Over 120 spacecraft presently use electric thruster systems. They are now being used to provide most of the post-LEO propulsion demands on geosynchronous missions. The availability of practical, high-specific-impulse electric thrusters with long life, and the development of electrical power-systems required to sustain them, has resulted in extremely rapid growth in the applications of this technology. ESA has engaged in programmes (e.g.

Spasolab was created in 1984, at INTA (E) premises, as an ESA external laboratory dedicated to Solar Cell and Panels Testing. The laboratory aimed at supporting ESA programmes and activities at different maturity levels, ranging from the development to the production phases, throughout the design and qualification ones.A list of Spasolab solar cell test laboratory capabilities is provided in the following:? Complete characterisation of space of Space Silicon and Gallium Arsenide solar cells (Type approval tests).?

GNSS sensor stations, part of large GNSS infrastructure, provide the key inputs for the core processing facilities to compute orbit, clocks , ionosphere products and even integrity corrections.

Based on an ESA feasibility study, the Wavemill concept has shown that extremely interesting results can be achieved in terms of ocean current retrieval for both velocity and direction. There is a strong interest for optimising the antenna architecture and demonstrating feasibility and performance. Among possible antenna architectures, the javelin concept looks interesting since it can provide the required along- and across-track baselines with a compact spacecraft at launch having a nearly optimal configuration for AOCS (long and thin in flight direction).

Today, aboard ISS, the crew is regularly resupplied with necessary metabolic consumables (i.e. food, water and air) coming from Earth. These consumables are generally packaged into dedicated containers, which cannot be re-used and have to be wasted. For food only, the amount of wastes generated by packaging is estimated to be between 300 and 500g/crew member and day, which represents close to 40% of packed food mass.

The mixed signal (SiGe BiCMOS) technologies have been under interest in the specific area of signal generation due to good achievable signal quality. Meanwhile, the technology has been improved to reach higher operating frequencies and lower noise figures, too. The SiGe is very well suited for digital receiver implementation at L-band.The advantage of SiGe over GaAs in space use is foreseen in the high degree of integration due to the feasibility of mixing analogue and digital functions on a single chip. This means that the complete microwave system (e.g.

The Payload Processing System architecture is able to host a set of well defined modules (Processing, Storage, I/O) interconnected through a network. As far as storage modules are concerned, a first demonstrator of the concept was developed and manufactured (High Capacity Memory Buffer).

For terrestrial applications, Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) cells are regarded as the most promising technology for the next generation batteries due to their high theoretical capacity, the abundant and low cost sulfur resources and lithium-ion comparable cathode production techniques, and the low toxicity of sulphur compared to cobalt based cathode. Theoretically, Li-S batteries can deliver an extremely high specific energy of 2,567 Wh/kg, compared to 387 Wh/kg being the theoretical maximum for conventional Lithium-ion cells used in terrestrial and satellite applications at the moment.

For the past 20 years ESA has invested in the development of robot systems, in support of human spaceflight and exploration. A robot relies heavily on specific software, called robot controller software (RCS)? or robot operating system, that can provide? tight coordination of perception, reasoning and motion functions. In these years several tens of millions of Euros of RD and project budgets have been spent in developing RCS for various purposes. While this has allowed to progress space robot technology and projects, the approach used in the past is not sustainable.

The reception performances of the Deep Space Ground Stations is limited by the noise generated in the front end. Any reduction of this noise will allow to increase the data transmitted or to reduce the required mass and power on the spacecraft transmitter.X band is presently used for the telemetry of all deep space missions and will still be the preferred frequency band for future Mars exploration missions. The existing feed and LNA systems have been designed separately. Therefore, the feed system is operated at room temperature while the LNA is operated at 12 K.