On December 16, Francesca Letizia from the ESA Space Debris Office gave a seminar at PoliMi about the sustainability of the space environment and the importance of space situational awareness for current space activities and for future space exploitation.
In-person meetings have become a rare luxury due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That is why the International Astronautical Federation has made the 71st International Astronautical Congress – The CyberSpace Edition their first fully online congress. On 12-14 October more than 10,000 attendees joined all over the world to share the latest space developments. The COMPASS team contributed with 5 papers and videolectures.
Matteo Romano successfully defended his PhD thesis “Orbit propagation and uncertainty modelling for planetary protection compliance verification” at Politecnico di Milano, to be awarded the degree of Doctor.
Check out the Inaugural Lecture for the Opening of the 157th Academic Year of Politecnico di Milano by Camilla Colombo on “Satellites and Space Debris: Services from Space in a more sustainable world”.
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 more work “on the field” to improve the existing tools with the latest developments from their researches.
Every year, the European Space Agency organizes its Space Engineering and Technology Final Presentation Days, a remarkable occasion to look back on the recent achievements from its technology programmes. This year, the event took place 2-4 July at ESTEC, with ESOC joining on 3 July. Juan Luis Gonzalo from COMPASS was on ESOC to present our recent work on the use of sails and tethers as passive deorbiting devices, developed in collaboration with 4 other European partners.
An article presenting parts of the research conducted in the COMPASS group is being published in the Advances in Space Research journal. The paper shows how to improve the accuracy of semi-analytically propagated orbits – especially highly eccentric ones – perturbed by atmospheric drag.
The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) was meeting in Rome for the 37th time to discuss the space debris issue. Bringing in the expertise of the COMPASS group, Stefan was participating within the ASI delegation.
The COMPASS team participated to the CanSat Italy competition as part of the judging commission.
June 30 was Asteroid day 2018 and ESA/ESO made a two-hour webcast. About 10 minutes were also spent on the MIAPP workshop “Near-Earth Objects”.