Nebula Public Library

To develop large scale infrastructure on the Moon many different systems will have to be shipped to the Moon to produce the necessary components. This means that the traditional design of systems cannot be assumed and a production machine cannot be expected to provide its own power especially when power demand is in the 100kW-1MW range . A large scale lunar or martian base will most likely require an operating micro grid network, in order to effectively progress large scale developments.

The project, part of the ESA Discovery Campaign on Remote Sensing of Plastic Marine Litter, developed a method to estimate floating macroplastic accumulation and transport rates in rivers using remote sensing. It combined the detection of floating water hyacinths using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 with in-situ estimates of macroplastic densities carried by this invasive aquatic weed. Water hyacinths typically form large patches of several meters of width and length, and can thus be detected from space.

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the merits of a dual-camera setup to acquire high-resolution images of identified events of iinterest, on board, through AI methods. A mission analysis of the approach for a single-satellite, dual camera setup as well as for a two-satellite (leading-trailing), single camera setup was performed. The dual-camera AI approach was demonstrated on commercially available high-performance embedded computers (Xilinx Kria SoM / Google Edge TPU SoM) through a state-of-the-art active fire detection use case.

Radioisotope generators provide electrical power for spacecrafts by converting the energy released by the decay of radioisotope fuel into electricity. Non-thermal converters (voltaic devices) make use of the photoelectric effect much in the same way a solar cell does. They are much easier to miniaturize for future chip-sized deep space probes, however performance quickly degrades due to radiation damage.