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The objective of this activity is to assess the system level and design impacts of optimising a satellite design for on-orbit manufacturing and assembly, as well as preparing it to be refurbished, reused or recycled on orbit afterwards, and to identify the technologies needed.

This study aims to carry out the conceptual design of a large-parabolic-antenna reflector that is manufactured and assembled on-orbit.

Through its Clean Space initiative, ESA has been devoting an increasing amount of attention to the environmental impact of its activities, including its own operations as well as operations performed by European industry in the frame of ESA programmes. In its Technology Strategy, ESA identified 'Inverting Europe’s contribution to space debris by 2030' as one of the four technology development targets.

Light-trapping helps enhance the light absorption in space solar cells and hence enables their thickness to be reduced to increase the radiation hardness. We have optimised light-trapping structures (LTS) inspired in the diatom frustule and moth’s eyes. As a solar cell reference, we use the commercial 3G30C model from Azure Space Solar Power GmbH. We have developed a physical model to describe the solar cell absorption and derive the efficiency. The optical description relies on the Fourier modal method and the solar cell performance on the detailed balance limit.

The emergence of the classical world from quantum theory, and especially of a consensus among different observers, is a long-standing problem for the foundations of quantum theory. Using recent advances in multipartite quantum information theory, we shed light on these problems. Besides their interest for fundamental physics, they are related to quantum sensing and metrology using a quantum-network of stations, a situation of interest for the potential use of quantum-based measurement probes for exploring space and the Universe.