Magnetic materials, both with soft and hard magnetic behavior, are key components in many devices aboard any spacecraft, such as motors, mechanisms, actuators and sensors. The most common route for the manufacturing of magnets is the sintering process, which produces the highest magnetic performance possible but it is energy intensive and requires molds for each geometry. The alternative is the use of bonded magnets, which are composite materials composed of a polymeric matrix with a high content of magnetic filler.

In 50 years of Space Exploration, the total distance covered by rovers on Mars and the Moon is about 200km, an average of 4km per year. Future exploration rovers are expected to travel one or two orders of magnitude more.This requires designing rovers that are intrinsically faster than what has been built so far.

Advanced III-V technologies, especially wide-bandgap GaN, are the engines powering the rapid deployment of various SATCOM multi-beam active antenna arrays in space today. Although power levels per element in the recent Direct Radiating Arrays (DRAs) are typically in the order of few watts (e.g. for GEO with HPA MMICs 2-15W), already now it is apparent that larger deployable active antennas with hundred or even thousand elements will yield much lower power per radiating element with DRA.

In-orbit molecular contamination can rapidly degrade the performance of sensitive sub-systems, such as optical instruments, thermal control surfaces and solar arrays. In existing spacecraft design, most of the effort is concerned with reducing the contamination potential at source e.g. by limiting high outgassing materials, reducing view factors between materials and the surfaces etc. However this is generally a very complex task, and, despite best efforts, contamination in-orbit cannot be fully eliminated.

Currently EO missions are operated in S/X-Band with payload data in X-Band. New EO missions will have payload data in K-Band and TTC still in S-Band. In the long term TTC will be moved to X-Band still keeping payload data in K-Band. Presently only US suppliers are able to provide antenna radomes operating over different frequency bands. It is intended to develop an European alternative to US suppliers in the domain of high/multi-frequency application like the one needed for future Earth Observation missions.