Stefan Frey and Matteo Romano from the COMPASS team are carrying out their last visiting periods at the European Space Operations Centre of ESA, where they will once again work “on the field” and apply the expertise they have acquired in the fields of space debris and planetary protection.
Stefan is joining the Space Debris Office for six months, where he is extending the continuum-based cloud propagation tool to be applicable for fragmentations in highly eccentric orbits. This allows to estimate statistically the increased collision risk for operational and defunct satellites with the remnants of fragmented objects.
Matteo is joining the Mission Analysis Section for three months, where he is going to carry on his research in planetary protection, applying the methods he developed for the analysis of interplanetary missions and verification of planetary protection requirements using Monte Carlo simulation and uncertainty propagation methods, and improving the existent tools used in mission analysis.