Mars Terahertz Microsatellite

Last updated
Mars Terahertz Microsatellite
Mission type Science, reconnaissance
Operator Japan's NICT
Spacecraft properties
Manufacturer NICT & University of Tokyo
Start of mission
Launch date 2020 (as a secondary payload of
another flight to Mars)
Rocket To be announced
Mars lander
Instruments
terahertz sensor

The Mars Terahertz Microsatellite is a planned spacecraft that will be carrying a terahertz sensor to the surface of Mars to measure the oxygen isotope ratios of various molecules in the Martian atmosphere. [1] The objective of the mission is to understand the chain of chemical reactions that resupply the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. [1]

Terahertz radiation The range 300-3000 GHz of the electromagnetic spectrum

Terahertz radiation – also known as submillimeter radiation, terahertz waves, tremendously high frequency (THF), T-rays, T-waves, T-light, T-lux or THz – consists of electromagnetic waves within the ITU-designated band of frequencies from 0.1 to 30 terahertz (THz). One terahertz is 1012 Hz or 1000 GHz. Wavelengths of radiation in the terahertz band correspondingly range from 1 mm to 0.1 mm (or 100 μm). Because terahertz radiation begins at a wavelength of one millimeter and proceeds into shorter wavelengths, it is sometimes known as the submillimeter band, and its radiation as submillimeter waves, especially in astronomy.

Mars Fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System after Mercury. In English, Mars carries a name of the Roman god of war, and is often referred to as the "Red Planet" because the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance that is distinctive among the astronomical bodies visible to the naked eye. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, having surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth.

Isotope nuclides having the same atomic number but different mass numbers

Isotopes are variants of a particular chemical element which differ in neutron number, and consequently in nucleon number. All isotopes of a given element have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons in each atom.

Contents

The probe should be launched as a piggyback with another payload during the July 2020 Mars launch window. [2] As of September 2017, no official launch arrangement with a primary mission had yet been reached. [3] The spacecraft will orbit Mars for a short while before landing the instrument on the surface. [1] [4]

The probe is being developed by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), and the University of Tokyo Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory (ISSL). [5] The project is based on a past proposal named FIRE (Far InfraRed Experiment), which was a sensor intended for JAXA's cancelled MELOS Mars orbiter. [5]

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology is Japan's primary national research institute for information and communications. It is located at 4-2-1 Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei, Tokyo 184-8795, Japan.

University of Tokyo national research university in Tokyo, Japan

The University of Tokyo, abbreviated as Todai or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877 as the first imperial university, it is one of Japan's most prestigious universities.

MELOS is a Japanese rover mission concept under study for an engineering demonstration of precision landing, and to look for possible biosignatures on Mars using a rover. JAXA has not published updates since 2015.

Development

ISSL has previously developed two deep space probes: the PROCYON asteroid probe and the EQUULEUS CubeSat mission to Earth–Moon L2 Lagrangian point. [6] NICT will put into use their experience developing the SMILES (Superconducting Submillimeter-Wave Limb-Emission Sounder) instrument on board the ISS Kibo module, and SWI (Sub-millimeter Wave Instrument) on board the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, which the institute jointly developed with ESA and DLR (German Aerospace Center). [5] Unlike the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, NICT's parent agency is the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). MIC formally approved the Mars Terahertz Microsatellite in early 2017. [2]

PROCYON was an asteroid flyby space probe that was launched together with Hayabusa2 on 4 December 2014 13:22:04 (JST). It was developed by University of Tokyo and JAXA. It was a small, low cost spacecraft.

CubeSat type of miniaturized satellite

A CubeSat is a type of miniaturized satellite for space research that is made up of multiples of 10 cm × 10 cm × 11.35 cm cubic units. CubeSats have a mass of no more than 1.33 kilograms (2.9 lb) per unit, and often use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components for their electronics and structure. CubeSats are commonly put in orbit by deployers on the International Space Station, or launched as secondary payloads on a launch vehicle. Over 1000 CubeSats have been launched as of January 2019. Over 900 have been successfully deployed in orbit and over 80 have been destroyed in launch failures.

Lagrangian point one of five positions in an orbital configuration of two large bodies where a small object can maintain a stable relative position

In celestial mechanics, the Lagrangian points are the points near two large bodies in orbit where a smaller object will maintain its position relative to the large orbiting bodies. At other locations, a small object would go into its own orbit around one of the large bodies, but at the Lagrangian points the gravitational forces of the two large bodies, the centripetal force of orbital motion, and the Coriolis acceleration all match up in a way that cause the small object to maintain a stable or nearly stable position relative to the large bodies.

Spacecraft

The preliminary lander's dimensions are a 50 cm cube, [4] and may have a mass of 140 kg (310 lb) including propellant. [4] Its landing system is proposed to employ an inflatable aeroshell decelerator, and an airbag. [7]

Aeroshell rigid heat-shielded shell

An aeroshell is a rigid heat-shielded shell that helps decelerate and protects a spacecraft vehicle from pressure, heat, and possible debris created by drag during atmospheric entry. Its main components consist of a heat shield and a back shell. The heat shield absorbs heat caused by air compression in front of the spacecraft during its atmospheric entry. The back shell carries the load being delivered, along with important components such as a parachute, rocket engines, and monitoring electronics like an inertial measurement unit that monitors the orientation of the shell during parachute-slowed descent.

