In order to support the European leadership in the field of Star Trackers, the development of a new detector supporting the high-end is required.Rather than engaging the design of a new image sensor, it is considered more efficient to characterize existing developments, either to engage directly a qualification or to identify needs in terms of delta functionality or performance.State-of-the-art Star Trackers are using today 1 mega-pixel detectors. A detector with 16 mega-pixels will aim at reducing by a factor 4 the angular resolution of one pixel.

One current research in industrial robots is the development of mechanisms based on parallel kinematics, with flexible elements instead of rigid bars. This allows fast robots to operate close to humans or other robots, with reduced risk of damage in case of collision.Future robotic exploration will benefit from the advantages of parallel kinematics and flexibility of its elements, such advantages being notably:- For parallel kinematics: actuators can be placed inside the robot, hence protected from the environment.

With state-of-the-art polishing techniques straylight from surface roughness is decreased and straylight induced by contamination is becoming one of the main contributors to the straylight performance. It is then important to rely on representative models for contamination induced straylight. Typically, industry is using models coming from literature, which can lead to very different results. The activity shall include the following tasks : - A critical review of the existing models shall be performed.

Microvibrations are a critical issue to more and more ESA missions and represent a significant technical challenge due to the stringent stability requirements of the payloads. The ongoing TDE activity ?High performance microvibration isolation system? is developing a very promising semi-active isolation technology based on electro-magnetic shunt damper, which can be used to isolate either noise sources or payloads.

Background and context: The aim of this activity is to breadboard the Straylight LIDAR instrument concept and to verify its performance experimentally. This activity aims to raise the TRL to 4 and follows the TDE activity (T216-104MM Verification of straylight rejection of optical science payloads using a pulsed laser source). The aim of this smooth follow-on is to verify the concept experimentally using an available flight spare space telescope baffle as a representative test object.Description of the concept: The technique is called ?straylight LIDAR?

Capillary Driven Loops, as Loop Heat Pipes are currently assembled and filled at the loop heat pipe manufacturer. LHPs are used to transport heat from dissipative units where sometimes these units could be in an area that is difficult to access. In these cases, the LHP tubing routing could be very complex which makes the task of inserting these two-phase devices very challenging. Furthermore, the radiators used by LHPs could be an access panel which would need to be opened and closed multiple times.

In the last years, electric propulsion has become an interesting alternative to the traditional chemical propulsion for different applications, ranging from transfers to GEO to operations of (large) constellations of small satellites in LEO.The activity will first look at available data on flown hardware and their performance, together with a review of currently adopted operational concepts.

Using an optimized control will enable not to oversize the CMGs and so to reduce the mission cost, but also the volume and mass, while benefiting of an enhanced agility.