Nowadays, human Moon exploration, and the consequent desire to establish a permanent settlement on its surface, represents one of the most fascinating challenge to face. The permanent presence of a human outpost very far from Earth raises the problem of the huge amount of payload required for the settlement, as well as the need of rapid and in-time supply of material and spare parts useful for all the activities carried out in-situ, including the realization of medicals tools and patient-specific back-up implants.

Detecting, identifying, quantifying and tracking strategies for leakage plastic litter in terrestrial as well as aquatic environments using remote sensing technologies is expected to support future continuous monitoring of waste pollution at wide covering geo-spatial scales. The methodologies to detect plastic waste from airborne or satellite observations should be based on fundamental and well-characterised optical features.

Marine Litter Aggregation Forecast presents a new estimation of long-term global distribution of marine litter proceeding from land-based and from sea-based sources at global scale, taking advantage of numerical reanalysis databases of historical met-ocean conditions. Different machine learning techniques are applied to generate long-term climate-based series of those environmental variables that may affect the drift of marine litter over the sea surface such as currents, wind and wave-induced Stokes drift.

The main objective of the OMAR Mission Architecture study is to identify and trade-off different mission architectures, to provide different services on-orbit. For each of the relevant scenarios, this objective shall be achieved by defining the associated system functional analysis and by trading-off different architectures and concepts of operations. Furthermore, the impact of aspects such as: operational orbit, type of serviced satellites, services provided, different levels of autonomy, and any other relevant factors is to be assessed.

For the last few decades geometrical ray tracing method has been the backbone of optical simulations for various optical industries including space applications. The industries have implemented innovative methods such as importance sampling for improving straylight analysis and coherent beam propagation for modelling beam diffraction effects. Also the optical ray tracers have implemented file interchanges between optical CAD and mechanical CAD platforms.

Achievements and status: During a hot fire campaign (TRL-6), the thruster engineering models (EM1 and SN2) have proven ability to perform within the nominal operational pressure box of a standard GEO CPS specification. The thruster demonstrated low thrust roughness and margin against combustion instabilities for a wide throughput range. The maximum recorded throat temperature, slightly above 1300°C, shows margin against the platinum-alloy limits.

Background and justification:

• The powder characterization method PowderGenetics forms the basis for later evaluation and correlation strategies. Among the numerous variables along the whole additive manufacturing chain, PowderGenetics is a way to allow powder material to become measured, compared and evaluated. It aims to become one constant within the process.

Achievements and status: