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:

The problems derived from RF interference (RFI) created by men hand, whether generated intentionally or not, remain as one of the main concerns of the space industry.

The general goal of this project is to operationalize and deepen the findings and conclusions of the initial project “Exploring AI capabilities to support the evaluation process of ideas submitted in the OSIP platform.” which demonstrated that AI techniques and software (COGITO Discover) could be used positively to enhance and ease the evaluation of ideas, by providing some new indicators such as idea novelty (scoring 0-100) based on the notion of similarity between ideas and innovation projects.

Collision avoidance is part of routine operations today. Detailed re-entry predictions and assessment of on-ground risks are regularly performed for high interest objects such as payloads of ESA or its member states. Both activities rely on uncertainty information, which has to be propagated along the trajectory and mapped to quantities which are not state vectors, e.g. collision plane and on-ground location. Current approaches rely on either Monte Carlo methods (with few runs) or propagation of covariance assuming a simple model of the dynamics, in particular of the air drag perturbation.

Space qualified Electrical, Electronic and Electromechanical (EEE) components are often considered as very expensive compared to automotive products that exhibit similar and sometimes better performances with a demonstrated quality and reliability. Therefore, the use of automotive EEE parts might be considered as a potential solution to decrease the cost of component of a spacecraft. However, the suitability for space application of the automotive products shall be demonstrated.

Current on-board orbit determination concepts are in the most cases an integral part of the satellite avionics. However, it is believed that a capability of on-board precise orbit determination would allow to develop new areas of applications. E.g. autonomous station keeping (LEO, MEO and GEO), on-board SAR processing (LEO), missions with high resolution image processing (LEO) or missions related to atmospheric sounding.For this reason, this study shall investigate the conceptual approach for an on-board precise orbit determination system which is not a part of the on-board avionics.

Large apertures (antennas and telescopes) and long baselines and focal lengths in space have applications for telecommunications, Earth observation and scientific missions. Astrophysics missions need deployable structures mostly for the creation of long base lines of interferometers and large focal lengths, e.g. for X-ray telescopes. Missions currently in early phases may require for instance deployable booms of up to 100 m deployed length and positioning accuracy within a sphere of 1 mm radius or better and rotations lower than 0.005 degree.