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Main achievement: Development of the first blockchain ecosystem for space system engineering, as a global configuration tool that can model the business logic of concurrent design. Addressing the MBSE challenges of  controlling data exchange and traceability across system development and operations lifecycle.

Results: Two use cases have been successfully implemented

The EasyMOD project takes place in the OSIP Model-Based System Engineering Campaign as an Early technology Development of ESA, as well as an IRT Saint Exupéry project funded by Airbus Defence and Space, Airbus Commercial Aircraft, HDGroup and the French Government. It aims at improving the human/machine interactions in the use of MBSE models, by providing friendlier visualisation and review capabilities, modelling assistants and new kind of HW and SW interfaces.

For an extended stay on the Moon, humans require habitation with substantial protection from space radiation and micrometeorites. The lunar regolith is a readily available resource in-situ, which can be thermally treated to build lunar habitats/infrastructure and extract oxygen/water. Due to the volumetric heating characteristic intrinsic to microwave heating, it is a more energy-efficient process than solar or laser sintering for large-scale manufacturing and construction.

This project, renamed ACROSS (Asteroid Collaborative Research by Occultation Systematic Survey), aimed at considerably improving the predictability of stellar occultations by small and difficult targets such as the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). In particular, it focused on the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos, target of the DART (NASA) and Hera (ESA) missions, and other NEAs: either secondary targets of Hera, or NEAs whose orbit is accurate enough. Stellar occultations are an unbeatable approach to:

To realize the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics started developing a novel seismic sensor: An ultra-sensitive miniaturised accelerometer made in micro-electro- mechanical system (MEMS) technology. The goal was to develop an affordable accelerometer that was as sensitive as conventional seismometers, but significantly smaller and cheaper. Innoseis, a spin-off company, has been licensed to bring this cutting-edge technology to market.

The goals to improve mechanical and magnetic material properties for soft magnetic Ni50Fe50 specimens processed by LPBF was achieved. Tensile strength is with ~500 MPa higher than the targeted 365 MPa and close to values of conventionally processed material. Whereas, magnetic properties measured are still lower than those specified in the datasheet of PERMENORM 5000V5 material by VAC. Since the density achieved is already close to 100% it can be concluded that not only density has a strong influence on the magnetic properties.

Commonly used classical cryptographic protocols, such as the RSA-protocol, rely on the hardness of computational problems. With the advent of quantum computing (QC), the hardness assumptions of these problems is nullified, since they can be solved efficiently on a QC. On the other hand, the security of Quantum key distribution (QKD) rests upon the very laws of physics and guarantees information-theoretic security, which not only enables tap-proof communication at present, but also prevents any future technology to crack encrypted messages.

For long-term studies, numerical simulations are at the center of predicting the space debris environment of the upcoming decades. In the scope of the study, the authors present the architecture and proof-of-concept results for a numerical simulation capable of modeling the long-term debris evolution over decades with a deterministic conjunction tracking model in contrast to typically employed Monte Carlo methods. For the simulation, an efficient propagator in modern C++ accounting for Earth’s gravitational anomalies, solar radiation pressure, and atmospheric drag was developed.

The general goal of this project is to operationalize and deepen the findings and conclusions of the initial project “Exploring AI capabilities to support the evaluation process of ideas submitted in the OSIP platform.” which demonstrated that AI techniques and software (COGITO Discover) could be used positively to enhance and ease the evaluation of ideas, by providing some new indicators such as idea novelty (scoring 0-100) based on the notion of similarity between ideas and innovation projects.