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In the 1950s, a combination of technological and scientific advancement, political competition, and changes in popular opinion about spaceflight generated public policy in favor of an aggressive space program. This and that of 1960s moved forward with a Moon landing and the necessary budgets. Space exploration reached equilibrium in the 1970s, sustained through to the present. The twenty-first-century progresses signals that support for human space exploration is waning and may even begin declining in the coming years. This chapter reviews this history and analyzes five rationales suggested in support of continued human spaceflight: discovery and understanding, national defense, economic competitiveness, human destiny, and geopolitics.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the study of an innovative unmanned mission to Mars, which is aimed at acquiring a great amount of detailed data related to both Mars’ atmosphere and surface.

The Mars surface exploration is conceived by means of a fleet of drones flying among a set of reference points (acting also as entry capsules and charging stations) on the surface. The three key enabling technologies of the proposed mission are the use of small satellites (used in constellation with a minimum of three), the use of electric propulsion systems for the interplanetary transfer (to reduce the propellant mass fraction) and lightweight, efficient, drones designed to operate in the harsh Mars environment and with its tiny atmosphere.

The low-thrust Earth-Mars transfer is designed by means of an optimization approach resulting in a duration of slightly more than 27 months with a propellant amount of about 125 kg, which is compatible with the choice of considering a 500 kg-class spacecraft. Four candidate drone configurations have been selected as the result of a sensitivity analysis. Flight endurance, weight and drone size have been considered as the driving design parameters for the selection of the final configuration, which is characterized by six rotors, a total mass of about 6.5 kg and a flight endurance of 28 minutes. In the mission scenario proposed, the drone is assumed to be delivered on the Mars surface by means of a passive entry capsule, which acts also as a docking station and charging base. Such a capsule has been sized both in terms of mass (68 kg) and power (80 W), showing to be compatible with 500 kg-class spacecraft.

As a general conclusion, the study shows the mission concept feasibility.

The concept would return incomparable scientific data and can be also be potentially implemented with a relatively low budget exploiting of the shelf components to the larger extent, small identical spacecraft buses and modular low-cost drones.

The innovative mission architecture proposed in this study aims at providing a complete coverage of the surface and lowest atmospheric layers. The main innovation factor of the proposed mission consists in the adoption of small multi-copter UAVs, also called “drones,” as remote-sensing platforms.

This paper aims to discuss the complexities and foresight of Mars colonization. There are many pioneers competing in a space race to Mars, for example, Elon Musk – SpaceX, Jeff Bezos – Blue Origin and Richard Branson – Virgin Orbit. The analyses are focused on the aerospace industry – the process of space adventures to Mars.

This study offers new methodological approaches – the development of a complexity metric and system innovation mode – to analyze how the complexities relate to the systemic nature of innovation. The complexity metric and system innovation model can be applied in various industries. These analysis tools can help gain insights into the strategies for achieving the diffusion of commercial space.

The analyses of findings have shown that, despite various attempts among the pioneers in a space race to colonize Mars (Elon Musk – SpaceX, Jeff Bezos – Blue Origin and Richard Branson – Virgin Orbit, among others), the aerospace industry has not yet reached a stage of commercialization. The commercial space to Mars is of low systemic nature at present. Many companies compete in a space race to develop technologies on a proprietary basis. However, the highest complexity level suggests a multinational and intergovernmental collaboration to achieve economies of scale and economies of scope as well as accelerate the process of technology diffusion – successful commercial space for the interplanetary settlement.

The main contribution that shows originality and value of this paper is the development of a complexity metric and system innovation model which can be used to explore how the complexities relate to the systemic nature of innovation and how they relate to the strategies in managing technological innovations. The new methodological approaches can be used and applied to various industries.

Describes the technological developments which are establishing the foundation for an exciting era of in situ exploration missions to planets, comets and asteroids with advanced robotic systems. Also outlines important concurrent terrestrial applications and spin offs of the space robotics technology. These include high‐precision robotic manipulators for microsurgical operations and dexterous arm control systems.

This paper aims to provide a technical description of the sensors and instruments used on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Following an introduction, this paper describes the various sensors and instruments used on the mission. The sampling systems, power source and communication technologies are also considered.

This shows that the Mars Science Laboratory is equipped with an array of sophisticated analytical instruments, sensors and cameras which will yield a unique insight into the Martian environment.

This paper provides details of the sensors and instruments being deployed on NASA's latest robotic mission to the surface of Mars.

Reviews the two symposis making up the part of the 2001 Photonics Boston event – “Intelligent Systems and Advanced Manufacturing” and “Environmental and Industrial sensing”. The emphasis was on robots and on vision associated with mobile and/or autonomous robotic activity. Papers discussed include the FIDO Mars exploration robot. The symposium “Machine Vision and Three‐Dimensional Imaging Systems” is also discussed and included systems for inspecting asparagus, monochromatic Fresnel lens applications and fibre optic assembly.

This paper aims to introduce an efficient active-simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach for rover navigation, future planetary rover exploration mission requires the rover to automatically localize itself with high accuracy.

A three-dimensional (3D) feature detection method is first proposed to extract salient features from the observed point cloud, after that, the salient features are employed as the candidate destinations for re-visiting under SLAM structure, followed by a path planning algorithm integrated with SLAM, wherein the path length and map utility are leveraged to reduce the growth rate of state estimation uncertainty.

The proposed approach is able to extract distinguishable 3D landmarks for feature re-visiting, and can be naturally integrated with any SLAM algorithms in an efficient manner to improve the navigation accuracy.

This paper proposes a novel active-SLAM structure for planetary rover exploration mission, the salient feature extraction method and active revisit patch planning method are validated to improve the accuracy of pose estimation.

This paper's aim is to assess the practical advances resulting from progress in artificial intelligence affecting vision‐equipped robots.

A short history of artificial intelligence applied to robotic hand‐eye coordination is followed by a description of some of the milestones in pattern recognition, interfacing, operating systems and programming paradigms. Finally, a range of current‐day practical applications is given, from industrial to student project.

The paper finds that advances in the speed and robustness of pattern recognition algorithms have been very important in the development of robots that adapt to randomly positioned workpieces. Event‐triggered object oriented programming, wide address buses, smart cameras, ethernet and other standard cables and communications formats, and the ever‐increasing power of computers are also of great practical importance.

The paper contrasts the current state of robotic vision with that 20 years ago.