The ESA Open Space Innovation Platform Campaign for Cognitive Cloud Computing in Space (3CS) called for project proposals for the use of edge and cloud computing technologies in space. D-Orbit created a consortium including UniBap and Trillium to respond to this opportunity with a proposal to engage the cloud computing community to identify and fly applications on the ION SCV-004 mission.

Lunar exploration has only started within the last few decades, and interest is continuing to grow. Space agencies and private investors are looking at the opportunities that it brings and see more commercial interest in it. According to a Euroconsult study, 51 missions to the Moon are planned in 2020–2029, compared to just seven in the previous decade, allowing us to better explore Earth's natural satellite and prepare for long-term lunar exploration and, in the future, deep space.

Security is becoming increasingly important in all of ESA's missions, rather than just in specific missions (Galileo, Copernicus) as was the case in the past. Therefore, the European space industry need to have a well-defined and standardized approach to assess the security processes of its suppliers, especially in terms of software development, where many security vulnerabilities can be introduced.

SpaceWire has become a de facto standard for payload systems (including for Command & Control) and its Real-Time derivatives are now being considered for avionics. The capability provided by SpaceWire to develop data handling systems based on high-speed networks allows much greater performance but implies implementing communication bus management techniques specific to SpaceWire. As network management is not part of the basic SpaceWire protocol ECSS-E-ST-50-12C (Rev.1), it must be provided to industry in the form of an additional standard. 
 

The Data Compression as a Service (DCaaS) study aimed to bring the benefits of data compression to the experimenters on ESA's OPS-SAT platform. It focused on using the POCKET+ algorithm for the compression of housekeeping telemetry data. The project contained a space component, which performed the compression of provided user data, and a ground component, for the decompression of transmitted user data. Three use cases were selected within the scope of the project: file-to-file, packet-to-packet, and stream-to-stream lossless data transfers.

CubeSats have the potential to revolutionise Earth observation from space by exploring different operating points in terms of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution. However, physical limitations, mostly in terms of size, prevent them from obtaining high-quality images. OPS-SAT, while characteriaed by a small form factor, provides an impressively capable and flexible hardware/software platform for executing demanding machine learning algorithms (inference stage).

Recent developments in optimisation formulation and software design have allowed multi-criteria optimisation problems to be solved in real-time on typical space-grade processors. An important potential application is slew attitude guidance in the presence of actuator limitations and star tracker or instrument exclusion zones, particularly when slew time is critical.The optimisation problem can be formulated as time, fuel or pointing error (during slew) minimisation with constraints of exclusion zones and actuator authority envelopes.

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