ABSTRACT. — Very low Earth orbit (VLEO) enables improved spatial resolution and access to the lower thermosphere, but sustained operations are limited by strong, highly variable aerodynamic drag in the free molecular flow regime. In addition to drag, spacecraft must also meet numerous other requirements, including mass, volume, and power. Together, these constraints motivate design methods that can explore large parameter spaces with multiple competing objectives. This report presents...

ABSTRACT. — Designing scientific instrumentation often requires exploring large, highly constrained design spaces using computationally expensive physics simulations. These simulators pose substantial challenges for integrating evolutionary computation (EC) into scientific design workflows. Evolutionary computation typically requires numerous design evaluations, making the integration of slow, low-throughput simulators particularly...

ABSTRACT. — Heavy (Z>26) solar energetic particles (SEPs) with energies ~1 MeV/nucleon are known to leave visible damage tracks in meteoritic materials. The density of such "solar flare tracks" in lunar and asteroidal samples has been used as a measure of a sample's exposure time to space, yielding critical information on planetary space weathering rates [e.g., 1] and the dynamics and lifetimes of interplanetary dust grains [e.g., 2, 3]. Knowledge of the SEP track accumulation rate in planetary materials at 1 au is critical for...