Microbial contamination is a generic risk concerning flight hardware degradation, Planetary Protection and potentially crew health. Material surface requires a proper control and monitoring of the microbial cleanliness level. Today, contact plates, swabs and wipes are used for surface sampling. Swabs and wipes samples include mandatory liquid transfer to further extract and detect microorganism. Today, automated miniaturized system, molecular-based, has been developed and offers the possibility to perform multiple laboratory functions on a complete integrated system (i.e.

Achievements and status: ​

Achievements and status:
•Review of the State of Art of probes for Plasma Thrusters.
•Definition of probes requirements.
•Design and fabrication of several RFCLP, a couple of FC and an RPA.
•Integration and assembly of the probes at UC3M premises using different UC3M-SENER owned HPTs prototypes.
•Validation (by test) of the probes: RFCLP and FC pairs comparison, and RPA-LIF validation.
•Post-processing tool for results processing and interpretation.
Benefits:

In 2009, the Nanosat study recommended a high degree of integration between data handling, AOCS and power distribution. Meanwhile, industry has come with innovate solutions where AOCS sensors are miniaturised and can be progressively introduced fully or partially in the central processor, typically coarse gyros, GNSS receivers or the processing part of the Star Trackers, leaving only optical heads or GNSS antennas to be accommodated as external units.