Speaker
Description
Two LCA studies were conducted in parallel on two Copernicus missions with the aim of quantitatively assessing the recurrent environmental impacts of the CRISTAL and LSTM satellites, which has as Lead System Integrator (LSI) Airbus DS.
The functional unit (FU) of this study is the “The definition, manufacturing, integration, qualification, testing and preparation for launch of the Satellite space segment to fulfil its requirements”. The reference flow considered for the purpose of both studies was “one space segment”, that was expressed in two forms, namely at PFM and at FM2 level.
For the purpose of this study, primary data has been collected for the following elements: equipment, propellant and GSE composition, a number of manufacturing processes, testing sequences at equipment and satellite level, AIT and transport schedules, labour hours and travelling. For all the elements where primary or similar equipment data was not available, proxies have been used in line with the recommendations of ESA LCA Handbook. Dedicated LCI datasets have been created accordingly.
Environmental impacts and hotspots were identified by means of the EF3.0 methodology adapted by ESA. These LCIA results have shown that the environmental profile is dominated, for the PFM and FM2, by the AIT phase and staff travels.
