ESA has a new tool for designing space missions.

The Agency’s Concurrent Design Facility – bringing together different experts for the rapid creation and evaluation of virtual spacecraft designs – has adopted an advanced software tool, COMET, which will help extend the use of digital models into further mission development phases. Its open source nature means it is freely available beyond ESA Member States, facilitating international cooperation with wider space agencies, research institutions or companies.&nbsp;&nbsp;

COMET upgrade for ESA’s mission design centre

With networked consoles arranged around a main screen, the <a href="/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/CDF" target="_blank">Concurrent Design Facility, CDF</a> – based at the <a href="https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESTEC" target="_blank">European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC,</a> at Noordwijk in the Netherlands – resembles a spacecraft mission control room – but rather than overseeing missions it is actually set up to design them. Differing subsystem teams gather here to creating new mission blueprints on a ‘concurrent’ basis – meaning they all work together to shape a shared spacecraft model that updates immediately as changes are made, speeding up design times from a matter of months to a few weeks.&nbsp;

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In more than two decades of operation the CDF has performed more than 300 studies to date, their subjects ranging from CubeSats to Moon bases, space telescopes to systems of systems, even audacious probes to the outer planets – along with the very first iterations of numerous ESA missions that have gone on to fly, such as the <a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter" target="_blank">Sun-observing Solar Orbiter</a> or ESA’s flying software lab, <a href="https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/OPS-SAT%20" target="_blank">OPS-SAT</a>. “Our previous software, the Open Concurrent Design Tool, has been in use for the last eight years, and applied in more than 150 studies,” explains Ilaria Roma, heading the CDF. “Now we have adopted a brand new replacement, the Concurrent Model-based Engineering Tool, COMET, developed for us by <a href="https://www.rheagroup.com/" target="_blank">RHEA Group</a> through <a href="https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/Shaping_the_Future/About_the_General_Support_Technology_Programme_GSTP" target="_blank">ESA’s General Support Technology Programme.</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;

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“This new software provides a much better-performing and more contemporary user interface experience, and adds a new dimension to report generation, including mass and power budgets for the missions being designed. At the same time COMET is fully backward compatible with our previous software tool, so all existing models can bereused as needed.”

The CDF’s transition to COMET began last August, and at the start of this year it became the baseline for all future studies. This software upgrade has wider implications beyond the facility itself, because the CDF has inspired the creation of more than 50 concurrent engineering site across Europe, for both space and non-space applications. So COMET was announced a year ago to the European concurrent engineering community, with a user group created to facilitate its adoption. Almost all the software produced for the project are freely available in open source, <a href="http://products.rheagroup.com/comet" target="_blank">for more information go to the website.</a>&nbsp;

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The adoption of COMET also serves one of the top priorities of <a href="https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_Publications/Agenda_2025" target="_blank">ESA’s Agenda 2025</a> – Director Gene ral Josef Aschbacher’s vision of transforming the Agency over the next half decade – which includes the goal of moving to ‘Model Based System Engineering’ throughout all phases of mission development, swapping traditional design specifications and blueprints for ‘digital twins’ of the spacecraft being worked on, allowing full ‘digital continuity’ with ESA’s industrial partners.&nbsp;

“An associated Digital Engineering Hub Pathfinder project with the COMET development has delivered domain specific tool adaptors to integrate a variety of Model Based System Engineering solutions into a unified engineering environment centred around COMET.”

“What this enables in plainlanguage is facilitating the use of spacecraft digital twins beyond solely the design phase to the assembly, integration and test phases of development – ultimately allowing them proceed smoother and faster, allowing early identification of anomalies, letting detailed simulations take the place of costly physical testing, along with the harvesting of data throughout the production cycle to feed back into follow-on design phases.&nbsp;
“Accordingly, COMET is fully compliant with the <a href="https://ecss.nl/hbstms/ecss-e-tm-10-25a-engineering-design-model-data-exchange-cdf-20-october-2010/" target="_blank">ECSS-E-TM-10-25 technical memorandum</a> of the <a href="https://ecss.nl/" target="_blank">European Cooperation for Space Standardization</a>, which is a commonly agreed rulebook for mode l based data exchange in the early phases of engineering design.”&nbsp;&nbsp;

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The largest antenna ever tested in ESA’s Hertz radio frequency test chamber is this 5-m diameter transponder antenna, which will operate down on the ground to help calibrate the BIOMASS mission, which will chart all the forests on Earth.

Radio Eye on Tree-counting BIOMASS

“This is a particularly challenging test campaign both in terms of the size of the antenna and the very low P-band frequency that <a href="https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/Biomass" target="_self">BIOMASS </a> will be using, which allows it to pierce through forest canopies to acquire individual trees,” explains ESA Antenna Engineer Luis Rolo, overseeing the test campaign.
“Usually when we test a large satellite here, its antenna is significantly smaller, typically between 0.5 and 2 metres across. But this entire structure is a radiating antenna in its own right, its sides coming near to the chamber walls.

