Plastic marine litter is a very complex global environmental issue, with plastic litter at the sea surface representing only a small fraction of plastic entering the sea. In this respect, the BLUE project investigated the potential of diverse LIDAR techniques (backscatter, fluorescence, Raman) to address the detection of plastic litter not only floating on the sea surface, but also suspended in the first few metres under the surface, with also a focus on detecting microplastics and discriminating plastic from other types of litter. The approach adopted was four-fold:

The Mars Weather Network Mission is a key precursor mission to future human exploration planning which consists of two orbiting spacecraft and four Lander together these will provide a comprehensive understanding of weather patterns at Mars.

The activity shall develop three prototypes of the exoskeleton system, one to be qualified for usage inside the International Space Station and one to be up-loaded as flight model to the international space station. The third model will be a ground reference model. The test campaign of the system can be undertaken as an agency furnished item. The activity shall develop a full mechatronic system, including all material to package and transport the system to orbit, control electronics and computers.

The current state of the art for bi-propellant propulsion systems employed by telecom spacecraft is to have a gas regulated system to maintain the propellant feed pressure in the propellant tanks for the Apogee engine burn. For on-station the pressure in the propellant tank is allowed to decay over life (aka blowdown) and thus the thruster propellant inlet pressure (and hence thruster performance) decays over time. Recently a number of different pump concepts have been proposed to improve the performance of propulsion launcher systems.

The idea presented here links to the miniaturization of trace gas sensors for earth observation. In the scientific community there is a push for smaller satellites either complementary to the currently existing and planned missions or even for future satellite constellations. The contractor proposes a system study to investigate one possible method for future instrument miniaturization. At the core of this study idea are recent advances in spectrometry using 2D photonic crystals and metasurface filters.

For plastic detection, characterisation and tracking, we need rich spectral information, ideally hyperspectral data. We would like hyperspectral data up to short-wave infrared (2500 nm) and around 0.5 m ground sample distance. Neither of these characteristics are existent in current Earth observation missions, and will still be difficult to find in future Earth observation missions.