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The ACT has been working on a project to exploit the idle time computing power of ESA employees' desktop computers.

"Union Of Concerned Scientists" - The Priddle Concern; Geeknotes: Brad Wilson, APP Group Feed, Two CPS Items, Shows 16-20 Back in Archive; Open Mic Stage: "Storm" - Hungry Lucy, Billo 'Inside Edition' Meltdown, The Scott Fuller Show Promo, "Discipline" - Nine Inch Nails, "May" - Helen Hunt Jackson, Osama Bin Laden Podcast Promo, "2 AM" - Slightly Stoopid, "Pale Fire (Ulrich Schnauss Mix)" - Dead Leaf Echo; Map Room: CCTV Boom has Failed to Slash UK Crime, How to Locate Pinhole Cameras, Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex, Europe Recruits Astronauts for Possible Moon Missions; Venue Verite: Keith Olbermann: Bush Gives Up Golf for the War; Music Bed: "Interplanetary Materials" Compilation

"Union Of Concerned Scientists" - The Priddle Concern; Geeknotes: Brad Wilson, APP Group Feed, Two CPS Items, Shows 16-20 Back in Archive; Open Mic Stage: "Storm" - Hungry Lucy, Billo 'Inside Edition' Meltdown, The Scott Fuller Show Promo, "Discipline" - Nine Inch Nails, "May" - Helen Hunt Jackson, Osama Bin Laden Podcast Promo, "2 AM" - Slightly Stoopid, "Pale Fire (Ulrich Schnauss Mix)" - Dead Leaf Echo; Map Room: CCTV Boom has Failed to Slash UK Crime, How to Locate Pinhole Cameras, Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex, Europe Recruits Astronauts for Possible Moon Missions; Venue Verite: Keith Olbermann: Bush Gives Up Golf for the War; Music Bed: "Interplanetary Materials" Compilation

Chris de Cooker of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Dr. Lesley Jane Smith. rector of the Riga Graduate School of Law talk about a European space law moot court competition held in Riga April 18 and other matters.

A number of features of swarm intelligence are attractive for the space engineering community. The space environment typically puts stringent constraints on the capabilities of single satellites, robots or anything that needs to survive in space. Space agents are particularly limited in terms of mobility (propellant and power limited), communication (power limited) and size (mass limited). At the same time, a high level of adaptability, robustness and autonomy is required to increase the chances of success of operating in a largely unknown environment. Similar characteristics are found in the individual components of a biological swarm. At the time being a number of space applications are based on the presence of multiple space agents. The very first commercial application proposed and realized for satellite systems was that of Arthur C. Clarke and was a satellite constellation providing global communication services by means of three satellites put in a geostationary orbit. Since then, a large number of constellations have been deployed to provide global communication, navigation and Earth observation services. More recently, the idea of a number of satellites flying in formation has also been used in a number of missions for applications ranging from X-Ray astronomy, differential measurements of the geomagnetic field, space interferometry, and the search for exoplanets. Swarm intelligence methods would represent an attractive design option allowing achieving autonomous operations of multiple spacecraft. Simpler agents with limited capabilities could be considered as a resource, rather than as an overhead. At the same time, one would be able to engineer systems that are robust, autonomous, adaptable, distributed and redundant. Besides, swarms allow for mass production of single components, therefore promising for mission cost reduction, and represent highly stowable systems that would allow reducing launch costs. As the orbital swarm could have a collective consciousness coded in its control system, we could maybe in the long term send hundreds of small satellites on orbit and they could build a large antenna just as birds build their nests. In a closer future, swarm intelligence techniques can help us to achieve decentralized control systems for coordinated planetary exploration or spacecraft formation flying.

How to build large - very large structures in space? This is the problem addressed by this podcast of the Advanced Concepts Team. The Advanced Concepts Team tries to advance the research in this field via several ways: swarm-intelligence based automatic assembly, formation flying of a very large number of elements, and what can be called "furoshiki"-type approaches. The name 'furoshiki' comes from a Japanese cloth used to wrap up small possessions and the idea behind is to deploy a thin film or a net in space on which the antenna elements are positioned. For this purpose, a Japanese sounding rocket experiment was launched on January 22, 2006 from the Uchinoura JAXA/ISAS launch site in the south of Japan, carriying out three experiments all three never tried in space: First, three daughter satellitels detached from the mother section and extended between them a very thin net of triangular shape of a bout 130 squaremeters. Second, at the same time, the mother (in the middle of the net) and daugther satellites received a pilot signal from a ground station and accordingly "tuned" their respective microwave antenna elements to "retrodirectively" direct their collective beam towards the ground receiving site. Third, two tiny robots, RobySpace Junior 1 and 2 got their signal to detach from and leave their launch configuration box in the mother satellite and tried to crawl on the free floating net in a controlled manner each towards one daugther section. While the deployment of the net and the daughter sections are made by Prof. Nagasuka (University of Tokyo) and the retrodirective wireless power transmission experiment is conducted by Prof. Kaya (University of Kobe), the two robotic crawlers are from Europe.

