Member State delegations pledged a record-breaking €16.9 billion budget for ESA at last week's Council at Ministerial Level in Paris, including renewed support for dedicated R&D programmes employed by ESA’s Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality to invent the future in space.
These technologies can be protected as patents, which ESA makes available to entities in its Member States for research or commercial uses. But there is a long way to go before a patent becomes a product.
Part of the Agency’s Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory , based at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands, this test facility is vital for developing materials capable of withstanding the highly-erosive individual oxygen atoms prevailing at the top of the atmosphere, the result of standard oxygen molecules of the same kind found just above the ground being broken apart by powerful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
The HANSEL system is hosted in ESTEC’s Navigation Laboratory and allows linking to sensors across the site, providing insight into the collective networking and computing needed to get a variety of ‘intelligent elements’ to mesh seamlessly together – what the brain of a future smart city might look like.