Increased radiation levels, as a result of space weather, has been recognised as an important risk for spacecraft and launcher operations. Recently threshold levels of solar energetic particle (SEP) flux and solar activity have been considered as a baseline criteria for launches. After the launch of Gaia in 2013, the transfer included manoeuvres reliant upon the AOCS star trackers, operating in interplanetary space and whose reliability could be seriously impacted by radiation storms known as Solar Particle Events (SPEs).

•On-board disturbance sources such as solar array drive mecha

Permanence in microgravity conditions is well known to have detrimental effects on biological systems and living organisms, limiting in particular human space operations and exploration both over short and long term periods, as it promotes/accelerates some degenerative processes associated to aging and often to pathology onset on Earth.

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.

Collision avoidance is part of routine operations today. Detailed re-entry predictions and assessment of on-ground risks are regularly performed for high interest objects such as payloads of ESA or its member states. Both activities rely on uncertainty information, which has to be propagated along the trajectory and mapped to quantities which are not state vectors, e.g. collision plane and on-ground location. Current approaches rely on either Monte Carlo methods (with few runs) or propagation of covariance assuming a simple model of the dynamics, in particular of the air drag perturbation.