See below the overview of Newsletters published by the TU Delft Space Institute.

Graphene as a material for solar sails

A team of researchers, the TU Delft GrapheneX-team, is preparing an experiment to test graphene in space-like zero-gravity, for potential future use as a light sail in space-craft propulsion, such as for Starshot (article Volkskrant May 27th 2017, in Dutch). The GrapheneX team successfully submitted their experiment proposal to ESA Education’s Drop Your Thesis! Programme in October … Continued

“Innovate your Space” Symposium together with TNO

On November 9th, the TU Delft Space Institute together with TNO will organize a full-day symposium. This event is a unique opportunity to discuss and get updated on state of the art research and the challenging aspects for future space. The program will be an intense mixture of presentations, poster sessions, panel discussions as well as matchmaking with … Continued

NASA Selects Mission to Study Churning Chaos in our Milky Way and Beyond

NASA has selected a science mission that will measure emissions from the interstellar medium, which is the cosmic material found between stars. This data will help scientists determine the life cycle of interstellar gas in our Milky Way galaxy, witness the formation and destruction of star-forming clouds, and understand the dynamics and gas flow in … Continued

Talk about the KickSat project, crowdsourcing the World’s Smallest Spacecraft, by Zac Manchester

On Friday March 10th, Zac Manchester, Founder of the KickSat project and Postdoctoral Fellow of Harvard, visited TU Delft and gave a talk about the KickSat project, crowdsourcing the World’s Smallest Spacecraft. Zac initiated the KickSat project as an outgrowth of his Ph.D. research at Cornell, where he developed the electrical, mechanical, and communications systems underlying … Continued

Lecture STO-2 Balloon Mission over Antarctica by Dr. Jian Rong Gao

In an earlier news item on this site, the very successful launch of the Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory (STO2) on December 8th 2016 was already described. On March 7th, NVR together with the TU Delft Space Institute (DSI) organised an evening lecture about this launch at the TU Delft Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. At this lecture, … Continued

STO2 safely landed and retrieved data

In an earlier news item, the launch of the Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory (STO2) was mentioned. The STO2 telescope circled along with the polar vortex 39 km above Antarctica on a giant NASA balloon, to investigate interstellar gas clouds. After three weeks, on December 30th, 2016, the STO2 safely landed back on Antarctica. During the mission, … Continued

Polar balloon STO2 on its way

Last year it stayed on the ground due to bad weather conditions, but this year it went up last Thursday December 8th at 21.30 hours: the STO2 telescope, that will peer into molecular clouds in the universe where stars are born, while hanging on a giant NASA balloon, 40 kilometers above Antarctica.The NASA balloon that … Continued

First Learning Robot in Space

At the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, Leopold Summerer (head of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team) presented the Self-Supervised Learning experiment, which has been performed on board of the International Space Station (ISS). A small drone successfully taught itself to see distances using only one eye. The experiment was designed in collaboration between the European Space Agency … Continued