Nebula Public Library

The aim of the project “Strategy and Recommendations for microbiological cleanliness of future cargo integration” was to review current measures implemented to ensure the microbiological cleanliness of cargos and recommendations how to enhance the microbiological cleanliness. The lessons learned from the ATV campaigns and the current cargo processes were summarized based on interviews with representatives of all the steps of the cargo process.

The project entitled "System analysis of deployable components for micro landers in low gravity environment" is conducted within the framework of the ESA contract no. 4000117150/16/NL/HK/hh. Its goal is to perform an analysis and trade-off between the various design options for antennas and solar array deployment mechanisms (including a comparison between the fixed and deployable configurations) of the MASCOT-2 lander in the micro-gravity environment of Didymoon.

In the first demonstrations, the detection of photons with graphene was based on the pn-junction generated by the graphene-metal contact. There the active detector area is a narrow line with length determined by the contact edge and as the absorption of photons incident to a single layer of graphene is 2.3 % at highest, the detector efficiency is rather modest. However, the detector has very high speed, demonstrated up to 40 GHz and predicted to reach over 500 GHz, possibly limited only by the contact resistance.

The BOUNCED project has assessed the behaviour of elastic tethers within flexible link Active Debris Removal (ADR) systems. This has been achieved by solving a multidimensional set of linear equations, through the separation of dynamic modes; and the construction of analytic and numeric models of the resulting system. These models can be used to simulate the behaviour of both single and multi material tethers across the full lifetime of a tether mission, from pretension, through re-entry burn and free body motion post burn, to re-entry.