The course aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of scientific and navigation payloads for spacecraft and their onboard integration. It offers students the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to address the challenges of designing instruments, starting from high-level performance requirements to low-level implementation requirements.
The course focuses on the analysis of payloads and their main characteristics and objectives. For a selection of instruments, their design choices and main challenges will be analyzed. The technical characteristics and requirements of each instrument will be compared with measurement performance and requirements based on specific examples. The payloads analyzed are chosen from: laser altimeters, radio transponders, spectrometers, cameras, accelerometers, magnetometers, particle analyzers, and laser reflectors. The scientific measurements and the information they can provide will be independently analyzed for each instrument, highlighting their synergies. For example, laser altimeter data can be combined with radio tracking data to measure surface and gravitational tides of celestial bodies, providing essential information for determining the internal structure of those bodies.
The theoretical background that students have developed during their undergraduate and master’s studies is applied in a context that allows them to understand the challenges of developing advanced instrumentation qualified for space applications.
By the end of the course, students will have acquired the following skills:
Understanding the instrument's requirements and its impact on spacecraft design;
Evaluating the impact of the operational environment on instrument design;
Understanding the functions and objectives of the instrument in the mission context and the use of its data by the end user;
Acquiring knowledge about some of the most commonly used instruments in space exploration.
Scientific instruments:
Cameras
Imaging spectrometer
Radio science instrumentation
Altimeters
Accelerometers
Magnetometers
Plasma particle detectors