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<i>Hayabusa</i> Japanese unmanned spacecraft

Hayabusa was a robotic spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to return a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa to Earth for further analysis. Hayabusa, formerly known as MUSES-C for Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft C, was launched on 9 May 2003 and rendezvoused with Itokawa in mid-September 2005. After arriving at Itokawa, Hayabusa studied the asteroid's shape, spin, topography, colour, composition, density, and history. In November 2005, it landed on the asteroid and collected samples in the form of tiny grains of asteroidal material, which were returned to Earth aboard the spacecraft on 13 June 2010.

JAXA Japans national aero-space agency

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is the Japanese national aerospace and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satellites into orbit, and is involved in many more advanced missions such as asteroid exploration and possible manned exploration of the Moon. Its motto is One JAXA and its corporate slogan is Explore to Realize.

<i>Akatsuki</i> (spacecraft) space probe

Akatsuki, also known as the Venus Climate Orbiter (VCO) and Planet-C, is a Japanese (JAXA) space probe tasked to study the atmosphere of Venus. It was launched aboard an H-IIA 202 rocket on 20 May 2010, and failed to enter orbit around Venus on 6 December 2010. After the craft orbited the Sun for five years, engineers successfully placed it into an alternative elliptical Venusian orbit on 7 December 2015 by firing its attitude control thrusters for 20 minutes.

Sample-return mission space mission to retrieve tangible samples from an extraterrestrial location and return with them to Earth for analysis

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<i>Hayabusa2</i> Japanese space probe

Hayabusa2 is an asteroid sample-return mission operated by the Japanese space agency, JAXA. It follows on from Hayabusa mission which returned asteroid samples in 2010. Hayabusa2 was launched on 3 December 2014 and rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu on 27 June 2018. It is in the process of surveying the asteroid for a year and a half, departing in December 2019, and returning to Earth in December 2020.

Several Asian countries have space programs and are actively competing to achieve scientific and technological advancements in space, a situation sometimes referred to as the Asian space race in the popular media as a reference to the earlier Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Like the previous space race, issues involved in the current push to space include national security, which has spurred many countries to send artificial satellites as well as humans into Earth orbit and beyond. A number of Asian countries are seen as contenders in the ongoing race to be the pre-eminent power in space.

<i>Hitomi</i> (satellite) X-ray astronomy satellite launched on 17 February 2016

Hitomi, also known as ASTRO-H and New X-ray Telescope (NeXT), was an X-ray astronomy satellite commissioned by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for studying extremely energetic processes in the Universe. The space observatory was designed to extend the research conducted by the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA) by investigating the hard X-ray band above 10 keV. The satellite was originally called New X-ray Telescope; at the time of launch it was called ASTRO-H. After it was placed in orbit and its solar panels deployed, it was renamed Hitomi. The new name refers to the pupil of an eye, and to a legend of a painting of four dragons, two of which were given eyes and flew into the sky, and two that were left eyeless and stayed as motionless art. The spacecraft was launched on 17 February 2016 and contact was lost on 26 March 2016, due to multiple incidents with the attitude control system leading to an uncontrolled spin rate and breakup of structurally weak elements.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Mars Micro-Satellite for Terahertz Remote Sensing. Larsson, Richard; Kasai, Yasko; Kuroda, Takeshi; Maezawa, Hiroyuki; Manabe, Takeshi; Nishibori, Toshiyuki; Nakasuka, Shinichi; Wachi, Akifumi; Sagawa, Hideo. 19th EGU General Assembly, EGU2017, proceedings from the conference held 23-28 April, 2017 in Vienna, Austria., p.18645. Published by the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System.
  2. 1 2 Yamazaki, Keisuke (March 27, 2017). "Japan planning 2020 mission to put satellite in Martian orbit". The Asahi Shimbun . Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  3. ↑ "総務省、来年度から火星のテラヘルツ波を調査　酸素ある？生命いる？". Sankei Shimbun (in Japanese). 3 September 2017. Retrieved 28 December 2017.
  4. 1 2 3 Japanese research team to develop microsized Mars probe. Yomiuri Shimbun, Asia News Network. 9 January 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 "惑星資源探査 ⼩型テラヘルツ探査機" (PDF) (in Japanese). National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. 25 January 2017. Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  6. ↑ Terazono, Junya (14 March 2017). "情報通信研究機構、東大などが2020年に火星周回衛星打ち上げを検討　朝日新聞が報道" (in Japanese). Retrieved 2017-05-13.
  7. ↑ Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing by Small THz Spacecraft via Membrane Aeroshell. Akifumi Wachi, Ryohei Takahashi, Ryo Sakagami, Yuki Koshiro, Yasuko Kasai, Shinichi Nakasuka. AIAA SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition, AIAA SPACE Forum, (AIAA 2017-5313). Published by the Aerospace Research Central.
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