The goal of the project was to develop a service as a product to simplify fitting DNN (Deep Learning Neural Networks) in on board HW to make better use of AI on space missions The role of the service is to support data processing engineers in reducing HW resources requirement of powerful DNN for image analysis to be executed onboard. 

Space missions benefit greatly by the capability of the on-board GNC system to adapt rapidly to unknown environment. Autonomous vision-based navigation is a particular technology under implementation in several ESA missions. One of the most interesting applications in that field is the proximity operations around a small asteroid, like those in HERA.
The goal of this activity was to develop a navigation algorithm with the capability to fly over an unknown terrain and achieve better navigation performances than current vision-based techniques based on unknown feature tracking.

With the increased frequency of shipping activities, such as tourism and freight’s transport, navigation safety has become a major concern, especially when human casualties, environmental issues and economic losses are considered. Even if new technologies have already supplied aids to pilots for the navigation risk reduction, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reports that the majority of accidents could have been avoided by providing suitable input to the navigation decision-making process.

SMARTIE (Smart Resource Management based on Internet of Things to support Off-Earth Manufacturing of Lunar Infrastructures) is an ESA study to assess the requirements, architecture, hardware and software needs and costs for implementation of an Internet of Manufacturing Things (IoMT) for a lunar human base and associated infrastructure. 

Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) are rapidly approaching market-readiness, with numerous partly-autonomous and teleoperated systems either under development or already performing operational demonstrations for applications such as bathymetric surveying (SEA-KIT Maxlimer, Deep BV), maintenance of offshore installations (Thales Halcyon), and commercial shipping (Yara Birkeland, Maersk VISTULA-Class).

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.

Currently, GNSS is the backbone of most Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) solutions, in providing 24/7 continuous, all-weather, global coverage to an unlimited number of receiver-equipped users. There is an increasing dependency on the availability and reliability of GNSS. However, GNSS is widely known to be vulnerable to an evolving range of threats (natural and man-made, unintentional and deliberate).

New L2 missions like Euclid and Plato will require high data rate reception in K-Band downlink (26 GHz). A new X/K-Band coaxial feed system was developed in a previous TRP activity and it will be deployed in the next years in DSA2 (Cebreros, Spain) and DSA3 (Malargue, Argentina). This feed system architecture will be considered the starting point for the re-design of a new feed system that will allow simultaneous uplink (22 GHz) and downlink (26 GHz).It is intended to trade-off at least two alternative feed system architectures and to perform the detailed design of the selected one.