At the end of its operational life a spacecraft undergoes a disposal phase and as a result is left without control. Then the battery may be subject to extreme environmental conditions due to the loss of spacecraft attitude and thermal control. Battery overdischarge or overcharge may also occur.

The novel technology of Modelocked Semiconductor Lasers (MLSCL) is a promising candidate to be used in optical metrology systems for various space applications, e.g. in the context of optical interferometry or frequency and distance metrology as well as optical communications and data processing. Recent laboratory demonstrations of MLSCLs are capable of producing VIS / NIR ultrashort light pulses in the few picoseconds time regime at very high repetition rates in the MHz domain.

High Density Interconnect (HDI) technology entails miniaturisation of Surface Mounted Device (SMD) pads, tracks and microvias, which is already available technology for commercial market. Space market currently only uses more conservative larger dimensions for PCB routing and components. HDI is strongly driven by the decreasing pitch due to miniaturisation of available components. Denser population of PCBs leads to mass reduction. Typical HDI components are ceramic and, therefore, require the use of a low Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) laminate, such as the obsolete Thermount.

The European space industry and ESA programs lack information on RF breakdown (Multipactor) when ferrites and dielectrics are used.

SpaceWire defines the links and the network as well as some higher level protocols. The users are free to define the network management and the Failure Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) scheme adapted for their application. With the increasing spread of SpaceWire more users ask for recommendations how to perform network management and FDIR for their application. In this activity a set of typical use cases of SpaceWire networks shall be prototyped and recommendations for network management and FDIR shall be found.

The current redundancy approach is often intended to maintain or re-establish full functionality and performance capability in case of failure of a primary system or equipment. This naturally leads to build and carry system resources that may never be used in case the primary system works reliably throughout its operational life. On the other hand, alternative concepts exist which implement simply the capability of maintaining certain acceptable level of performance (i.e. graceful or acceptable degradation) in case the primary system fails.

Background and justification:

A fibre-based deep space optical data terminal incorporates a seed laser, amplitude, frequency and / or phase modulator, optical amplifier and free-space beam forming optic. Provision is also made for coarse and fine pointing. For little additional Size Weigh and Power (SWaP), the architecture can be extended to that of a coherent Laser Imager Distance and Ranging LIDAR. Unlike conventional direct detection and photon counting schemes, it is relatively straightforward with coherent LIDAR to achieve quantum limited detection performance with unsophisticated detectors.

Bandwidth, frequency and power reconfigurable payload architectures are currently under development by major satellite manufacturers. Today's fixed bandwidth filters are a major bottle neck in such systems and have led to the implementation of reconfigurable filters. These new reconfiguration scenarios require flexible converters and, hence, flexible filters to be accommodated after the down/up conversion.

FPGAs are increasingly being used to implement complex and critical functions on-board the Satellite at both Platform and Payload level. The new European Space FPGA software tool chain is intended to be used in the end to end FPGA Development Lifecycle to ensure that the devices are correctly programmed, starting from the functional specification of the device behaviour through to the final Verification and Validation in the target environment.