Francesca Scala successfully defended her PhD thesis “Multiple satellites formation flying for earth observation applications in low Earth orbit” at Politecnico di Milano, to be awarded the doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering.
Are you curious about the modelling of a distributed L-band radiometer and its link to relative motion? Last week Cristina Erbeia presented her thesis work, developed under the supervision of our Camilla Colombo and Francesca Scala, at the Pegasus Student Conference 2023 in Rome.
The new paper published in IEEE TGRS by Manuel Martin-Neira and co-authored by Francesca Scala, Camilla Colombo, ESA and Airbus D&S proposes an innovative mission concept, TriHex, to achieve high spatial and radiometric resolution for passive L-band application, approaching user needs beyond SMOS and SMAP missions.
The paper is available for early access at the following link: here.
Formation flying missions have increased their importance thanks to the better performances that can be achieved with a distributed system of satellites.
A recent paper by Alejandro Monteiro Miñan, Francesca Scala and Camilla Colombo proposes an open-loop manoeuvre planning algorithm, to provide the control accelerations for a formation reconfiguration.
The ESA’s Living Planet Symposium is one the biggest Earth observation conferences in the world, playing a fundamental role in advancing our understanding of how our planet works and how it is being affected by climate change. The COMPASS group participated to the Living Planet Symposium 2022, held in Bonn, Germany on 23–27 May 2022.
Francesca Scala, from the COMPASS team, is spending a six-month period of her PhD as visiting researcher at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESA-ESTEC), where she will increase her experience and expertise acquired during her research activities on mission design and guidance, navigation and control strategies.
Are you interested in new study to improve the quality of data of Earth observation missions?
Our Francesca Scala presented a tool for GNC simulation of future formation flying missions at the 2022 AIAA SciTech Forum.
The COMPASS group participated to the 72nd International Astronautical Congress this October in Dubai, UAE.
The COMPASS members participating contributed to the technical programme of the congress with several presentation on topics such as space debris, collision avoidance, asteroid ejecta dynamics, formation flying and active debris removal, and sustainability of space. For more info on the research works presented at the congress visit our LinkedIn page.
The design of optimal low thrust manoeuvres for remote sensing multi-satellite formation flying in low Earth orbit is studied in the latest Open Access paper published in Advances in Space Research by Francesca Scala, Gabriella Gaias, Camilla Colombo, and Manuel Martin-Neira.
The paper is freely available in Open Access at this link.
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.