DEVELOPMENT OF A DEPLOYABLE DECELERATOR CONCEPT FOR SMALL MARS LANDERS

Small exploration spacecraft and landers have proven to be scientifically useful and capable with missions such as Philae or Hayabusa 2. For the exploration of planetary bodies with atmospheres, novel and efficient entry, descent and landing (EDL) technologies are being explored. One of these concepts is the rigid deployable decelerator, which would be an alternative to existing EDL systems if proven to be feasible. For a Mars micro lander mission with an entry mass of 25 kg and a ballistic coefficient of 3:5 kg=m2, a concept for a deployable decelerator was developed. First, a flow-field analysis of different possible geometries of the deployed structure with Ansys Fluent was performed. From this, the pressure and temperature distribution and qualitatively the heat flux density along the profile wall of each geometry were determined. Subsequently, for a conical geometry, a design for a deployment mechanism was developed based on the umbrella concept, where a deployable structure spans a flexible thermally resistant cloth. The mechanism developed is a combination of folding parallelised struts, similar to an umbrella, and telescopic rods. Focusing on the strut structure and based on the results of the flow field analysis, with Ansys it was then investigated whether the design can in principle withstand the mechanical loads generated by the maximum dynamic pressure and how the temperature behind the deployed cloth is distributed under the maximum thermal load

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

GOCE gravitational gradients along the orbit

GOCE is ESA’s gravity field mission and the first satellite ever that measures gravitational gradients in space, that is, the second spatial derivatives of the Earth’s gravitational potential. The goal is to determine the Earth’s mean gravitational field with unprecedented accuracy at spatial resolutions down to 100 km. GOCE carries a gravity gradiometer that allows deriving the gravitational gradients with very high precision to achieve this goal. There are two types of GOCE Level 2 gravitational gradients (GGs) along the orbit: the gravitational gradients in the gradiometer reference frame (GRF) and the gravitational gradients in the local north oriented frame (LNOF) derived from the GGs in the GRF by point-wise rotation. Because the V XX , V YY , V ZZ and V XZ are much more accurate than V XY and V YZ , and because the error of the accurate GGs increases for low frequencies, the rotation requires that part of the measured GG signal is replaced by model signal. However, the actual quality of the gradients in GRF and LNOF needs to be assessed. We analysed the outliers in the GGs, validated the GGs in the GRF using independent gravity field information and compared their assessed error with the requirements. In addition, we compared the GGs in the LNOF with state-of-the-art global gravity field models and determined the model contribution to the rotated GGs. We found that the percentage of detected outliers is below 0.1% for all GGs, and external gravity data confirm that the GG scale factors do not differ from one down to the 10?3 level. Furthermore, we found that the error of V XX and V YY is approximately at the level of the requirement on the gravitational gradient trace, whereas the V ZZ error is a factor of 2–3 above the requirement for higher frequencies. We show that the model contribution in the rotated GGs is 2–35% dependent on the gravitational gradient. Finally, we found that GOCE gravitational gradients and gradients derived from EIGEN-5C and EGM2008 are consistent over the oceans, but that over the continents the consistency may be less, especially in areas with poor terrestrial gravity data. All in all, our analyses show that the quality of the GOCE gravitational gradients is good and that with this type of data valuable new gravity field information is obtained.Space EngineeringAerospace Engineerin