Achievements and status:
•Review of the State of Art of probes for Plasma Thrusters.
•Definition of probes requirements.
•Design and fabrication of several RFCLP, a couple of FC and an RPA.
•Integration and assembly of the probes at UC3M premises using different UC3M-SENER owned HPTs prototypes.
•Validation (by test) of the probes: RFCLP and FC pairs comparison, and RPA-LIF validation.
•Post-processing tool for results processing and interpretation.
Benefits:

The use of optical (laser) feeder-links for next generation telecommunication satellites is receiving strong interest from commercial telecommunication providers because it will soon not be possible to support the projected growth in bandwidth using radio frequency bands (e.g. Ka-band). Moving to higher radio frequencies such as the Q/V or W-bands does not dramatically improve available bandwidth, while it increases atmospheric attenuation to a level comparable with the laser communication bands. Cloud coverage can be mitigated by site diversity, namely by using multiple (e.g.

Today, Ge is used as a growth template for III-V based solar cells and also serves as the lowest active junction. While the thickness of the Ge on solar cell level is around 140µm, actually only 10-20µm are really active. Therefore, in order to become thinner and lighter, solar cell manufacturers start to thin down the Ge wafers after cell processing by grinding, etching or lift-off processes (to reduce weight). However, this Ge waste is today not recovered since no economical process exists.

Up to now, the RF Safe Operating Area (SOA) of a process is evaluated by performing, at Room Temperature, RF step stress tests and RF life testing on specific parts and for specific applications only. In order to establish the complete RF SOA of a process, i.e. the RF SOA covering the main applications of a process, the two following main testing need to be done. Firstly, RF step stress tests and RF life testing will be performed on several MMIC designs and/or discrete parts, specifically chosen to be representative of the main applications of 2 major European millimeter-wave processes.

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) impact heavily on a wide variety of space applications/services belonging to different areas, such as Telecommunications, Navigation and Earth Observation. Despite the huge number of interfering signal types, a preliminary classification of Interference may be performed according to the nature of interfering sources: - Intentional interferences. The transmitting events are deliberately performed for attacking other systems (e.g., jamming, spoofing, etc.); - Unintentional interferences.

Future spacecraft missions require high accuracy (in relative and absolute kinematics as well as attitude parameters).

The Ka-band frequency (35 GHz) is becoming increasingly attractive for spaceborne remote sensing applications. Unlike other radar bands, the Ka-band enables the development of compact high resolution interferometric instruments and embarking the payloads on a single platform. This creates unique new opportunities in Earth observation science and civil security applications, for instance in monitoring the changing cryosphere, generating high resolution maps of ocean currents and ship and vehicle detection.

This activity is split in different parts focusing on various aspects of the overall methodology: 1) Models and structural analysis development, fidelity and coupling: Noise source models are the starting point of microvibration analysis. Some sources are well known and modelled (e.g. Reaction wheel) but others still require some development. In particular, cryo-cooler and stepper motors models are often key to microvibration performance but are generally based on black-box models coming from test characterization without a model representation of the physical phenomena.