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The study and exploitation of In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) technologies (with an initial focus on the Moon) are stimulating an increasing interest in the international community, both at Agency and industry levels, in view of and in preparation for future crewed exploration missions and in terms of scientific and societal long-term benefits.

The objective of this activity was to propose a general infrastructure of an end-to-end simulator (E2ES) for space science missions, namely an E2ES requirements baseline, reference architecture and an associated library of software models (building blocks, BB) to promote reuse, standardisation and reduction of engineering costs by defining a products/science validation process throughout the lifecycle based on an E2ES.

The purpose of this study was to define the a communication subsystem architecture (including both ground and space segments, as well as operational methods) that allows robust RF TT&C links during superior solar conjunction phases. The defined architecture shall ensure robust and reliable links in scintillation regimes (i.e. at low SEP angles) where TT&C links are nowadays degraded, leading to occasional link interruptions. Similarly, the defined architecture shall ensure that at even higher scintillation regimes (i.e.

The project is dedicated to an in-depth study of the re-entry of ESA's Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), for which a rich measurement dataset is available up to the very end of its decay phase.