Objective: The objective of the activity is to trade-off alternative, energy efficient and low carbon footprint heating technologies for use in gateway Earth stations, and to design and develop a de-icing system prototype. The focus and the main benefits are expected for higher frequency antennas (e.g Ka, Q/V, W band). Targeted Improvements: 50% reduction of energy consumptionDescription: Incold environments, snow, frost, or ice can cause link…

The objective of the activity is to develop a time modulated array antenna breadboard realising directional modulation to add an additional layer of security. Targeted Improvements: Adding a physical layer of security to satcom user terminals. Improvement over standard array security by 3 orders of magnitude in terms of bit-error-rate (demonstrated on laboratory breadboards). Description: With ever increasing demand for secure connections, thi…

The objective of this activity is the design, development and test of a more energy efficient receiver hardware architecture at system level. The activity shall include the investigation of more efficient receiver hardware design, use of narrower time slices and waveforms aimed at reducing demodulator complexity and produce a breadboard prototype.Targeted Improvements:50% energy reduction in receivers in TV broadcast and broadband user termina…

The objective of the activity is to design, manufacture and test low-loss W-band RF passive equipment (filters, multiplexers and transmission lines) for future very high throughput telecommunication payloads. Targeted Improvements: Enabling technology for W-band payloads. Description: W-band has the potential to provide the feeder link capacity needed for future Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS). The frequency allocation for this band all…

The objective of this activity is to develop, manufacture and test a highly efficient Q-band spatial power divider and combiner forapplication in Q-band Solid State Power Amplifiers (SSPA). Experimental performance verification shall be carried out on a 40 - 60 W (nominal operating point) Q-band SSPA breadboard. Targeted Improvements: Improved power added efficiency of 5 - 10% of Q-band SSPAs in comparison to the state of the art. Description:…

The objective of this activity is to design a TV, radio and data distribution network via satellite using DVB Native IP. An end-to-end (source to consumer) test-bed will be developed to adopt the standard for satellite and produce implementation guidelines for DVB Native IP over satellite. Verification activities will include content delivery and content security, as the specification becomes available from DVB. Targeted Improvements:Enable th…

The objective of the activity is to develop and test an engineering breadboard of a satcom access/backhaul node capable of responding to changing link conditions facilitated by reconfigurable, regenerative, and software-defined payloads. The activity will also provide the system demonstrator to test the breadboard and to assess the performance in a laboratory environment.Targeted Improvements: Adding flexibility to integrated satcom nodes need…

The objective of the activity is to design and validate the baseband receiver of a user terminal to compensate for beam squint adopting equalisation techniques. The goal is to maintain the end-to-end performance for wideband carrier, large phased arrays and large scanning angles.Targeted Improvements: Up to 3 dB link quality improvement for wideband carriers (500 MHz or larger) and large scan angles of representative active antenna array opera…

Objective:The objective of this activity is to design and develop a computer control system hardware prototype and its interfaces with every subsystem to provide a self-sufficient optical quantum communication ground stations interfacing with all subsystems without the need of technical supervision and without public internet connection.Targeted Improvements:- 50% cost reduction of OPEX cost of operational optical ground stations - Enabling no…

The objective of the activity is to develop and carry out on ground tests as well as Very Low Earth orbit (VLEO) tests of a small-scale air-breathing electric propulsion system. The on ground test data and the in-orbit experiment in VLEO atmosphere will provide the necessary data in order to significantly improve the models of the plasma physics, thrust efficiency and ingestion. This will enable significant design improvements allowing to reac…

The objective of the activity is to design, develop, and test an on-board Autonomous Collision Avoidance Detection (OCAD) system for satellites.Targeted Improvements:Enabling a ground-independent, on-board collision avoidance detection system.Description: The large number of commercial and institutional satellites is posing a serious risk of accidental collisions, which at present is mitigated by time-consuming collision avoidance procedures b…

The objective of this activity is to develop an integrated structural antenna concept for high aspect ratio satellites. The antenna concept shall be frequency and size scalable. Critical breadboarding shall be carried out to evaluate the concept for mobile satellite communication systems in Low Earth Orbit. Targeted Improvements: Enabling stackable satellites with efficient launch volume occupation with an improvement of 30% in comparison to e…