Spacecraft must evolve. Advancing space research is no longer just about swapping old components for new ones, now it is also about entirely rethinking what a space mission can do and how it achieves its goals. This podcast reports from discussions among world experts on February 21 which exchanged new ideas and stimulated unconventional thinking about space systems.“We think that the future of space flight is in using new systems, new architectures and exploring technologies to reinvent the design of space missions,” says Dario Izzo of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team (ACT).Some of these ideas include: spindly tethers that pull electrical power out of space to explore the fascinating moons and planets of the outer solar system; using advanced propulsion to send spacecraft to deflect dangerous asteroids or go beyond the solar system; using a swarm of tiny satellites in formation to synthesise large structures such as telescopes and sails; and designing constellations of satellites that behave like rigid objects in space mocking Kepler’s Laws.One focus of the workshop was the coordinated motion of satellite swarms. Primitive goal-oriented instincts will be coded into the control system of each satellite, guiding it to complete a small task, whilst remaining unaware that a more complex undertaking is being achieved collectively. This is how ants and termites behave in nature. In this way, a satellite swarm may be given a collective intelligence, allowing it to achieve useful tasks in space. Large structures could be built, or many satellites could fly in formation to simulate the performance of much larger apertures than can be launched, whole, into space. Or the satellites might work in a co-ordinated way to explore many asteroids, providing a large cross section of comparable information rather than a snapshot of just one asteroid as happens with current missions.Some of the ideas discussed might lead to future studies. Other talks simply open people’s minds to the many possibilities on offer for future missions.

Spacecraft must evolve. Advancing space research is no longer just about swapping old components for new ones, now it is also about entirely rethinking what a space mission can do and how it achieves its goals. This podcast reports from discussions among world experts on February 21 which exchanged new ideas and stimulated unconventional thinking about space systems. “We think that the future of space flight is in using new systems, new architectures and exploring technologies to reinvent the design of space missions,” says Dario Izzo of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team (ACT). Some of these ideas include: spindly tethers that pull electrical power out of space to explore the fascinating moons and planets of the outer solar system; using advanced propulsion to send spacecraft to deflect dangerous asteroids or go beyond the solar system; using a swarm of tiny satellites in formation to synthesise large structures such as telescopes and sails; and designing constellations of satellites that behave like rigid objects in space mocking Kepler’s Laws. One focus of the workshop was the coordinated motion of satellite swarms. Primitive goal-oriented instincts will be coded into the control system of each satellite, guiding it to complete a small task, whilst remaining unaware that a more complex undertaking is being achieved collectively. This is how ants and termites behave in nature. In this way, a satellite swarm may be given a collective intelligence, allowing it to achieve useful tasks in space. Large structures could be built, or many satellites could fly in formation to simulate the performance of much larger apertures than can be launched, whole, into space. Or the satellites might work in a co-ordinated way to explore many asteroids, providing a large cross section of comparable information rather than a snapshot of just one asteroid as happens with current missions. Some of the ideas discussed might lead to future studies. Other talks simply open people’s minds to the many possibilities on offer for future missions.

Even though the space age is now 49 years old, determining the optimal trajectories for spacecraft is a far from easy task. People often have trouble deciding which is the best route to take on a car journey. In space the problems are much worse. Space missions are constrained by certain factors such as the thrust of the rocket used to launch the spacecraft, the celestial object you want to reach and the time at which you want to get there. When working out the best trajectories within such constraints, engineers all have different strategies. “Ask ten engineers for the best orbit for a particular spacecraft and you’ll get ten different ideas,” says Dr. Dario Izzo, a researcher on mission analysis in the Advanced Concepts Team at ESA’s European Space and Technology Research Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands. Each one of these missions will be the best for a certain reason, so the question becomes: what’s the best of the best? One of the proposed trajectories or another that no-one has thought of? In other words, orbits are like needles in a haystack. Search hard enough and you’ll find one, but is it the best one in the haystack? That’s where the new technique of global optimisation comes in. It is a method of handling complex problems with many variables that has lots of solutions. But there are many techniques for global optimisation and they are difficult to compare since they seldom use the same constraints when applied. To compare and contrast different techniques, ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, supported by ESOC, launched a competition. They issued a challenge to space engineers across the world to find an intercept trajectory that delivered as much energy as possible to the asteroid 2001 TW229. Twelve teams, from the US, China, Russia and Europe submitted their respective best solution. Izzo’s job was to rank the proposals according to how much energy each mission could impart to the asteroid. “The inspiration for this competition was asteroid deflection, a problem we have been working on quite thoroughly” says Izzo. Whilst asteroid 2001 TW229 presents no danger to Earth, issuing a call for trajectories simulated a step that would be taken in the event that a potentially dangerous asteroid were to be discovered. The key to the mission would be to deliver the largest push possible, in time for it to do the most good. The top ranked trajectory went to a team from the United States’ Jet Propulsion Laboratory (closely followed by two Spanish teams). Their amazing trajectory involved seven planetary flybys, mostly of the Earth but including Venus, Jupiter and Saturn that literally smashed the spacecraft into a head-on collision with the asteroid. In fact, the response to the competition was so good that the Advanced Concepts Team also hope to run future competitions, to further stimulate research in the exciting field of mission analysis.

