrates that in 1992 the EGRET spacecraft was groundbreaking by showing gamma ray activity

We hoped to demonstrate that a solar probe would function as it reached close to the sun

So we developed electromagnetic shield with cost and time efficiencies

The shield includes a radiation shield, neutrino detectors and instrument casing that would be deployed within the spacecraft

The mission study was the launch from earth and every time we went around the orbit closer to Venus we went closer and closer to the sun

Mission study: cost for falcon heavy launch, complete spacecraft and five years of operations

Phase three has been to build a cubist with the the eventual goal to measure incidence rays and theorems and a requirement of being within 4kg

The history of the project began in 2015 while NIAC has funded this to 92%

We have a long ways to go…

Q: could this detector function from earth?

A: no, an accelerator beam would be far too narrow with a thousand times too much energy, mostly anti-neutrino reactors and we are looking for solar neutrinos that are more difficult to detect

Q:App to energy in the core of the sun in solar flares?

A: neutrinos with solar flares reach earth only in 8 minutes as opposed to over a thousand years for the energy from the core of the sun

Q: would a balloon flight be adequate?

A: not a high enough altitude to deal with galactic cosmic and gamma ray real rates. the goal of the cube sat is to make sure it works in space, and to ensure it makes these double incidences exist in background events

Q: would the neutrino detector be tested on the cubesat?

A: no. a sodium 22 source could be use, but an intense source would be needed, and that would be prohibitive to safety

Q: launch vehicle selection and if starship has been considered?

A: the falcon heavy was the most cost-effective choice

Q: G-lens could concentrate the …

A: originally there was only a search from dark matter by going far from the sun and taking dark matter close to the sun, we found after a calculation with an undergrad student that we could take only about two times bigger than the moon, then we could get about 8000 times intense neutrinos from the galactic core, allowing a high concentration of the galactic core neutrinos… look at the real-time concentration within the galactic core, or in the planet Neptune or Uranus as a possibility of application

Q: any possibiility of neutrino cores or galactic cores, remember that we go much closer to the sun and any neutrino at seven solar radii, and the discussion over where the neutrino zones are in the sun, and determine if there are dark matter collections within the sun, where is the proton, proton fusion occurring… this internal structure of the helioregions of the sun remains one of the largest questions in the scientific community.

NIAC 2021 - Mini Bee Prototype

 Joel Sercel, PhD

All patent obtained or patent pending

Notes by Paul Fischer

Mini Bee prototype to enable demonstration flight in LEO

With our partners at the Colorado school of mines, the omnivore thruster uses water as propellant and light as an energy source

The intent was to create the transcontinental railroad of space

In the past three months alone, we have been able to secure six billion dollars with private company invvestments of 400 million dollars

We have been able to build on mini bee with worker bee which we expect to over take worker bee

Philip Wahl:

Optical mining spals   with solar energy 

Works in tandem with the NIAC phase ii project

Apis mission concept rendezvous with spacecraft and materials

Worker bee orbital logistics

Introducing worker bee carries customer satellites into space with the omnivore rocket engine

This is a breakthrough solar powered engine

Omnivore advantages are lower cost and higher thrust and can run on virtually any propellant 

Nuclear rocket-like propellant combines for a much safer propellant

The mini bee mission will demonstrate lower earth orbit to demonstrate mining technology

A robotic zipper will capture the asteroid and sunlight spalls the asteroid an freezes volatiles

The mini bee demonstrates asteroids

Honey bee will be used to spall the asteroid in deep space

The ground demonstration of minibee vehicle has been developed

Minibee’s optical adventure uses a actualized potential pointing areas during space craft construction

Use of computer vision to 

Inflatable an rigid reflectors with thin aluminum film and the engineering team has designed a rigid reflector with parabolic hexagonal structures

The inflatable subsystem is not capable of …

The demonstration of open capture bag system at one gram is also used

The omnivore thruster concept uses the same optical system as mining to create thrust through the sun’s energy

The omnivore thruster

MK1 test thruster has operational temperatures ranging from 500-950 degrees celsius

Newtons scale thrust values at the impulse of 1/ms

Testing readings are around 60% of the requirements

Next will come flight qualifications of our flight systems

Finally we hope to launch worker bee 26 months later an min bee about a year later

Q: concentrated UV?

A: the silicon is pretty standard practice the polyimid doesn’t see the light, and was a major design driver

Q: was the YKK zipper company an official collaborate and what was the partnership like?

A: space applications of the zipper tech and how to cross fertilize with that, including space suit familiarity with tech

Q: Difficult to evaluate trajectory?

A: a type of mission design that is totally feasible but not used by nasa, that is more adaptive in nature, however, we should know it well enough, it is a pretty unlikely possibility

Q: what kind of materials are used to construct the bags?

A: something interesting about optics says that the intensity of the light scales with the convergence angle, so the volume of space with high intensity almsot like a light saber, otherwise there is no damage, so when it opens up, to where it hits the bag, the light would not be intense enough to propagate and cause damage to the bag. When you calculate the momentum exchange, it doesn’t require that tough of a bag to handle

Q: can we use smaller bags now that we found asteroids to be smaller than we thought

A: we have found that bulk density of asteroids to be significantly less than original estimates, so we need much larger bags now, 

Q: other insight and advice to NIAC researchers?

