Yuji Takubo, Towards Icy Moons: Trajectory Design in the Jovian and Saturnian Systems

Abstract:
Europa Clipper, a $5-billion flagship mission of NASA, was launched last month and is heading to Jupiter's icy moon Europa to explore its habitability. The main goal of the mission is to make a global mapping of Europa's surface, while a naive "orbiter" approach is not desirable as the spacecraft quickly degrades due to high radiation from Jupiter. Instead, Europa Clipper makes 50+ flybys to Europa with a highly elliptical orbit. In this talk, the enabling astrodynamical methodology to make a global mapping of Europa is discussed, unveiling what mission designers are thinking of, given the requirements from scientists.  

Bio:
Yuji Takubo is a second-year PhD student in Aero/Astro, currently working at Stanford Space Rendezvous Lab (PI: Prof. Simone D'Amico). He graduated from Georgia Tech with B.S. In Aerospace Engineering (2023), and interned at NASA JPL twice, where he worked on the mission concept design of the future Enceladus mission as well as the contingency planning for the Europa Clipper.

Zahra Ahmed, Exoplanet Detection and Characterization in the Ultraviolet using a Starshade Complement for Habitable Worlds Observatory

Abstract:

A major objective of the future Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is to directly image and spectrally characterize at least 25 habitable worlds. Achieving this ambitious goal will depend on a myriad of factors, including the effectiveness of starlight suppression technology and the completeness of background calibration during post-processing. While coronagraphs are the favored starlight suppression technology for HWO, there is ongoing work to investigate the utility of a starshade complement operating in the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum. Although starshades are limited in the number of observations they can make due to fuel and reconfiguration time, their high throughput, high contrast, and broad spectral bandwidth make them a powerful characterization instrument. The first portion of the talk will provide an overview of HWO's exoplanet science goals as well as a brief history of proposed starshade concepts. The second half of the talk will cover ongoing efforts to simulate and analyze Earth-like exoplanets using a proposed HWO starshade in the UV, accounting for varying orbital inclinations and phase angles as well as the presence of inhomogeneous exozodiacal dust distributions.

Bio:

Zahra is a PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, where she is advised by Simone D'Amico. Her research focuses on developing data simulation tools and post-processing techniques for high-contrast, spaceborne imagery, with a particular emphasis on exoplanet detection and characterization.