E-Glider: Active Electrostatic Flight for Airless Body Exploration

The environment near the surface of airless bodies (asteroids, comets, Moon) is electrically charged due to Sun’s photoelectric bombardment. Charged dust is ever present, even at high altitudes (dust fountains), following the Sun’s illumination. We envisage the global scale exploration of airless bodies by a gliding vehicle that experiences its own electrostatic lift and drag by its interaction with the naturally charged particle environment near the surface. This Electrostatic Glider (E-Glider) lifts off by extending thin, charged, appendages, which are also articulated to direct the levitation force in the most convenient direction for propulsion and maneuvering. It thus carries out its science mission by circumnavigating the small body, and it lands, wherever it is most convenient, by retracting the appendages or by thruster/anchor.

Artist’s view of the E-Glider concept on an airless body.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Marco Quadrelli previously worked on a concept called Orbiting Rainbows

Researchers propose using clouds of reflective glitter-like particles in place of mirrors to enable a telescope to view stars and exoplanets. The technology would enable high-resolution imaging at a fraction of the cost.

“It’s a floating cloud that acts as a mirror,” said Marco Quadrelli from JPL, the Orbiting Rainbows principal investigator. “There is no backing structure, no steel around it, no hinges; just a cloud.”

In the proposed Orbiting Rainbows system, the small cloud of glitter-like grains would be trapped and manipulated with multiple laser beams. The trapping happens because of pressure from the laser light — specifically, the momentum of photons translates into two forces: one that pushes particles away, and another that pushes the particles toward the axis of the light beam. The pressure of the laser light coming from different directions shapes the cloud and pushes the small grains to align in the same direction. In a space telescope, the tenuous cloud would be formed by millions of grains, each possibly as small as fractions of a millimeter in diameter.

Such a telescope would have a wide adjustable aperture, the space through which light passes during an optical or photographic measurement; in fact, it might lead to possibly larger apertures than those of existing space telescopes.

It would also be much simpler to package, transport and deploy, than a conventional space telescope.

“You deploy the cloud, trap it and shape it,” Quadrelli said.

Glitter Cloud May Serve as Space Mirror – This image shows white light reflected off of a glitter mirror onto a camera sensor. Researchers tested this in a laboratory as part of the concept of “Orbiting Rainbows,” a low-cost solution for space telescope mirrors. Credit: G. Swartzlander/Rochester Institute of Technology

Nature is full of structures that have light-scattering and focusing properties, such as rainbows, optical phenomena in clouds, or comet tails. Observations of these phenomena, and recent laboratory successes in optical trapping and manipulation have contributed to the Orbiting Rainbows concept. The original idea for a telescope based on a laser-trapped mirror was proposed in a 1979 paper by astronomer Antoine Labeyrie at the College de France in Paris.

Now, the Orbiting Rainbows team is trying to identify ways to manipulate and maintain the shape of an orbiting cloud of dust-like matter using laser pressure so it can function as an adaptive surface with useful electromagnetic characteristics, for instance, in the optical or radar bands.

o test the idea, co-investigator Grover Swartzlander, an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, and his students spread glitter on a concave lens in the laboratory. His team used lasers to represent the light from a double star system. They pointed the speckled mirror at the simulated stars, then used a camera to take pictures. With many exposures and lots of processing, an image of the two “stars” emerged using the glitter mirror.

“This is a major achievement,” Quadrelli said. “This demonstrates a highly controlled experiment in which we were able to do imaging in the visible light spectrum.”

The technology could be used more easily for radio-band signals. Because the wavelength is so much longer (about one centimeter, compared to nanometers in visible light), the mirror grains don’t have to be as precisely controlled or aligned. This opens up Earth science applications such as earthquake detection and remote sensing of water and other phenomena. JPL’s Darmindra Arumugam is investigating possible mechanisms for remote sensing with Orbiting Rainbows.

The JPL optical design team, including Scott Basinger and Mayer Rud, has been working on the adaptive optics techniques that would be needed by an Orbiting Rainbows telescope. So far, the team has been exploring reflective, refractive and diffractive versions of a telescope based on Orbiting Rainbows, with maximum sensitivity to one specific frequency.

Orbiting Rainbows has not yet been demonstrated in space. For a test in low-Earth orbit, the researchers would deploy a telescope with a small patch of particles, no larger than a bottle cap, to show that it can be trapped and shaped to reflect light. The next step would be to make many of these patches and synthesize an aperture with which to do imaging.

The project represents a new application of “granular matter,” materials such as dust grains, powders and aerosols. Such materials are very light, can be produced at low-cost and could be useful to the space exploration community. In this particular project, the “glitter” may be tiny granules of metallic-coated plastic, quartz or some other material.

SOURCE- NASA