Background and justification:

•The railway simulation testbed is an essential tool / capability needed to support validation of GNSS receiver technologies / techniques / integrity algorithms for safety-related applications in railway

•Testbed complements field testing allowing conditions that are statistically unlikely to be observed in the field to be simulated in a highly controlled and repeatable environment

Achievements and status:

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.

The main objective of the ELMASAT study was to brint into Capella the means to calculate the availability of a satellite system and provide extra facilities for trade-off analysis. As an example of application, an assesment of SEE detection and mitigation strategies was performed with respect to availability objectives.

WASP is a prototype EO data processor, developed in the frame of the ESA Discovery Campaign on Remote Sensing of Plastic Marine Litter, exploiting Copernicus Sentinel-2 L1C images to detect and catalogue the presence of filaments of floating marine debris with high probability of containing anthropogenic litter.

The BIOINSPACED project was initiated to find bio-inspired solutions for space debris removal because the identification, orbital alignment, capture and removal of uncooperative bodies in space is incredibly complex and no fully functioning method is available to date. Biology and its evolved mechanisms often provide specialized concepts that show great transferability to technical systems.

The main objective of the project is the reverse engineering of the OPS-SAT system, creating a model of the existing system design. The model aims to be built in a way that it is most useful for OPS-SAT engineers to understand and discuss the existing design and use this as a basis for further development of the OPS-SAT system.

The original Ball Latch Valve was developed between 2004 and 2007, based on a Swagelok design, and between 2008 an

The objective of the Space Weather impact on Arctic Navigation (SWAN) project has been to
develop and demonstrate new techniques, which are expected to improve on the current
state-of-the-art space weather forecasting techniques and products related to space weather
effects for Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) systems in the Arctic, with particular
attention to the Greenland area.

The main objectives of this project were to develop a thruster prototype based on magnetic powder electrostatic propulsion and to test it in vacuum with direct thrust measurements. The aim was to check the robustness of the concept and to measure and calculate important performance parameters such as thrust and specific impulse, to allow a comparison with other thruster technologies. This project demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of electrostatic propulsion based on powder emission.

The activity aims at developing a tool that can investigate the failure modes of GNSS systems. Such tool can then be used for detection of failures, and/or to characterise the tolerance of GNSS system or subsystem architectures to failures. Focus will be given primarily to failures and failure modes that may impact critical services (e.g. Safety-of-Life). The tool shall be able to model GNSS systems and subsystems (i.e. ground or space segments, elements and/or components) and its failure modes in a modular way.