European Advanced Reusable Satellite Mission Engineering

The new launchers concepts and families dramatically reduced the cost of access to space. The satellite industry itself is adapting quickly to the new opportunity, bringing completely new classes of spacecrafts or systems such as small-sat constellations. On the other hand, more and more concerns are rising about the environmental sustainability of this 21st century gold rush. Leveraging on the experience of CNR, VKI, Deimos, Kongsberg Nanoavionics, T4i and University of Padova, the European Advanced Reusable Satellite (EARS) project, funded by the EC under the Horizon Europe program GA 101082531, aims to design and build a low-cost spacecraft capable of supporting a variety of small experiments for orbital missions potentially longer than a year. The satellite has to operate and return to Earth autonomously, taking advantage of a deployable/inflatable drag device and heatshield. After recovery, it shall be reused with minimal refurbishment. Moreover, it must be compatible with common launch vehicles secondary payload attachments. The spacecraft is based on a current microsatellite platform with the addition of a heat shield, a powerful propulsion system, and a recovery system (a parafoil – catcher solution).
This paper presents the mission engineering activities carried out to identify a promising solution in terms of the concept of operations, platform, and heatshield design parameters. The design process included multiple activities in support to the mission and system design: from de-orbit analysis to local entry corridor. Taking advantage of Deimos’ heritage on inflatable decelerators, and leveraging on literature review, a preliminary assessment on the masses and volumes requirements for the flexible thermal protection system was carried out. The outcome of such activity is fundamental for the definition of the main parameters of the aeroshape, an enabler for the identification of aerodynamic, aerothermodynamic and flying qualities performance, aiming to the definition of the reference trajectory.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe’s research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101082531. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.