Any plan to send a human crew to explore Moon or Mars requires many tons of propellant to blast off from Moon or Mars for return to Earth. Two propellants are needed: (a) a fuel, typically either methane or hydrogen, and (b) oxygen. Oxygen represents the greatest mass of propellant, and in situ propellant production (ISPP) for oxygen only would provide a significant mass saving. Lunar and Martian ISPP processes range widely in complexity and degree of difficulty, with equally wide ranges in risk and apparent return on investment (ROI). Moreover, operating autonomous chemical engineering plants on remote bodies, in some cases involving mining, transporting, delivering, discharging, and processing planetary soil under severe environmental conditions, presents significant challenges. Difficulty in providing power compounds the problems. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between autonomous processes that are simple and straightforward to implement that lend themselves naturally to first landings versus processes that are complex and challenging and, because of that, likely to be relegated to second-generation or even third-generation landings, if at all.

The China National Space Administration plans to launch the asteroid sample-return mission TianWen-2 with the target being the near-Earth asteroid 2016 HO3. The TianWen-2 spacecraft mainly focuses on surface sampling on the near-Earth asteroid 2016 HO3. the whole TianWen-2 spacecraft will be controlled to achieve touchdown and sampling rather than releasing a small lander or ejecting a projectile. Small celestial bodies usually have an extremely low surface gravity and are covered with granular material a centimeter in size or smaller in the form of regolith. The dispersion, friction, and nonlinear dissipation of inelastic collision between particles make a regolith surface behave like a solid or a fluid at the macroscopic level, exhibiting phenomena such as deformation, flow, and ejection. Thus, sampling on a low-gravity regolith-covered surface with unknown physical properties is particularly challenging and risky. In order to successfully implement an in situ exploration, it is of great significance to analyze the influence of regolith soil on the sampling process of the spacecraft on the surface of the asteroid and comprehensively understand and evaluate spacecraft dynamics and control behavior during sampling.

The research team led by Dr. Jang SeGyu at the Functional Composite Materials Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Oh Sang-rok) and the research team led by Professor Choi Siyoung at the Department of Bio and Chemical Engineering of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST, President Lee Kwang-hyung) announced the development of a high-density BNNT protective shield. This shield, created by densely-packed BNNTs, is robust, efficiently conducts heat, and effectively blocks cosmic radiation.

Low earth orbit (LEO) mega-constellations, characterized by dense satellite coverage and low transmission latency, have substantial advantages in global communications, earth observation, and disaster forecasting. Compared to traditional constellations with simple configurations, mega-constellations have a large number of nodes and complex satellite interaction relationships and are oriented to vast global missions. As a result, when the traditional ground-based centralized management mode is applied to a mega-constellation, the ground station suffers from an explosive growth of control load and struggles to achieve the efficient, timely, and orderly operation of the mega-constellation. Therefore, it is necessary to adjust the management architecture to partially transfer the on-ground management mission to on-board management mission. Clustering satellites into multiple management domains and implementing unified management within each domain is an effective method for realizing on-board management of mega-constellations. Existing studies on the construction of satellite management domains have focused on some specific indicators, such as spatial distribution uniformity, network control latency, and controller load. Considering the highly dynamic motion of the mega-constellation, a fixed management domain construction will inevitably lead to frequent updates of the management architecture, thereby increasing the burden of on-board management. Thus, more stable strategies for constructing and updating the management domain need to be explored to reduce the frequency of management architecture updates over extended mission periods.