Nebula Public Library

Plastic marine litter is a very complex global environmental issue, with plastic litter at the sea surface representing only a small fraction of plastic entering the sea. In this respect, the BLUE project investigated the potential of diverse LIDAR techniques (backscatter, fluorescence, Raman) to address the detection of plastic litter not only floating on the sea surface, but also suspended in the first few metres under the surface, with also a focus on detecting microplastics and discriminating plastic from other types of litter. The approach adopted was four-fold:

COMPASS is a tool for model-based system/software co-engineering developed in a series of ESA studies (2008–2016). It is based on a dialect of AADL and it offers a complete set of functionalities for formal verification, including requirements specification and analysis, contract-based design and verification, functional verification, fault specification, fault injection and RAMS analyses, including Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Diagnosability Analysis, Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery Analysis (FDIR).

'Don't try this at home' (named after one of the AI ships from I.Banks Culture series) is a concept demonstrating the benefits of having a cognitive cloud computing infrastructure in space. Such an infrastructure will provide a comprehensive and scalable set of commercial services to EO sensors and space-based data providers. It enables several applications by efficiently collecting and fusing information on target objects from observations of different platforms at various wavelengths, resolutions, and times. As a result, it leads to timely, precise information.

During the project activities, the authors proposed a conceptual framework, which utilizes resources available in situ through the chemical and physical processes associated with agriculture; the soil and CO2 (if present) are transformed into fibrous plant matter, harvested and finally converted into mechanical and structural components.