Nebula Public Library

Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) are rapidly approaching market-readiness, with numerous partly-autonomous and teleoperated systems either under development or already performing operational demonstrations for applications such as bathymetric surveying (SEA-KIT Maxlimer, Deep BV), maintenance of offshore installations (Thales Halcyon), and commercial shipping (Yara Birkeland, Maersk VISTULA-Class).

During the course of the study a significant effort has been dedicated to the explorations of a very high number of configuration architectures for scenario (d), which definition became the main focus of the activity. Several hundreds of options have been analysed with a high level of detail both at mission analysis and mass budget level, to properly identify robust and feasible solutions.

Over the course of this study we have convinced ourselves of the benefits of a reference architecture in particular and of an end-to-end simulator in general. Our arguments have mostly been technical ones, but the reality is that it can only be sold to the space science community by successfully making the case that it improves the science return of the mission.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are already used in space missions (e.g. GOCE, Swarm, Sentinel, and MetOp, among others), not only as a navigation sensor (either for autonomous orbit and attitude determination or for relative navigation) but also as a science instrument (e.g. for altimetry, global geodesy, Radio Occultation and GNSS Reflectometry applications). However, its use is usually limited to orbits or mission phases below the orbits of GNSS satellites, since GNSS satellite antennas transmit mainly in the Earth's direction.