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“What this means is that the testing process highlight some aspects of the chamber we’ve never seen before, even after many years of testing. But we’ve come up with a measurement method involving multiple acquisitions from different spots within the chamber, combined carefully to subtract such environmental effects, yielding very accurate results.”
Part of ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands, the metal-walled ‘Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone’ chamber is shut off from all external influences. Its internal walls are studded with radio-absorbing ‘anechoic’ foam pyramids, allowing radio-frequency testing without any distorting reflections.
Its name starts with ‘Hybrid’ because the chamber can assess radio signals from antennas both in localised ‘near-field’ terms or else on a ‘far-field’ basis, as if the signal has crossed thousands of kilometres of space.
Due to be launched next year, BIOMASS will deploy a massive 12-m diameter reflector to harness P-band radar signals in order to perform a five-year census of all Earth's trees.
Based in Australia, this transponder will be integrated onto a mobile positioning system inside a protective radome, allowing it to track the BIOMASS satellite moving across the sky. The transponder antenna will reflect radar signals from BIOMASS back to it, to help confirm the mission is operating optimally. The transponder was developed and built by Italian company <a href="https://www.idscorporation.com/" target="_blank">IDS</a> .&nbsp;

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The joint 15th International Symposium on Materials in the Space Environment (ISMSE) and 13th International Conference for Protection of Materials and Structures from the Space Environment (ICPMSE) represents one of the largest international conferences on materials in the space environment, with a heritage stretching back four decades.

Surviving Space: Major Conference Focuses on Materials in the Space Environment

“It is hard to imagine a more hostile environment for materials than space,” remarks Adrian Tighe, Materials Engineer in ESA’s Materials Physics and Chemistry Section and one of the co-chairs on the conference organising committee.&nbsp;
“Unfiltered ultraviolet sunlight degrades materials remorselessly, along with particle radiation, erosive atomic oxygen in low orbits and a growing population of space debris heightening the impact risk, starting from the microscopic scale on up.”&nbsp;
“Those are some of the traditional topics we’re looking at, but we’re also encouraging contributions on newer areas. Space is not one destination but many; future missions will take us to new environments such as very low Earth orbit, terrestrial reentry, the high-pressure atmosphere of Venus and the dusty surfaces of the Moon, Mars and asteroids.”&nbsp;
Riccardo Rampini, Head of ESA’s Materials Physics and Chemistry Section, adds: “Meanwhile the required performance of mission instruments grows increasingly stringent – which means in practice larger telescopes or greater instrument sensitivity – with follow-on requirements in terms of the need for higher performance materials on the one hand, or more stringent cleanliness and contamination control requirements on the other.”&nbsp;
“We also want to reflect the ways that the space business is evolving, with ‘New Space’ commercialisation leading to the increased use of commercial-off-the-shelf materials and parts, which need to be tested and characterized for space, including 3D printed parts, plus new high-volume manufacturing and digital testing approaches. Finally the space sector’s need to meet sustainability and environmental regulations means novel materials need to be developed and tested.”&nbsp;
The conference will include looking forward to some of ESA’s most challenging future missions from a materials point of view: the Athena X-ray telescope requiring a large-scale optical module based on novel ‘silicon pore optics’ technology, the gravitational-wave detecting LISA constellation which will have to be the stillest spacecraft ever flown, the EnVision mission to Venus orbit, ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter contribution to the international Mars Sample Return endeavour, the Lunar Gateway around the Moon and the proposed Comet Sample Return mission.&nbsp;

More information about the conference

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How can you accurately test a space antenna down here on Earth when it has been scaled up to penetrate the subterranean depths of another planet?

Aerial Antenna Test for Venus Mission

This was the question faced by <a href="https://www.group.sener/" target="_blank">SENER</a> in Spain, currently designing a candidate antenna for ESA’s <a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_selects_revolutionary_Venus_mission_EnVision" target="_blank">EnVision mission</a> , which will explore Venus from its inner core to outermost cloud layers. To solve it they lifted their prototype skyward with a balloon. 
"To develop key technologies for future missions, <a href="https://technology.esa.int/" target="_blank">ESA’s Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality</a> often explores multiple approaches,” explains ESA antenna engineer Paul Moseley. “This includes parallel prototypes for EnVision’s Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS), which will transmit and receive radio signals to chart the Venusian subsurface. It will achieve this using very low frequencies – 9 Mhz – which in turn means its antenna has to be very large, 16 m across. 
“To accurately characterise the performance of SENER’s current prototype it needs to be tested free of any interaction with its environment, but it is simply too big to fit dedicated test facilities such as <a href="https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2017/10/Inside_Hertz_Chamber" target="_blank">ESA’s Hertz chamber</a> – which in any case is not equipped to work with such low frequencies.” The only option left was going outdoors, but the ground would still have interfered with the antenna, distorting the results. So the antenna team decided to suspend the SRS antenna and a full-sized mockup of the EnVision spacecraft from a balloon, lifting it more than 200 m above the ground. 
“To further reduce interference from the ground, it was angled to point to the horizon,” adds Paul. “Results from the test campaign show the antenna design is working as expected.” This testing will help guide the final selection of a source for EnVision’s sounder instrument. The mission, targeting launch in the early 2030s, will also carry spectrometers for atmospheric and surface sounding, a radio science experiment to chart the Venusian gravity field and a NASA-sourced imaging radar.

Antenna Balloon Test for EnVision

How to test an extendible spacecraft boom designed to work in weightlessness down here on the ground? This is when helium balloons come in handy.

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The 3 m-long magnetometer boom of a ‘structural and thermal model’ prototype of the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (Smile) was deployed with balloons attached during its test campaign at the <a href="https://technology.esa.int/lab/test-centre" target="_blank">ESTEC Test Centre</a> in the Netherlands, the largest satellite test establishment in Europe.&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2019/03/The_Smile_mission" target="_blank">Smile</a> is a joint mission between ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (<a href="https://english.cas.cn/" target="_blank">CAS</a>) will aim to build a more complete understanding of the Sun-Earth connection by measuring the solar wind and its dynamic interaction with the magnetosphere.&nbsp;
Find out more <a href="https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2022/02/Balloon_boom" target="_blank">here</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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