Collision avoidance is part of routine operations today. Detailed re-entry predictions and assessment of on-ground risks are regularly performed for high interest objects such as payloads of ESA or its member states. Both activities rely on uncertainty information, which has to be propagated along the trajectory and mapped to quantities which are not state vectors, e.g. collision plane and on-ground location. Current approaches rely on either Monte Carlo methods (with few runs) or propagation of covariance assuming a simple model of the dynamics, in particular of the air drag perturbation.

The issue of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) generated by artificial sources is an increasing problem. Areas affected by the radio spectrum pollution include: Earth Observation using passive and active microwave remote sensing, ground based remote sensing of the atmosphere, space based radio experiments and radiostronomical observations.The current level of RFI contamination on ground based and spaceborne passive sensors is already an issue.

Heating samples to extract volatiles is a standard way to characterise solid samples. By heating a sample and recording the temperature profile results it can explain a lot about the nature of those volatiles and allow them to be collected and analysed further. This technique is, in principle, a standard process in terrestrial laboratories and the same principle is applied in-situ for planetary analysis where solid samples are delivered to an oven, which is sealed and heated to produce signatures of the volatiles.

The design of a re-entry vehicle and the analysis of its performance are extremely challenging tasks. The difficulties increase when the understanding of its transient behaviour is sought and grow even further if this transient is affected by uncontrolled phenomena such as the shape change caused by the ablation of the thermal protection material used as heat shield.

More and more applications rely on the Position and Time solution provided by a GNSS equipment to enable services of critical nature.

SWIR and IR optical lens materials are difficult to machine, since often they are based on micro-crystalline or crystalline substrates which makes them also brittle and difficult to polish. SWIR spectrometer optics for CarbonSat, Sentinel 5 or NISP (Euclid) for instance are highly critical with respect to straylight performance. For mass and volume reasons the optical design of the camera of the spectrometer is based on lenses (Si, ZnSe, ZnS).