A: focus on missions, hire really smart people who are highly collaborative and willing to fail, and encourage failure because only through failure is there growth in learning

Q: what components are actuating the reflectors?

A: M1 reflector and M2 actuated by a system that is motor driven screws and a piston movement, would be nice to come up with a sort of design everywhere, the real magic is not the actuators, but the vision system: it turns out if you have. A big reflector that is focused on a smaller reflector and you can keep the two aligned through a simple computer algorithm, like everything we do this is patent pending. We owe our work all to NASA and NIAC, collaboration in a win=win function

Q: in the future where does this concept go for worker bees?

A: like UPS or Amazon delivering spacecraft where they need to do, in the medium term we hope to create low-cost space tugs, and we can be the low cost standard oil of space, but we are really a vision driven company, and we exist because we think the resources of space vastly outweigh the resources of earth, we wish to support a trillion people and are fundamentally a company built on optimism.

NIAC 2021 - Skylight

 Red Whittaker - Skylight: Lunar Pit Exploration

Unique windows to unknowns to realities below the moon’s surface

Lunar caves could be shelters to the harsh radiation and other realities of the surface

Pits suggest acces to caves

The pit walls reveal the only observable pristine geology on the moon

Mission scenario surface. Robots will make the next great explorations

The operations are necessarily autonomous

No carrying direct to earth radio

This new class of skylight mission will use rovers

Pit rover to the rim of the pit, capture images and generate images

A smaller rover cannot carry communication equipment and must be preprogrammed

The rovers must be distinct from those that came before

They must be compatible with landers, negotiate pit sheet aprons… cameras must extend over into the pit

Pit ranger has a rigidly suspended four wheel drive skid steer

Aggressive slope extent, reverse pivoting to ascend

The model reverses these features for space relevance

Autonomy enables fast exploration

Microrovers cannot move quickly in response to human control. Autonomy allows the rapid movement. This is necessary because there are only 12 days, not 12 years to complete the mission

Both the imagery and plot morphology …

The flyover pit rover is also the model that the rover depends upon

The flyover image like satellite imagery cannot view into total darkness

The autonomy directs the rover to occupy strategic outlooks

Overlooks are ID’d while descending the steep apron

High quality navigation in motion at double the speed required to achieve exploration of any of the largest pits, this increases on speed and accuracy of previous rovers

Three images are captured at short, medium and long exposures

This eliminates burnout, retains lighting, and …

The rover returns to the pit to continue the exploration, this allows series uplink of models to earth

The longer the rover is operational, the higher the fidelity of the model

Skylight preprocesses before transferring to landing for modelling, the small size is negligible compared to the raw imagery that could not possibly be downloaded to earth

Cavern could not possibly be seen from satellites

LiDAR was utilized to create a high precision model to compare the rover to actual geometry of the pit with 2,850 sq m of area

The field experiments generated accurate 3d square models

Significantly advanced towards viability

Near term low cost missions to increase the exploration of lunar caverns

Q: upon fall, still useful?

A: very unlikely, though many of the small pits that are not sheer drops, almost seem to have ramps that is almost a matter of gradation

Q: potential ice that might be present on the moon?

A: yes, great activity in that area, given the ambition for pristine ice though a lighting phenomena as you come closer and closer to the pole, the grazing light makes it harder and harder to discover, just the true polar pits where ice would be accumulated are not yet known to exist

Q: any international partners for this project?

A: Yes, the Japanese with their Selene missions were the first to discover the pits, Hariyamo and Issa were among would like to see the ice on the poles, which everybody wants

Q: everything predicted?

A: yes, the lander is a flyover instrument which acquires those flyover imagery from which a first model is made. It is certainly possible that the light correcting could be added to the flyover imagery

Q: is there any use for the bot before NIAC?

A: every great mission has a …. Spoke earlier on a ramp in addition to the cave discoveries would discern a most likely route, lastly there are many scenarios for lobbing something into a crater and sensing something into a parabolic flight, and passing from a leap is also a scenario

Q: sending down a 6’3” cable, what turned you away from that approach?

A: this always comes up, whether to use a tether, and of course those are viable approaches and the moon diver proposed that approach, part of that is budget, further out, and more involved complexity with increased sulfur line that would come in its time, not in some far out someday, but instead for frequent lunar destination missions…. Also allows a cluster of pits etc.

Keynote Speaker - NIAC 2021

 2021 NIAC Day 3

Keynote Speaker - Dane Elliot-Lewis

GE Aviation, National Society of Black Engineers

“The future belongs to those who believe in the power of their dreams”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

Vision for a more inclusive and advanced society

This resonates with those who consider themselves a dreamer

We believe in transformative change, envision a society that suspends multiple heavenly bodies

Why are we doing this, why is government money going towards these adventures?

To overcome this small-minded thinking:

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys” - William Preece

Not within a thousand years will man ever fly

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers

Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop

The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is a pipe dream drivinven by greed.

