According to the United Nation Environment Program (2005), “Marine Litter” is defined as any item that has been made or used by people and deliberately or accidently discarded either directly into the sea or coast or transported from land into the marine environment.

The first steps have been taken to establish a non-explosive, harmless Indium-based 100W electric propulsion system for small and medium satellites. The activity successfully developed a breadboard that included all necessary functions for controlling a micro thruster, including temperature sensing and control, generation of the high voltage supplies for the ion emitter and extractor as well as heating and bias voltage supply for the charge balancing.

The time-honored Rayleigh criterion specifies the mini- mum separation between two incoherent optical sources using a linear imaging system. As a matter of fact, it is the size of the point spread function that determines the resolution: two points closer than the PSF width will be difficult to resolve due to the substantial overlap of their images.
Until recently, this Rayleigh criterion has been consid- ered as a fundamental limit. Resolution can only be improved either by reducing the wavelength or by building higher numerical-aperture optics, thereby making the PSF

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Project innovations in different knowledge domains

Based on an ESA feasibility study, the Wavemill concept has shown that extremely interesting results can be achieved in terms of ocean current retrieval for both velocity and direction. There is a strong interest for optimising the antenna architecture and demonstrating feasibility and performance. Among possible antenna architectures, the javelin concept looks interesting since it can provide the required along- and across-track baselines with a compact spacecraft at launch having a nearly optimal configuration for AOCS (long and thin in flight direction).

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The mixed signal (SiGe BiCMOS) technologies have been under interest in the specific area of signal generation due to good achievable signal quality. Meanwhile, the technology has been improved to reach higher operating frequencies and lower noise figures, too. The SiGe is very well suited for digital receiver implementation at L-band.The advantage of SiGe over GaAs in space use is foreseen in the high degree of integration due to the feasibility of mixing analogue and digital functions on a single chip. This means that the complete microwave system (e.g.