Ion propulsion has been used successfully in space for a variety of applications such as manoeuvring satellites in Earth orbit, and propelling spacecraft beyond Earth's gravitiational pull in interplanetary space on missions to the moon, asteroids and comets. Ion propulsion offers much lower fuel consumption than chemical rockets, and although an additional power supply is required, demanding energetic missions benefit from either a lower mass or higher delivered payload mass. During a recent experiment, researchers at ESA and the Australian National University have proven the concept for a new type of ion engine that significantly improves performance over existing designs, providing advantages for robotic space missions to the outer solar system, and human missions to Mars. Traditional ion engines use three closely separated perforated grids containing thousands of millimetre-sized holes attached to a chamber containing a reservoir of the charged particles. The first grid has thousands of volts applied, and the second grid operates at low voltage. The voltage difference over the gap between the two grids creates an electric field that acts to simultaneously extract and accelerate the ions out of the chamber and into space in a single step. The higher the voltage difference, the faster the ions are expelled and the greater the fuel efficiency of the thruster. However, at higher voltage differences approaching five thousand volts (5kV), some of the ions collide with the second grid as they are accelerated, thus eroding and damaging the grid and thereby limiting its lifetime in space. The DS4G ion engine utilises a different concept first proposed in 2001 by David Fearn, a pioneer of ion propulsion in the UK, which solves this limitation by performing a two-stage process to decouple the extraction and acceleration of ions using four grids. In the first stage, the first two grids are closely spaced and both are operated at very high voltage and a low voltage difference between the two (3 kV) enables the ions to be safely extracted from the chamber without hitting the grids. Then, in the second stage, two more grids are positioned at a greater distance ‘downstream’ and operated at low voltages. The high voltage difference between the two pairs of grids powerfully accelerates the extracted ions. The test model achieved voltage differences as high as 30kV and produced an ion exhaust plume that travelled at 210,000 m/s, over four times faster than state-of-the-art ion engine designs achieve. This makes it four times more fuel efficient, and also enables an engine design which is many times more compact than present thrusters, allowing the design to be scaled up in size to operate at high power and thrust. Due to the very high acceleration, the ion exhaust plume was very narrow, diverging by only 3 degrees, which is 5 times narrower than present systems. This reduces the fuel needed to correct the orientation of spacecraft from small uncertainties in the thrust direction.

One of the fundamental issues for the next decades is the identification and implementation of a sustainable energy system, capable to supply the increasing global energy demand necessary to sustain living-standards of developed countries and the development and rise of living-standards of developing countries. The availability of cheap and abundant energy plays a crucial role in enabling the reduction of poverty and development gaps.The analysis of the evolution of our energy system shows that it underwent several times in the past radical changes (e.g. introduction of electricity, oil and gas, nuclear power) despite its inherent inertia. All of these changes were predictable several decades before their occurrence since they were based on discoveries, the demonstration of their principal feasibility and the subsequent identification/ emergence of needs. Solar power from space was proposed several decades ago, all studies have shown their principal feasibility and the increasing adverse implications of fossil fuel seem to demonstrate the need for a change.

One of the fundamental issues for the next decades is the identification and implementation of a sustainable energy system, capable to supply the increasing global energy demand necessary to sustain living-standards of developed countries and the development and rise of living-standards of developing countries. The availability of cheap and abundant energy plays a crucial role in enabling the reduction of poverty and development gaps. The analysis of the evolution of our energy system shows that it underwent several times in the past radical changes (e.g. introduction of electricity, oil and gas, nuclear power) despite its inherent inertia. All of these changes were predictable several decades before their occurrence since they were based on discoveries, the demonstration of their principal feasibility and the subsequent identification/ emergence of needs. Solar power from space was proposed several decades ago, all studies have shown their principal feasibility and the increasing adverse implications of fossil fuel seem to demonstrate the need for a change.