A multi-disciplinary team composed of ESA and industrial experts have been busy over the past few months in the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) at ESA-ESTEC exploring system designs that can enable new on-orbit services. The industrial experts were from Airbus Defence and Space, Ariane Group, ELV, OHB and Thales Alenia Space.

 

Starting with a comprehensive list of potential on-orbit services, the study team selected three services on which to perform a system design. The three designs selected for study in the CDF were:

  • Tugging of large modules for exploration from LEO to lunar orbit
  • Assembly of large solid antennas for GEO satellites
  • Multi-mission active debris removal (ADR) for megaconstellations

During the CDF study, the team derived a system architecture including a concept of operations, functionality of the system and a baseline design consisting of mass budgets, power budgets, link budgets and mission options.

All three of the mission scenarios require common elements/technology building blocks, as the functions they need to perform are very similar to one another: rendezvous and inspection, capture, and the complex control of two satellites or bodies connected in-orbit.

One of the main outputs of the CDF study conducted will be the technologies identified to enable such missions, and the synergies between the technologies for different mission scenarios.

On February the 8th, at 15:00 CET, ESA will present the main findings of the study team, summarising the three mission scenarios and highlighting the critical technologies which have been identified. 

To know more about the content and to ask questions on the upcoming work, the Clean Space team would like to invite the European and Canadian industry to join a webinar on 8th February at 15:00 CET. Please register by sending an email to cleanspace@esa.int by 31st of January 2018. 

UPDATE: Please note that due to a restricted number of connections available and to a very high number of requests to participate to this webinar, we have to restrict the attendance to representatives from ESA’s Member States space industry only. Thank you for your understanding.

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