To sustain a long-term presence on the Moon, plants need to be cultivated in

Almost all types of satellite sensors are actively or passively cooled, in many cases down to cryogenic temperatures. The goal is to suppress thermal noise in order to achieve the highest possible signal-to-noise ratio. Thus, cryocoolers are critical components in satellite systems, and in many cases key enablers. For instance in Earth Observation (EO) systems, mechanical cryocoolers are preferred over passive ones. The reason is that passive radiators induce constraints on satellite orbit and attitude.

Distributed optical fibre sensors (DOFS) are highly suitable for monitoring temperature, vibration and strain using physical principles such as Raman, Rayleigh and Brillouin backscatter. They convert a standard telecom infrastructure to a sensor network providing thousands of virtual sensors per km using the intrinsic light/glass interaction during propagation.

GaN-based devices are becoming a key technology for millimeter-wave applications. Because of outstanding material properties, recent advances in GaN device designs provided a sharp increase in performances including high power, high efficiency, reliability, linearity, and compact size. These capabilities are ideally suited for numerous millimeter-wave power applications such as wireless networks and PAs MMIC for Q-band frequency and beyond.

Project HyperClass aimed at accelerating the technology to process spectra received from single pixel images of space objects and:

i) extract the material composition of the object,

ii) classify the object according to a set of predefined features,

iii) estimate the attitude motion from the spectral lightcurve.

The objectives of the DONE3D activities are the implementation of a novel additive manufacturing supply chain that is based on the through Lithography Metal Manufacturing (LMM) technology, and to assess its applicability to the development of RF components for SatCom and EO applications, such as multi-beam antennas.

The main objective of the intelligent COTS-based Power Stages (iCOTS) project consisted of the following aspects:

• Design and implementation of a BLDC power stage for robotic space application
• A modular design for the evaluation of power electronics in robotic space application based on COTS GaN-FETs
• Definition of the design process and the appropriate selection of COTS components
• Radiation test of selected COTS components

The goal of the Powersail project is to demonstrate the potential of amorphous silicon (a-Si) deposited on ultralight space-grade polyimide for solar power satellites (SPS). State of the art solutions are III-V compound semiconductor triple junction-based PV modules, which are 100 times too expensive and one order of magnitude too heavy to build a competitive SPS with terrestrial microwave energy collection infrastructure.

Diffraction limits the resolution of standard optical microscopes. Breaking the diffraction limit is the motivation behind Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) that includes Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy (SNOM). SPMs create high-resolution maps of the sample’s surface by scanning the sample with nanometric probes. SNOM in particular, can simultaneously provide information on the morphology and on the optical properties of materials by illuminating the sample with a localized field provided by the microscope probe.

The architecture of an SPS system requires that the SPS maintain constant visibility to both the Sun and the ground station. This immediately implies a so-called Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit (GEO), which is also called a Geostationary Orbit; or a near-GEO Geosynchronous Orbit (GSO). These are substantially the same orbits that are used for existing communications satellites.