Beginning in June 2012, an MSSL-led team have performed a study of the requirements and design of a Lunar Surface Camera Package for Exploration L- CAM for the ESA Lunar Lander. However, the Lunar Lander program was terminated by the ESA Ministerial Council in November 2012. As a result, with four of the six TNs requested in the SoW completed, ESA instructed MSSL to concentrate work on the L-CAM thermal model. The following final report is therefore composed of TNs 1- 4 and the Thermal Report.

The main goals of the DPEM project was [RD1] "to set the foundations for the development of a comprehensive suite of near surface dusty plasma environment models applicable in particular (but not only) to airless bodies of interest for future exploration missions such as asteroids, the Moon, Phobos and Deimos, etc … These models shall allow the definition of charged dust environment specifications to assess the effects of dusty plasmas on near surface or surface exploration units (spacecraft, payload, lander, astronaut) in a surface-spacecraft-dust environment system."

A considerable amount of supporting research and technology development has to take place on the Earth to allow humans to explore the Moon, Mars and beyond. The Concepts for Activities in the Field for Exploration (CAFE) project aims to support such aims in an international context by preparing a complete catalogue of terrestrial analogue environments that are appropriate for testing human space exploration-related scientific field activities.

The XNAV concept has been analysed in detail. The performances obtained from simulations have been validated successfully using real data from XMM-Newton space telescope.
The performances obtained using real data are not in line with the XNAV performances (100 m for the Crab pulsar) due to limitations in the XMM-Newton instrument operations. We have been forced to use a source much fainter than the Crab pulsar and surrounded by a background much stronger than expected.

Low energy transfers have shown that it is possible to reduce the ∆v cost (and therefore the propellant mass) for a number of transfer types. This is possible by exploiting the natural n-body dynamics characterizing the spacecraft motion within the Solar System. In particular, the concept of ballistic capture makes it possible to reduce the hyperbolic excess velocity upon moon/plant arrival, and allows the spacecraft to perform few orbits at zero cost. Low energy transfers are designed by using impulsive maneuver, and therefore they inherently use chemical propulsion (Figure 1).