Nebula Public Library

Model based approaches have proved to be efficient in supporting engineering activities, models replacing traditional document-based approaches. Nevertheless even in most advanced deployments, a lot of engineering artifacts are textual either because the return on investment of introducing models is too low on this particular case or because the information is more efficiently expressed in natural language even if consistency and correctness issues appears.

Marine Litter Aggregation Forecast presents a new estimation of long-term global distribution of marine litter proceeding from land-based and from sea-based sources at global scale, taking advantage of numerical reanalysis databases of historical met-ocean conditions. Different machine learning techniques are applied to generate long-term climate-based series of those environmental variables that may affect the drift of marine litter over the sea surface such as currents, wind and wave-induced Stokes drift.

SMARTIE (Smart Resource Management based on Internet of Things to support Off-Earth Manufacturing of Lunar Infrastructures) is an ESA study to assess the requirements, architecture, hardware and software needs and costs for implementation of an Internet of Manufacturing Things (IoMT) for a lunar human base and associated infrastructure. 

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.