Nebula Public Library

Nowadays, human Moon exploration, and the consequent desire to establish a permanent settlement on its surface, represents one of the most fascinating challenge to face. The permanent presence of a human outpost very far from Earth raises the problem of the huge amount of payload required for the settlement, as well as the need of rapid and in-time supply of material and spare parts useful for all the activities carried out in-situ, including the realization of medicals tools and patient-specific back-up implants.

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.

In this activity, lunar regolith simulants were characterised based on their thermal behaviour, particle size distribution and composition, in order to inform the choice of consolidation method for functionally graded materials (FGMs) – powder characterisation results are provided in the 'conference paper' deliverable.

Firstly, an extensive literature review study (deliverable 'Literature Review') identified Digital Light Processing (DLP) and Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) as promising consolidation techniques.