Clean Space industrial days
The Clean Space industrial days aim at providing an insight to the technological advancement achieved to date in the fields of ecoDesign for space, technologies for Space Debris Mitigation (SDM) and Active Debris Removal (ADR).
Through its Clean Space initiative, ESA is pioneering an eco-friendly approach to space activities. On the ground, that means adopting greener industrial materials, processes and technologies. In space, it means preserving Earth’s orbital environment as a safe zone, free of debris.
Clean Space is considering the entire lifecycle of space activities, from the early stages of conceptual design to the mission’s end of life – and even beyond, to removal of space debris. Clean Space has three branches, reflecting its mission to assess the environmental impact of Agency programmes as a first step to finding ways to address them in future, and contributing to a more sustainable and competitive European space industry:
- ecoDesign: designing to address environmental impacts and foster green technologies;
- CleanSat: designing to reduce the production of space debris;
- e.Deorbit: removing a large piece of space debris from orbit.
ESA has pioneered ecoDesign for space by performing environmental life-cycle assessments of its launchers and missions. Applying LCA to space activities is a first step towards a cleaner space sector. Based on this work, ESA has developed a space-specific handbook to perform LCA. A great challenge is to use the results of the LCAs to develop cleaner technologies which will be at least as performing than existing technologies. The industrial days will be an opportunity for the European space industry to acquire knowledge on ecoDesign for space missions.
ESA is globally leading the pursuit for Active Debris Removal through its e.Deorbit mission. The objective is to catch a large spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit and to bring it back to Earth in a controlled manner, in order to reduce the risk of growth of space debris. Through this mission, European industry is developing cutting edge technologies for monitoring, rendezvous, capture and deorbiting of space systems.
The CleanSat project started in 2014 and aims to develop technologies to comply with space debris regulations and avoid the generation of new debris from future missions. ESA’s CleanSat project seeks to steer this evolution in a coordinated manner, in direct collaboration with Europe’s leading satellite integrators and their suppliers. By developing technologies that enable future satellites to comply with standards, Europe’s space industry will have an international competitive advantage. CleanSat is developing building blocks that employ innovative technologies to meet space debris mitigation requirements, and that can be adopted on a systematic basis by a variety of satellite platforms.
By bringing together a variety of stakeholders including the public sector, industry and new potential participants, the Clean Space Industrial Days will be a unique opportunity for a broad discussion on the goals and strategies for e.Deorbit, CleanSat and ecoDesign and will be key to determine the next steps. This will be achieved through presentations from both industry and ESA on the state-of-the-art of the current activities and leaving opportunities to side meetings on specific topics as necessary.
AeroThermoDynamics Design for Demise Workshop
The workshop is organised by the “AeroThermoDynamics Design for Demise” (ATD3) Working Group settled by ESA and CNES to understand the aerothermodynamic process which contribute to reduce the amount of debris surviving re-entry. The Workshop is a regular (every 2 years) forum at European level to facilitate the discussions (at technical and scientific level), collect and disseminate information, propose and plan new topics/activities (roadmap definition and coordination) of all relevant aerothermodynamics aspects which governs the demisability problem and hence, increase the confidence on the tools used for that.
In this frame, a limited number of test cases will be validated with respect to efficiency and accuracy of different numerical tools, from low to high fidelity. The workshop provides the opportunity to compare ground facilities and measurement techniques, physical modelling, to explore Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) approaches and verification & validation process.
