Conventional lithium ion batteries use organic highly flammable liquid electrolytes increasing the risk of catastrophic failure due to thermal runaways. In addition, the use of carbon anode in Li-ion batteries limit the maximum energy density. Based on scientific results, it is believed that the use of solid state electrolytes will significantly improve the electrochemical and thermal stability range of the battery cells.

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Due to the large increase in manufacturing volume of space systems components, coming e.g. from the Mega Constellations and Cubesats domains, the standardisation of flight hardware is progressing faster than ever.

Efforts for anomaly root cause analysis (e.g. GAIA) show the urgent need of using discipline models with flight data for diagnostic purposes. Acquiring more feedback from (also nominal) flight operations is also urgent to improve spacecraft related processes of engineering, analysis and verification. A spacecraft is equipped with several monitoring sensors that measure different attributes of the spacecraft. This results in a huge raw stream of data that has to be analysed to produce information about spacecraft behaviour and health status.

Spacecraft potentials in the outer Earth magnetosphere may reach a few tens of volts positive and therefore severely perturb plasma particle and electric field measurements. Therefore, magnetospheric missions from ESA such as Cluster, but also from international partners such as Double Stars and MMS have relied on an ion emitting instrument, ASPOC (Active Spacecraft Potential Control), developed by IWF in Austria for lowering the positive potential down to a few Volts positive.

A key objective of the Model-Based for System Engineering (MBSE) roadmap is to use MBSE to improve reviews conducted within the Agency. To date, the Agency has some limited experience with this; nonetheless, a standardised process has not yet been developed. In addition, the current tools and processes do not encourage easy interaction with models for users who are not experienced modellers. Digital modelling literacy is low across the wider Agency, and will likely remain so in the coming years.