Following on from the successful Venus Express mission (2006 – 2014), the EnVision mission is a mission to observe the surface of Venus at an unprecedented resolution, investigating signs of active geology and looking for evidence of the past existence of oceans. EnVision is meant to help in the understanding of why this most Earth-like planet has turned out so differently and open a new era in the exploration of our closest neighbour. EnVision is proposed as a joint mission with NASA, with payload elements funded by the ESA Member States.

As on Earth, space debris should not only be seen as a threat. Instead, the value of waste as a recycled good should be understood. On Earth, this potential is already fully recognised. The German recycling industry alone generates more revenue than the entire European space industry. Nevertheless, this treasure was never lifted in space.

The Mars Surface Platform Capabilities Study aimed to provide ESA with an assessment of the state of the art in Mars lander technologies using ESA/European technologies with flight heritage. Airbus’ Mars lander experience is taken from the Beagle 2 probe launched in 2003 on board Mars Express.

The objectives of the study were to:

Previous ESA Studies, such as the LUNA study 'Artificial Analogue Concepts for Preparing Robotics and Human Exploration on the Moon' identified gaps in European infrastructures to simulate surface operations with lunar soil (simulant) in a vacuum. There exist several vacuum chambers or terrain models such as the coming EAC LUNA facility which can be used for testing equipment either in a vacuum or on a simulated lunar terrain, but not both.

The goal of the project was to generate synthetic data sets of marine debris accumulations and to train on them AI models in view to automatically detect plastic litter accumulations in real EO images.

In order to achieve this goal, the project aimed at the following objectives:

The Project 'Plastic waste and the Black Sea, monitoring litter at sea and on the land from Sentinel-2 data' was funded by the Discovery element of ESA's Basic Activities, and it had the following objectives:

• To facilitate systematic marine debris detection by Earth observation for tracking them before they beach, if ever, by improving a detection algorithm already sketched and tested, and develop a true detector from it
• To test various methodologies for the detection and identification of terrestrial illegal dumping sites

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The spatial distribution and quantity of in-situ lunar resources, such as water, ice and ilmenite, is currently highly uncertain. The VMMO (Volatile and Mineralogy Mapping Orbiter) is a low-cost 12U Cubesat that includes both the Lunar Volatile and Mineralogy Mapper (LVMM) science payload, a GNSS technology demonstrator, and the supporting 12U Cubesat platform. This GSTP activity addresses the need for mapping these lunar volatiles at relatively high spatial resolution in permanently-shadowed regions by using active single-mode fiber-lasers.