Nebula Public Library

The inertial navigation market has a need for accelerometers with high sensitivity, low noise, low cost and low power consumption. ESA has identified high accuracy accelerometer units as a priority in a 2019 roadmap. The current state of art products are not able to deliver. Here we introduce a novel accelerometer design, using concepts originally developed for gravitational wave detector physics, which will enable an accelerometer to meet these requirements.

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.

A major challenge in the field of control is to achieve reliable, aggressive, high-speed control of autonomous vehicles. In space, this may involve spacecraft that need to land under harsh conditions, or even – in an extreme scenario – negotiating asteroid debris fields at high speeds. On Earth, the exemplar task that draws most attention currently is high-speed autonomous flight of drones. The application of optimal control on board limited platforms has been severely hindered by the large computational requirements of current state-of-the-art implementations.

ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is both a Technology Mission of Opportunity, and a mission to greatly improve our understanding of asteroid physical properties and their response to a hypervelocity impact event on their surface. The AIM mission is combined with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Both missions complement one another in a joint asteroid impact test and observation campaign called Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA). The Thermal InfraRed Imager (TIRI) is Thermal IR imager of the AIM mission.