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With the increased frequency of shipping activities, such as tourism and freight’s transport, navigation safety has become a major concern, especially when human casualties, environmental issues and economic losses are considered. Even if new technologies have already supplied aids to pilots for the navigation risk reduction, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reports that the majority of accidents could have been avoided by providing suitable input to the navigation decision-making process.

Nowadays, human Moon exploration, and the consequent desire to establish a permanent settlement on its surface, represents one of the most fascinating challenge to face. The permanent presence of a human outpost very far from Earth raises the problem of the huge amount of payload required for the settlement, as well as the need of rapid and in-time supply of material and spare parts useful for all the activities carried out in-situ, including the realization of medicals tools and patient-specific back-up implants.

The main objective of the OMAR Mission Architecture study is to identify and trade-off different mission architectures, to provide different services on-orbit. For each of the relevant scenarios, this objective shall be achieved by defining the associated system functional analysis and by trading-off different architectures and concepts of operations. Furthermore, the impact of aspects such as: operational orbit, type of serviced satellites, services provided, different levels of autonomy, and any other relevant factors is to be assessed.

The activity 'Small Satellite Missions to Mars (S2M2)' is an early-phase architecture study of a potential low-cost mission to Mars as further step in the Mars exploration roadmap developed by ESA.

A potential implementation from industry’s point of view was assessed, applying the strict design-to-cost philosophy by fostering strong reuse of an available OHB platform. Trade-offs were performed for assessing a low-cost mission profile targeting the programmatic constraints that were input to this study.