Uncertainties on atmospheric densities and temperatures are major risk drivers for atmospheric entry and orbital maneuvers such as aerobraking or aerocapture. The EnVision mission scenario foresees orbit perigee lowering down to about 140km using aerobraking. Europe has gained a good expertise during the Venus Express mission, however there is no easily accessible model not to say engineering model to rely on for mission design at Venus.

TASTE is ESA’s established toolchain targeting heterogeneous systems implementing a model-based system/software engineering approach. At its core, it utilizes AADL and ASN.1 models for architecture and data description respectively. System behaviour can be described via various methods, including, but not limited to, SDL, Simulink models, C or Ada. TASTE can be used both for system design, analysis, simulation and actual implementation targeting embedded devices.

Frequency coverage for weather and science missions in mm-wave and submm-wave radiometers is increasing and it is now possible for Omnisys to commercially offer receivers up to 1-2 THz. For frequencies exceeding 300 GHz, integrated MMIC technology is preferred as it enables performance improvements and allows for more efficient system level implementations.

The ENHANCE (Enabling Harbor to Harbor Autonomous Situational Awareness in Sea Ice Conditions) project is aimed to study How to improve the autonomous navigation and situational awareness in the maritime domain by utilising ML and AI concepts. For this end, we utilise both traditional RGB cameras as well as IR cameras to obtain as diverse as possible data set of sea-ice conditions to train a ML model that can identify an ice tracks and objects, such as buoys, that can help in navigation.

New scientific missions require Ka-Band high power sources for the data return. Limitation on maximum antenna size and minimum required data rate can be overcome by increasing the transmitted power. At present, there is no off the shelf TWT(A) in the allocated frequency band (31800-32300 MHz) in Europe with 120W saturated output power. Instead, a 250W TWT in the range 17700 - 20200 MHz is under qualification and the feasibility of 100W TWT in the range 37500 - 42500 MHz has been recently demonstrated by test in a breadboard.

The purpose of the project COLA (Coincident Lasersheet Particle Monitor) was to perform a feasibility study for an in-situ lasersheet particles/debris detection system enabling the detection and identification of small sized space debris/meteoroids currently not detectable from ground and that can nonetheless present important hazards for space missions. The detection system must be able to determine and reconstruct particle shapes and trajectories for sizes and velocities ranging from 1 mm to 10 mm and 2 km/s to 20 km/s, respectively.