Inspiration to incubate some new ideas

With 23 years of experience at GE aviation, you can see the love for history, the story of the Panama Canal is resounding, partially because my grandfather was among the West Indian laborers …

Was there a spark or something that influenced you to begin this path of innovation and where did your journey start?

Saturday mornings was spent with a bowl of cereal and cartoons

One cartoon in particular as a five year old: Dastardly and Muttley and their flying machines, a series that follows a villain in wwi biplanes, like roadrunner

The innovation was always around airplanes

Every episode came something new, a new possibility

This began a path to a career in aerospace

A typical adolescence 

This is the point where I decided to be a shuttle pilot

Always doodling, astronauts and regimes of light: how to ensure that challenger never happened again

Spent alot of time absorbing technical manuals and trying to improve on the space shuttle

Turns out space camp became the experience that college interviewers were most interested in, 19 Ronald mauradeen scholars

Was sent to Glenn research center at Langley research center

Supported a study on lubricant fuels,

Kitbash spacecraft models into not something more realistic, but something into the starter universe

Saw the interest and asked why don’t you help me out? Want to understand leaps in physics that will enable warp travel

Began working primarily as a scribe

Mark went on tofound the CalCity foundation, interstellar flight as its mission

This was a huge inspiration to be an astronaut, become a nasa engineer and find out which of the military branches is going to train a pair of glasses to fly fighter jets essentially

Turned out a lot of the space companies folded, so things did not go as planned

What he really wanted to do was to design hardware

No awareness that GE was in the aerospace business at the time

Learn the skillsets to become an engineer and spacecraft designer like he is today

Capability to build something and test it and see it in service

Design engineer, combustor aerodynamic (because it is similar to a rocket engine) and mechanical design, GE still has the largest design ever, 16,000 pounds of thrust

Combustion testing manufacturing support

Designed multiple swirlers and production manufacture, learning manufacturing processes

Also got the first two patents around the hardware

Systems engineer

Performance and preliminary design

Commercial engine certification 

Advanced engine bid and proposal

Helped certify engine with competitors of the G-38 aircraft analysis of the A-10 warhog, turbo fannage, the next role was in certification

That was the ct-92, in China, with the Chinese equivalent, the FAA, and how it meets all of the expectations, and to lay out the certification plan, what are the tests that need to happen, analyses and in that order

Final roles, most recent roles with GE, most direct led teams of 150…

Engineering manager

Technical execution

Building Teams, people development -that means hiring people, firing people

Process improvement, improved through LEAN in order to reduce overburden

Had a wonderful experience at GE, still an itch that had not been scratched

NSBE is an organization that has six hundred chapters around the world, it was formed int he 1970s through undergraduate studies the organization has evolved over the years, but has now created a professional series, and even special interest groups for specific industries

NSBE: Aerospace Special Interest Group

Technical research

Technical development

Aerospace advocacy

Youth outreach

In terms of technical research, internal promotion along the lines of the aerospace development than research.

Project Arusha - Lunar rover, 20k kg rover designed to transport six astronauts

Cabin structures and radiation protection 

Power and drive train, specifically looking at fuel cells

Crew accommodations and habitability

Navigation

East Africa Spaceport

A number of rovers intended to support a lunar base of 48 people 

NSBE research east Africa spaceport

Feasibility studies of an equatorial African spaceport

Leverage geographic advantages

Develop local aerospace expertise

Space policy assessment 

Business lifecycle cost assessments

Really, it focuses around the potential while focusing on the core competency of of the local and regionals in East Africa

NSBE Research: visions for human spaceflight

Unlimited Horizons publication

Rationales study and graduate as many engineers as possible.

Series within the structure to cater to engineers such as myself

All of the opportunities that NASA has, get your opportunities aligned because here are the benefits that NASA has… you guys need to be involved with NIAC, and they get pointed to this symposium, come here and hear it first hand go to him or others

Q: Naturally flows out of what we just talked about, affects … touched by the story that you went to space camp twice, that you would be belittled and would be made fun of so never told anyone. How do we confront this issue? That kids might be ridiculed for going to space camp?

A: There are STEM forces, look at these as careers, there is a whole field of opportunity here. There is an entirely open space, like white space of opportunity

I can create something here, whether it is a home or a business opportunity

Whether there is going to be career or business here, things we cannot even think of, what is better in terms of leveraging, entrepenuership, legacy to give to the children, opens up perfectly, a bit of a capitalistic bent, but there is really no limit in terms of using a creative experience and mind and make something that no one has ever thought of

Geysers, just a little tease, started with Saturday morning cartoons, strip of the visions of the future, and absolutely transported past visions of the American future, an old book etc…

Just wonder about the role of the visioning

Vision is I’m going to put some details behind completely unrelated thoughts, or however that works for you, a timetable as you work through it. There needs to be some concept of tomorrow or that project and a self-motivating factor, helps organize, plan and how to become like may gemison…

I like to visualize myself in the spacelab or the spacehead module, you don’t get anywhere without some vision to drive you or focus you.