The development of efficient catalysts which utilise solar energy to convert CO2 to produce value-added chemicals or fuels is extremely appealing since it can simultaneously reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and provide energy storage solutions, with direct applications in both terrestrial and non-terrestrial environments. In recent years, novel solid catalysts such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have demonstrated great potential in energy conversion systems.

Future long-duration space missions or planetary outposts, such as on the Moon or Mars, will need solutions for producing food in situ, with a view to:

Development of instruments and algorithms for remote sensing of plastics need standardised global in-situ observations. Compared to aquatic environments, dry shores are more accessible to frequent in situ observations. As part of the HyperDrone project, funded by the Discovery Element of the European Space Agency’s Basic Activities, we aimed to develop a standardised indicator for in-situ radiometric detection of plastic debris with the view to be deployed globally on different platforms.

Main achievement: Development of the first blockchain ecosystem for space system engineering, as a global configuration tool that can model the business logic of concurrent design. Addressing the MBSE challenges of  controlling data exchange and traceability across system development and operations lifecycle.

Results: Two use cases have been successfully implemented

For an extended stay on the Moon, humans require habitation with substantial protection from space radiation and micrometeorites. The lunar regolith is a readily available resource in-situ, which can be thermally treated to build lunar habitats/infrastructure and extract oxygen/water. Due to the volumetric heating characteristic intrinsic to microwave heating, it is a more energy-efficient process than solar or laser sintering for large-scale manufacturing and construction.

The objective of the proposed PNT Traffic Light project is to develop a continuous 24/7 performance monitoring tool for EGNOS/GNSS (and particularly for GPS, GALILEO and EGNOS) on the northern and arctic region of, at least, EGNOS coverage area. In addition to just EGNOS, the tool shall be designed to support assessment of the performance of also other GNSSs (at least GPS and Galileo).

Tables and graphs are knowingly used to organise data within a company with different levels of depth and complexity. Knowledge graphs (KGs) are particularly useful because they can cope with data diversity (high-quality complete data and sparse and incomplete data), they have a high degree of scalability and flexibility (the semantic data model can be inter-operational, large, wide and as deep as needed) and, last but not least, they provide reasoning and inference capabilities.

Space Based Solar Power concepts promise the generation of large amounts of renewable power by launching vast Solar Power Satellites (SPS) into space and beaming the power back to rectennas on Earth. Due to diffraction physics, large scale arrays delivering 2GW of power to the ground will be on the order of a kilometre in length and have masses between 2,000 and 10,000 tonnes. As of January 2020, the amount of debris orbiting the Earth exceeded 8,000 metric tonnes. A decommissioned SPS would therefore have the potential to create a step change in the mass of debris humanity has created.

There is growing global concern over the chemical, biological and ecological impact of marine plastic pollution. Every year many millions of tons of plastic enter the global oceans but where it goes remains largely unknown. Remote sensing has the potential to provide long-term, global monitoring but for plastics in the ocean it is still in early stages.

The focus of study is to build near-IR capability onto Si CCDs for Time-Delay-Integration (TDI) applications, with the main requirement being charge domain summation, which allows the lowest noise performance on these types of devices. Currently there is no product that exists to do this. Si CCDs are a well-established technology which, whilst being an “old” technology, are still world leading in certain applications up to a wavelength of ~1μm.