The project summarized here was conceived to support the definition of applications, products and user requirements, as well as the hardware design and ground processing design of a companion satellite mission which will carry aboard a "passive" radar working in tandem with the Argentinian L-band radar developed by CONAE and denoted as SAOCOM. The primary objective (i.e., science driver) of the SAOCOM companion satellite mission (SAOCOM-CS) is forest tomography, which will be carried out by exploiting small baselines between active and passive systems (order of km) changing with time.

Generally speaking DIAMS has been an opportunity to secure the feasibility of the IOD in technical, programmatic and financial terms. More specifically DIAMS has allowed to define the end-to-end mission concept for this IOD, covering the design of various associated segments : Space Segment (Payload, Platform), and Ground Segment. Both interest and programmatic aspects have also been consolidated.

- On the technical plane :
Both the requirements and the design of the system have been refined to validate the IOD concept :

The Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) region, home of the operational Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) GPS and Glonass, is becoming more and more exploited with the advent of the European Galileo and the Chinese Beidou constellations, both in their build-up phase. The sensitive applications of the navigation satellites and the absence of any natural sink mechanism, such as the atmospheric drag, call for a careful debris prevention policy able to preserve the MEO environment, avoiding in the future the problems now already faced by the LEO and the Geostationary Orbit (GEO) environments.

The overall objective of this study is to assess constellations of two pairs of satellites for the retrieval of time-variable gravity field information for best quality scientific monitoring of mass distribution and transport in the Earth system. Before embarking on this study the geodetic community and space agencies have come to realize that weaknesses in current single-pair gravimetric satellite missions such as GRACE or GRACE-FO (to be launched in 2017) would significantly be alleviated by having a second GRACE-type pair in space simultaneously.

There is a need to achieve optimal cost effectiveness from remote sensing missions. Concurrently, a key scientific need in remote sensing is to address the spatial and temporal resolution of atmospheric measurements. Improved temporal resolution observations of the atmosphere – and importantly a reduced latency between observation and delivery to the user – can directly improve weather forecasting services.

The Optel-μ Implementation Study on ISS has been set up to assess the feasibility of an IOD (In Orbit Demonstration) of the Optel-μ Space Terminal on the ISS (International Space Station).
The Optel-μ system provides an optical data downlink from a LEO (Low Earth Orbit) S/C to an Optical Ground Station with a data rate up to 2Gbit/s. It is being developed by RUAG Space in the frame of the ARTES program

The simulations of the long term evolution of the space debris population, under realistic assumptions, show how the driving factor in the future environment will be mostly the breakup of large spacecraft and rocket bodies in LEO.

The BOUNCED project has assessed the behaviour of elastic tethers within flexible link Active Debris Removal (ADR) systems. This has been achieved by solving a multidimensional set of linear equations, through the separation of dynamic modes; and the construction of analytic and numeric models of the resulting system. These models can be used to simulate the behaviour of both single and multi material tethers across the full lifetime of a tether mission, from pretension, through re-entry burn and free body motion post burn, to re-entry.

Saocom-CS payload is aimed at being mounted onboard a dedicated satellite that will flight in formation with Saocom-1B satellite., the L-band SAR satellite property of CONAE (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales, Argentina).

This summary presents the work by the University of Strathclyde, SCISYS and Roke Manor Research in response to the ESA SysNova Challenge AO7891; Remote sensing with cooperative nanosats, Challenge #3 – Weather. The objective of this work was to evaluate the performance and cost of multi-agent satellite networks capable of providing data in support of severe weather monitoring.