Enabling Technologies for Planetary Exploration

The primary objective of this chapter is to present an overview of the different key technologies that will be needed in order to fly the technically most challenging of the representative missions identified in Chapter 4 (the Pillar 2 Horizon 2061 report, Lasue et al., 2021). It starts with a description of the future scientific instruments which will address the key questions of Horizon 2061 described in Chapter 3 (the Pillar 1 Horizon 2061 report, Dehant et al., 2021) and the new technologies that the next generations of space instruments will require (Section 2). From there, the chapter follows the line of logical development and implementation of a planetary mission: Section 3 describes some of the novel mission architectures that will be needed and how they will articulate interplanetary spacecraft and science platforms; Section 4 summarizes the system-level technologies needed: power, propulsion, navigation, communication, advanced autonomy on-board planetary spacecraft; Section 5 describes the diversity of specialized science platforms that will be needed to survive, operate, and return scientific data from the extreme environments that future missions will target; Section 6 describes the new technology developments that will be needed for long-duration missions and semipermanent settlements; finally, Section 7 attempts to anticipate some of the disruptive technologies that should emerge and progressively prevail in the decades to come to meet the long-term needs of future planetary missions.