n/a

The main goal of this project was to fabricate porous electrodes used in fuel cells. A porous electrode consists of a catalyst layer (CL), microporous layer (MPL) and gas diffusion layer (GDL). GDLs are conventionally made of carbon paper or cloth. However, there are several drawbacks, including degregation in alkalin media, deformation, and consequently, closure of pores under compression, and randomness of pore charactristics (e.g., pore size and distribution). As an alternative, metallic GDLs with much greater mechanical strengths have recently been introduced for alkalin environements.

The increasing interest for Deep-Space cubesat is leading in the near future to the need of adequate deployment systems (``Cubesat Dispensers``) suitable for deep space applications, taking into account all the environmental (e.g. radiation) and mission constraints (e.g. need for power supply to the cubesat, possibility to upload SW updates, need for accurate release conditions).

The activity is aiming at developing a new generation of mass memories able to support File Based Operations while sustaining high data throughput and providing large capacity.

The project called Peripheral and Redundancy Switch Controller is based on the proposal made by Agile Systems Engineering to develop, test and integrate a switch between two on-board-computers (OBCs) that would be connected to

Smallsat DTN is an OPS-SAT experiment awarded funding trough ESA’s OSIP, OPS-SAT campaign. The aim of the project is to investigate the benefits of CFDP and Bundle Protocol for satellite operations and their possible applications in the optical communications links, of the future ESA mission of OPS-SAT 2. The Flight Campaign of the project completed in a three-day span, successfully demonstrating the implementation of a LEO DTN network, spacecraft remote control and configuration over Bundle Protocol and CFDP imagery data distribution over multiple passes from the ground segment.

Efforts for anomaly root cause analysis (e.g. GAIA) show the urgent need of using discipline models with flight data for diagnostic purposes. Acquiring more feedback from (also nominal) flight operations is also urgent to improve spacecraft related processes of engineering, analysis and verification. A spacecraft is equipped with several monitoring sensors that measure different attributes of the spacecraft. This results in a huge raw stream of data that has to be analysed to produce information about spacecraft behaviour and health status.

n/a

A key objective of the Model-Based for System Engineering (MBSE) roadmap is to use MBSE to improve reviews conducted within the Agency. To date, the Agency has some limited experience with this; nonetheless, a standardised process has not yet been developed. In addition, the current tools and processes do not encourage easy interaction with models for users who are not experienced modellers. Digital modelling literacy is low across the wider Agency, and will likely remain so in the coming years.