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The parachute is located at the apex of the back shell and slows the spacecraft during EDL. The pyrotechnic control system releases devices such as nuts, rockets, and the parachute mortar. The inertial measurement unit reports the orientation of the back shell while it is swaying underneath the parachute.
Space exploration is about reaching the destination safely (mission enabling), quickly (reduced transit times), with a large quantity of payload mass, and relatively inexpensively (lower cost). The act of reaching the destination requires an in-space propulsion system, and the other metrics are modifiers to this fundamental action.
A space vehicle's flight is determined by application of Newton's second law of motion: =, where F is the vector sum of all forces exerted on the vehicle, m is its current mass, and a is the acceleration vector, the instantaneous rate of change of velocity (v), which in turn is the instantaneous rate of change of displacement.
An orbital propellant depot is a cache of propellant that is placed in orbit around Earth or another body to allow spacecraft or the transfer stage of the spacecraft to be fueled in space. It is one of the types of space resource depots that have been proposed for enabling infrastructure-based space exploration. [1]
It was to be 8.4 meters in diameter, longer than the Space Shuttle external tank, and powered by four RS-25 engines, a configuration broadly similar to the core stage as built. [35] The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to, where practicable, reuse Space Shuttle and Constellation program parts and contractors.
Laser propulsion is a form of beam-powered propulsion where the energy source is a remote (usually ground-based) laser system and separate from the reaction mass. This form of propulsion differs from a conventional chemical rocket where both energy and reaction mass come from the solid or liquid propellants carried on board the vehicle.
A considerable amount of development is being conducted in industry, such as IHI Corporation in Japan, Aerojet and Busek in the US, SNECMA in France, LAJP in Ukraine, SITAEL in Italy, and Satrec Initiative in South Korea. The first use of Hall thrusters on lunar orbit was the European Space Agency (ESA) lunar mission SMART-1 in 2003.
Spacecraft design was born as a discipline in the 1950s and 60s with the advent of American and Soviet space exploration programs. Since then it has progressed, although typically less than comparable terrestrial technologies.