The objectives of the activity are to identify the needs and requirements for new security assessment capabilities for satcom systems and their components, define related architectural solutions and develop prototypes of the main components of these capabilities.Targeted Improvements: Enabling testing, verification and validation of advanced technologies in the domain of cybersecurity, modern telecom and quantum security (Quantum Key Distribut…

The objective of the activity is to design, implement and validate signalling and control techniques for satellite user terminals in a non-geostationary satellite network where the user terminals can login and function in the network without necessarily relying on the assistance from global navigation satellite services. Targeted Improvements: Enable autonomous commissioning, login and operation of satellite user terminals within a non-geostat…

The objective of the activity is to develop and test a power-efficient, high-throughput and fault-tolerant network switching architecture for regenerative processors using COTS System-on-Chip (SoC) components as software-defined network switches. This will include radiation testing and development of fault mitigation methods (at system and software level).Targeted Improvements:Enabling reliable software-defined packet switching using COTS comp…

The objective of this activity is to develop a concept of a high-power output Butler matrix with integrated filtering transfer functions for multiport power amplifiers. The concept will be implemented and experimentally tested (including high power testing) in anengineering model with critical functions in Q, Ka or Ku band.Targeted Improvements:- 30% mass and size reduction.- Number of parts reduced of a factor 3.Description: Advanced telecomm…

Objective: The objective of the activity is to de-risk a key technology building block for quantum communication sources based on weak coherent states; a high bandwidth laser module. By achieving the desired optical properties using direct modulation at the laserpackage, the need for downstream intensity modulation and phase randomisation can be eliminated. Targeted Improvements: The simplification and reduction of both the size and mass assoc…

The objective of this activity is the design and demonstration of network protocols that can use multiple unreliable satellite and terrestrial networks for increased resilience and security for retrieval of multimedia data with multiple QoS classes from drones and unmanned maritime vessels. Targeted improvements: This technique will allow at least 50% increase in the number of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) that can be supported in the same s…

The objective of the activity is to design, manufacture and test a prototype of an on-board timing equipment for secure communications.Targeted Improvements:Enabling secure communications thanks to high accuracy and resilient timing synchronisation (sub micro seconds).Description:Governmental communications make use of secured waveforms, which implement modern techniques like frequency hopping or direct sequence spread spectrum, and require a…

The objective of the activity is to develop, manufacture and test a low noise slipring breadboard assembly for solar array drive mechanisms. Targeted Improvements: Reduction of the slipring noise by at least 3 orders of magnitude with respect to the worst measured noise on current slipring technology. Description: A slipring of a solar array drive mechanism is an electrically conductive rotating track transferring low level signals and high cu…

The objective of the activity is to develop and test physical layer techniques that mitigate the impact of the communication channel impairments on the performance of NGSO interactive broadband systems that use 3GPP 5G New Radio and DVB-based air interfaces. The end-to-end performance improvement achieved with the developed techniques will be evaluated in a software-based testbed to be developed as part of the activity. Targeted Improvements:E…

The objective of this activity is to develop, manufacture and test a scalable and modular DC Transformer test-bed breadboard to enable direct-drive-based electric propulsion architectures supplying the anode of a Hall effect thruster from available 100V solar generators in the 5-20 kW range.Targeted Improvements:-Increased end to end electrical efficiency by 5%.-Decreased mass by 50% of the power train of the anode supply line.Description: The…

The objective of this activity is to design, manufacture and test an on-chip integrated power converter for high performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) applications to reduce size and footprint. Targeted Improvements: 50% reduction in FPGA application footprint, fourfold increase in reliability and 20% increase in efficiency. Description: Currently external power supplies are used to power FPGAs in space applications. This limits the…

The objective of this activity is to demonstrate the suitability of HEO payloads for 5G-connected mobile services. Key parameter trade-offs like orbit optimisation, maximum achievable throughput shall be analysed. The study shall identify key enabling technologies to support 5G type of services on a regional coverage. Targeted Improvements: - Reduce the complexity and total cost of the required constellation to provide 5G services to mobile us…

Objective: The objective of the activity is to develop CGH to replace classical optics (e.g. (dichroic) beam splitters, lenses...)in optical/quantum communication terminals. In addition, performance simulations shall be validated on CGH test samples. Several CGH device shall be manufactured, and their performance tested. A-thermal designs shall be investigated. Targeted Improvements: 50% reduction in the size, footprint and mass of classical b…