Nebula Public Library

The knowledge bank of ESA’s R&D programmes

Format: 2023
Format: 2023
2400 results found
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In this report, we describe the advisory study for both the Asteroid Impact Monitoring (AIM) as a stand-alone European mission and for AIM with its second component, the US Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission under study at NASA by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

France

Discovery

15/700

Observatoire de la Côte d`Azur

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The scope of the project was to investigate and develop suitable strategies for the development of nano-enabled fibre reinforced plastics (neFRP) in order to produce materials tailored to the customer's needs and requirements. Within the scope of the work was also to establish a quality control system to assure that the produced products are of acceptable quality and can be integrated in functional parts for space applications.

UK

Discovery

12-713

ADAMANT COMPOSITES LTD

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Simplified models for spacecraft vulnerability assessments in early design phase
All spacecraft in Earth orbit are exposed to the risk of impact with Micrometeoroids and Orbital Debris (M/OD). Because of the large collision velocities, Hypervelocity Impacts (HVI) with M/OD may cause significant damage to various subsystems and components up to mission failure.

France

Discovery

12-601-A

Airbus Defence & Space

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This purpose of the study was to develop a high frequency radar to sound the first tens of metres of asteroid regolith and to achieve 3D tomography with metric resolution in order to - Determine its structure and layering - Identify geomorphological elements (rocks, boulders, etc.) embedded in the sub surface - Map the spatial variation its texture - Derive an estimate of dielectric permittivity of the sub-surface material

France

Discovery

14/M74

Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG)

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The Huygens mission was the first, and currently the only, successful ESA mission to land a probe on another planet or moon. It was the most distant planetary landing to date by any space agency and will remain so for the foreseeable future. An industrial team comprising Vorticity Ltd, Fluid Gravity Engineering and the Von Karman Institute has carried out a study to examine aspects of the Huygens probe performance which were not as expected and to compile the lessons learned from the mission.

UK

Discovery

12-704

VORTICITY LTD

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The overall objective of this study is to assess constellations of two pairs of satellites for the retrieval of time-variable gravity field information for best quality scientific monitoring of mass distribution and transport in the Earth system. Before embarking on this study the geodetic community and space agencies have come to realize that weaknesses in current single-pair gravimetric satellite missions such as GRACE or GRACE-FO (to be launched in 2017) would significantly be alleviated by having a second GRACE-type pair in space simultaneously.

Germany

Discovery

12.708

UNIV STUTTGART

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Generally speaking DIAMS has been an opportunity to secure the feasibility of the IOD in technical, programmatic and financial terms. More specifically DIAMS has allowed to define the end-to-end mission concept for this IOD, covering the design of various associated segments : Space Segment (Payload, Platform), and Ground Segment. Both interest and programmatic aspects have also been consolidated. - On the technical plane : Both the requirements and the design of the system have been refined to validate the IOD concept :

France

Discovery

13/701

Airbus Defence & Space

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Satellite based optical communications in space is rapidly progressing, involving an increasing number of flight validations in LEO, GEO and beyond. Various space agencies successfully demonstrated both, optical Inter-Satellite communication Links (ISL's) which have been validated in flight experiments since 2001 and direct-to-Earth (DTE) optical communications.

Switzerland

Discovery

152

RUAG SPACE

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InSAR based tarrain motion mapping in support of landslide hazard assessment in high mountain areas
Results of this pilot project provide new hints on landslide occurrence in high alpine environments, and shows the enormous potential of satellite-based techniques to map, classify and explore large bedrock instabilities that represent significant hazards throughout remote regions. Moreover, our findings are extremely important especially for developing countries as Bhutan, where systematic acquisition and exploitation of EO data can allow for a better evaluation of landslide hazard at relatively low costs.

Switzerland

Discovery

AO5-f

ETH ZÜRICH

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The project summarized here was conceived to support the definition of applications, products and user requirements, as well as the hardware design and ground processing design of a companion satellite mission which will carry aboard a "passive" radar working in tandem with the Argentinian L-band radar developed by CONAE and denoted as SAOCOM. The primary objective (i.e., science driver) of the SAOCOM companion satellite mission (SAOCOM-CS) is forest tomography, which will be carried out by exploiting small baselines between active and passive systems (order of km) changing with time.

Italy

Discovery

13-076

UNIV ROMA LA SAPIENZA

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