New technologies for the future of European space

ESA created the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) to discover and invest in new unconventional ideas that could significantly benefit and advance the European space industry and academia.

Here, the minds behind five of the projects funded between January and June tell us about their projects, motivations and goals, as well as the ways ESA Discovery funding is helping them take their activity to the next level.

From waste to taste: An astronaut's dinner made with bacteria

Think about your weekly food shop. They are heavy and bulky and some items spoil quickly. For long-duration space missions, storing and launching a lot of food, as well as keeping it fresh, is a big dilemma.

ESA Discovery funding is helping Finnish startup Solar Foods explore a solution that involves feeding bacteria with waste gases. The technology already works on Earth, creating a powder that can be made into delicious and healthy dishes, but can it be scaled up into space?

“Solar Foods has commercialized Solein®, a protein ingredient produced ‘from thin air’ using carbon dioxide and hydrogen,” explains Arttu Luukanen, Solar Foods. “While the possibility of using hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria to produce food in space has been suggested in the past, we are the first company aiming to do so practically.”

“Carbon dioxide and hydrogen are already available in space habitats as waste gases,” says Jonathan Scott, a space medicine expert at the European Space Agency. “In addition to providing astronauts with fresh protein, Solein® will support recycling and water management.”

Arttu explains that the ultimate goal is to have one or more future space habitats housing its Solein® bioreactor: “We are convinced that with the significant savings in mass provided by the bioprocess, we can save tens of millions of euros per year per habitat.”

“We found it useful to interact with ESA experts who provided us with a lot of information about habitable space habitats in general, the characteristics of contemporary environmental control and life support systems, and feeding requirements.”

Monitoring avalanches via satellite

Every year, avalanches kill people and destroy infrastructure. Since they often occur in remote areas, monitoring them using satellites can be very useful. ESA Discovery has funded Germany's Fraunhofer Society to explore this idea further.

“Now that huge constellations of satellites (such as OneWeb, Starlink and others) are available in low Earth orbit, we want to investigate and hopefully prove that there are potentially useful applications,” says Diego Cristalini, who is leading the research.

Satellite constellations provide continuous coverage of remote areas through multiple satellites looking from different observing angles. In this project, Diego and his colleagues are exploring whether we can use their “passive radar” systems to detect avalanches; These systems listen for reflections of radio waves off the Earth's surface.

ESA engineer Ernesto Impembo, who is following the research, explains the potential implications of being able to take advantage of this technology: “In the short term, this could open the door to low-cost/low-mass passive radar models in the future.” “Long-range missions are intended for civil security applications such as avalanche early warning.”

“If we show that this technology is feasible, it could also have great commercial interest, because it could provide avalanche monitoring around the world at a low cost,” Diego adds. “ESA support is vital to prove this – because the level of technological readiness is very low.” “It was difficult to find financial support elsewhere.”

Clean air for astronauts

“People on Earth are surrounded by fresh air. But astronauts in space don't have the luxury of simply opening a window!” bucher.solutions (in consortium with Villinger R&D, the private Danube University and ionOXess) receives funding from ESA Discovery to develop a new system for disinfecting and purifying the air breathed by space travelers.

The system involves physical/molecular processes that inactivate bacteria, fungi and viruses, avoiding the use of chemical additives. It can be used to upgrade the International Space Station's advanced closed-loop system.

“This activity is developing technology that we can implement in future life support systems, with the aim of sustainable, long-term exploration,” explains ESA Materials and Processes Engineer Malgorzata Holinska, who is covering this project with her ESA colleague Cathal Mooney. (Bio)airborne on a space station and providing an alternative or complement to our current systems that will one day need to be upgraded.”

Lukas Bucher of bucher.solutions adds: “We see a huge number of potential application areas in addition to crewed space travel, and enclosed spaces exist all over the world. Elevators, airplanes, submarines, waiting rooms, public transport, offices, basements, open spaces.” -Plans for offices, cinemas, theaters and much more!

This is the first time Bucher.solutions has worked on a space project. “The expertise we are gaining in the space sector through this project is exceptional and represents the greatest challenge for technology enthusiasts in all industries,” Lucas says.

Draw a map of the surface of Venus in detail

Venus is Earth's mysterious twin, but little is known about the planet's surface and interior due to its thick cloud layer and the relatively few missions it has visited.

In the early 1990s, NASA's Magellan mission revealed that the surface of Venus is littered with massive volcanoes, lava plains, and other evidence of ongoing metamorphism. Through this data set and painstaking manual searching, scientists found one compelling case of surface change. Through Discovery funding, Imperial College London is working to detect these changes more effectively.

“We are developing intelligent software tools to reliably detect and measure surface change on Venus, using radar images, in a semi-automated way,” explains Philippa Mason, from Imperial College London. “On Earth, this is relatively straightforward, but on Venus it is a real challenge.”

These open source tools will be applied to images acquired by next-generation radar instruments on the EnVision (ESA) and Veritas (NASA) missions. It will reveal how the surface of Venus changed between the 1990s and 2030s, in addition to the changes that occur during missions.

ESA's Anne-Grète Strom-Lindner, an EnVision project scientist, highlights why the new instruments and radar data will be so valuable to science: “They will help answer key questions, which are why Venus is so different from Earth, and how “The surface of Venus? evolved over time, and whether there is any geological activity on the planet today.”

“This project kicks off an eight-year research programme, so we are very happy and grateful for the unique opportunity provided by ESA Discovery,” explains Philippa.

How does machine learning “taste”?

A major challenge facing the use of artificial intelligence in space missions is the high demand on computational resources. To solve this problem, dedicated pieces of hardware called “hardware accelerators” can provide the necessary computing power. As part of its ambitions towards a model-based system engineering approach, ESA is supporting Discovery's Politecnico di Milano Machine Learning Translation to translate machine learning algorithms into hardware accelerators for space applications.

“This will have huge implications for how machine learning is used in space,” says Fabrizio Ferrandi, who leads the research. “Designing hardware for machine learning applications is receiving a lot of attention, but so far no definitive solution has been discovered.”

Maxime Perotin, a software engineer at ESA, adds: “This activity is essential for us at ESA, as artificial intelligence will become more important in our daily lives and this is a step towards its integration into our development processes. System engineering is being adopted for the development of space systems, making Linking up with growing AI frameworks now ensures that the European space industry has early access to the possibilities offered by the joint use of these technologies.

Fabrizio adds: “OSIP is a great research enhancer because it gives the possibility to interact with engineers and researchers from ESA, who offer their expertise and invaluable support. Besides, a wide range of real-world use cases is provided by ESA.” To test the research product, evaluate its capabilities, and ensure that many people can benefit from it in the future.