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The design of a re-entry vehicle and the analysis of its performance are extremely challenging tasks. The difficulties increase when the understanding of its transient behaviour is sought and grow even further if this transient is affected by uncontrolled phenomena such as the shape change caused by the ablation of the thermal protection material used as heat shield.

This work has primarily focused on establishing scenarios where inflatable devices could be the most useful. Given that these missions rely on aerodynamic drag that results in (potentially significant) heating, the authors have sought to find solutions to minimize heat fluxes acting on the device surface, and especially keeping it within the limits of flexible/foldable TPS materials for the aerocapture scenario.

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.

Solid state optical refrigeration is the only active cryocooling technique that is truly vribration free, due to absence of moving parts and mass transport, with significant potential for use in future space missions. However, the overall wallplug efficiency is still relatively low in current approaches. One alternative approach investigated here is using a solar pumped laser (SPL) to drive the optical cryocooling process. This approach could offer higher efficiency by eliminates two conversion losses.