Mars Ice Access Mission is a key robotic precursor mission to future human exploration planning. It is part of ESA’s Exploration Programme, named “Terrae Novae”, encompassing all ESA’s human and robotic activities related to the exploration and utilisation of Earth Orbit, Moon and Mars. The “Mars Ice Access Mission Study” is a Pre-Phase A level study. The objective of the study was to propose a preliminary design of a mission aiming to:

This work begins the material selection process for EVA suits based on initial inputs from the EAC team that is developing an ergonomic prototype space suit.

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.

The documents describe the first work developed by Maana Electric in the frame of the ACME project. The aim of the activity is to develop a system to use thermite reaction produced from in-situ resources from lunar regolith and use the energy released by the metallothermic reaction as a Lunar Night Survival solution. These documents report the results of the first Proof-of-Concept car laboratories to validate that thermite in atmospheric condition can be generated from regolith and its beneficiated forms. From the outcomes of the PoC, a breadboard has been designed, integrated and tested.

The AERODEM is an ESA demonstration mission that will implement an aerocapture phase in order to provide an atmospheric ∆V instead of a standard chemical one for orbiting a SpaceCraft around Mars. The aerocapture technique currently studied relies on a discrete event drag modulation technique that modifies only once the aerocapture module ballistic coefficient by separating / retracting the heatshield.

An interplanetary probe must decelerate from a hyperbolic interplanetory trajectory to an orbital trajectory when it arrives at its destination. Currently, this maneuvre is achieved using chemical propulsion, which means that propellant makes up a significant fraction of the vehicle mass. Aerocapture is an alternative concept that instead uses aerodynamic drag from the athmosphere of the planet to decelerate the arriving spacecraft.

The European Charging Station for the Moon (ECSM) is to be integrated within the EL3 Architecture, which provides the function of transportation of ECSM to the lunar surface. The Power Station mission is envisaged as possible EL3 payload and it aims at providing power, at a strategic location on the lunar surface, during lunar day and night to ESA and International partner assets. It is in line with the envisioned international lunar exploration architecture.

The ENHANCE (Enabling Harbor to Harbor Autonomous Situational Awareness in Sea Ice Conditions) project is aimed to study How to improve the autonomous navigation and situational awareness in the maritime domain by utilising ML and AI concepts. For this end, we utilise both traditional RGB cameras as well as IR cameras to obtain as diverse as possible data set of sea-ice conditions to train a ML model that can identify an ice tracks and objects, such as buoys, that can help in navigation.

The study aimed to develop crucial enabling technologies for constructing potential large scale Moon and Mars Planetary surface simulators. It involved the Design, Construction and Testing of five enabling technologies, two related to the simulator chamber design (Task 1) and 3 involving modular sub-systems (Task 2). To summarize, despite several technical challenges functional solutions have been found for each of the five target technologies. Together these constitute vital components for future construction of a (low cost) large scale Mars/Moon test facility