Addressing the utilization of telecommand and telemetry packets for the purpose of remote monitoring and control of the spacecraft, the Packet Utilization Standard (PUS) is one of the few ECSS engineering standards that is applied from the development of the Spacecraft, subsystems and payloads but also in the development of the Ground Segment and to the Operations.Producing a new PUS that includes the last 10 years of lessons learned, the PUS Working Group has applied some formal requirement engineering techniques with as intended objective to enable the capability to automate the productio

Use of electric propulsion (EP) is becoming a key issue for the European industry in order to remain competitive in the short to long term on the space satellites market. One of the main constraints for accommodation of electric thrusters and therefore for architecture choice is the erosion induced by the plasma plumes on satellite surfaces, some of which are very sensitive like solar array interconnectors or antenna layers. Also, eroded parts contaminate other satellite surfaces and equipment.

In the long term evolution of GNSS, it is expected that new signals and innovative signal designs will be conceived to support the next-generation of GNSS applications. These future GNSS signals will require innovative protection mechanisms to enable the business models of value-added services from multiple service providers, ensuring the protection of service revenues.

Reflectarrays and transmitarrays can be designed to steer the reflected and transmitted beam away from the specular direction or to shape it according to preassigned requirements. Their properties can be tuned also with respect to the frequency. Their increased number of degrees of freedom may be beneficial in the design of multibeam antennas.

SMOS has shown the importance of achieving low level of noise floor and side lobes for best image quality in aperture synthesis radiometry. One key factor is the similarity between element patterns. During the TRP study on Super-MIRAS a solution was proposed based on dummy elements. This activity includes the following tasks : - To build of a representative part of an aperture synthesis radiometer at L-band with a conventional ground plane and with the proposed dummy element technique. - To measure of the patterns of the active elements.

The general approach while designing a Reconfigurable Avionics will follow the general principles: - Implementing by default most of the functions as SW - Using (slave) reprogrammable FPGA(s) as an accelerator to implement too CPU intensive functions - Providing a scalable and versatile I/O system supported by flexible SW drivers - Extending digital I/Os by Analogue Front-ends The selected hardware platform is the combination of a powerful microprocessor and one or several high-end reconfigurable FPGAs, fulfilling the following needs: - Supporting exploratory and evolutionary designs accord

The development of manufacturing processes to obtain ultra-thin cells (20-80 microns) is of paramount importance to achieve a significant mass reduction without reducing the fabrication yield. In order to achieve this goal, it is required the interaction of two different technological processes: epitaxial lift-off and layer transfer. The epitaxial lift-off consists in the separation of the active layers (those responsible for the operation of the solar cell) from the substrate, in a way that the latter can be reused.

There is an increased attention to safeguarding Earth's orbital environment, as reflected by the number of relevant regulations that are being set forward. ESA has published an update of the Space Debris Mitigation (SDM) Policy for Agency Projects in March 2014. It is expected that in the near future more countries will adopt mandatory SDM requirements. ESA's Clean Space initiative has been promoting several engineering activities and technology developments at spacecraft platform level.

A number of upcoming or planned Earth Observation missions (e.g. Sentinel 3, MTG, Post-Metop, Premier etc.) require cryogenic cooling between 80 and 50K. To obtain this level of temperature, it is now common to use long life mechanical coolers (e.g. Stirling Coolers for Sentinel 3 and Pulse Tube cooler for MTG) which are most of the time redundant. Operational missions requiring to be Single Point Failure tolerant, the cryogenic system has to be sized taking into account a OFF redundant cooler. This introduces a large parasitic heat load in the order of the actual user load.