Heuristic Guidance Techniques for the Exploration of Small Celestial Bodies

A Minimally Actuated Hopping Rover for Exploration of Celestial Bodies

This paper describes a minimalist hopping robot that can perform basic exploration tasks on Mars or other moderate gravity bodies. We show that a single actuator can control the vehicle’s jumping and steering operations, as well as the panning of an on-board camera. Our novel thrusting linkage also leads to good system efficiency. The inherent minimalism of our hopping paradigm offers interesti...

The Motion of Celestial Bodies

The history of celestial mechanics is first briefly surveyed, identifying the major contributors and their contributions. The Ptolemaic and Copernican world models, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Newton’s laws of universal gravity are presented. It is shown that the orbit of a body moving under the gravitational attraction of another body can be represented by a conic section. The six or...

Semantically Constrained Exploration and Heuristic Guidance

Exploration can be an effective learning experience. if suitably constrained and guided. Moreover. it can provide this benefit for specifically targeted formal skills in the arithmetic curriculum. This paper presents two complementary techniques for promoting success in computer-based exploration environments. Semantic constraints on eploration cut out meaningless options. and heuristic guidanc...

Celestial Mechanics of Elastic Bodies

We construct time independent configurations of two gravitating elastic bodies. These configurations either correspond to the two bodies moving in a circular orbit around their center of mass or strictly static configurations.

Barrier detection of celestial bodies