Bright fireballs streaking across the Dutch skies suggest that every two years on average a new meteorite is dropped in the Netherlands. Finding them back is notoriously difficult and TU Delft researcher Sebastiaan de Vet now plans on searching for them using drones. What better way to use the aerial vantage point of a drone […]
How dark are the starry skies above the campus in Delft? To find out researcher Sebastiaan de Vet and technicians installed a sky quality sensor at the Rooftop Laboratory of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. It is part of the national network ‘Was het donker’ (“Was it dark?”), which measures the sky brightness across the […]
A grand odyssey of exploration is about to begin. Humankind’s next bold mission to the outer solar system. ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice), is poised to explore giant planet Jupiter and its largest moons. After years of preparations, Juice will be launched into space on April 13 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The […]
The coordination of the Dutch branch of the allsky fireball camera network ‘FRIPON’ has been handed over from ESA-ESTEC to the TU Delft. In a formal event ESA-scientist Detlef Koschny handed over the network to its new coordinator Sebastiaan de Vet of the section Astrodynamics & Space Missions. Scientific purpose FRIPON (Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation […]
The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected the Venus orbiter EnVision as the fifth medium-class mission within its Cosmic Vision program. It marks the beginning of a new era of Venus exploration—last week NASA already announced two new missions to Earth’ sister planet. SRON and TU Delft are part of the EnVision consortium. The spacecraft […]
Researchers of the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft are involved in four of the eight new projects that will start within the Dutch planetary and exo-planetary programme ‘PEPSci’. That was decided by the NWO Domain Science Board last month. The projects include research into the icy moon Enceladus, the properties of exomoons and […]
During his Master thesis research, Victor Trees discovered a new method to detect oceans on exoplanets: spectropolarimetry, or measuring the vibrational directions of planet-light in different colours. Together with his supervisor, associate professor Planetary Sciences, Daphne Stam, Victor wrote an article about it, titled ‘Blue, white, and red ocean planets. Simulations of orbital variations in […]