On the 3rd and 4th of February, Clean Space held the final presentations on design for demise at ESTEC. Two parallel studies were presented, with Airbus and TAS-I leading consortia containing companies from all over Europe. Alongside the consortia, present from ESA were systems engineers, technical experts and even potential customers, such as Sentinel Project Managers. As such, 20 or so of us made good use of the CDF facility in order to present the results and hold the technical discussions.

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CleanSat workshop on Design for Demise – 3rd and 4th of February 2016

Designing for demise is highly complex, and ESA is really the world-leader. This makes for exciting technical discussions, but often it can be hard to make conclusions with ultimate clarity! The results showed that design for demise techniques can provide real improvements, but that further work on both the demisable elements (which is being done in the CleanSat project) and improvement on the reentry tools is a necessary next step to reaching the end goal.

If you’re interested in more detailed information about this activity, we would suggest you to read the following articles:

ATV - demising as it was designed to

ATV – demising as it was designed to