Thursday 22 August, 2019 9am to 5pm
ISU Cosmos Auditorium, Illkirch
Open to public upon registration

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This event will be webcasted on the ISU Live channel

 

Space for Urban Planning

Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas with projections showing an upwards trajectory to 68% by 2050. This team project will explore how space-based technologies and applications may help enhance understanding key trends and drivers in urbanization, which is crucial for sustainable development and forming a new framework for planning and living in urban areas.

Raising awareness of the significant potential of satellite-based information and technologies for planning population growth and for building more sustainable cities will be required to track our urban footprint and understand the impact of urbanization.

Enhancing industrial space competitiveness: Global trends and local positioning

The global information and networking explosion enhances the role of space as an integrator of systems. Telecommunications, remote sensing, positioning and celestial body exploration and exploitation pose new opportunities and challenges. Industrial policies and capabilities must constantly evolve in this environment to provide value of invested funds, satisfy security considerations and add value in potential partnerships and alliances. A mapping of industrial policies and capabilities is a prerequisite for regional space industrial positioning. Comparisons between leading nations like US and France in terms of the methods, tools and objectives of national distribution of competencies and the role of cases like Bas-Rhin would make a useful case for space stakeholders. As such, participants are expected to draw comparisons across regional industrial policies and how these can relate to national, or global value chains. The deliverables are expected to include an interdisciplinary analysis of key national industrial policies and links to regional competencies in Europe (France), US, others and recommendations for future competence development for regions like Alsace. The project should also cover the role of security considerations.

Fast Transit to Mars

Today’s human Mars mission concepts involve very high risks to the health of their crews from radiation exposure and long term microgravity effects. These problems might be largely solved by a propulsion system capable of traveling at a constant acceleration of 1g all the way to Mars and back. It is possible that 1g acceleration would reduce the travel time from Earth to Mars to less than one week. It would also reduce the impact of microgravity by simulating an Earth-like onboard gravity experience. This project should explore the feasibility and implications of a 1g propulsion system for a Mars mission. What problems would such a system address and what new ones might it create? What technologies will be required? Are the investments worthwhile? What business opportunities might arise and could they be made profitable? What are the broader implications for our culture and society?

Next Generation Space Systems: Swarms

Swarm-organized systems found in biology show remarkable benefits over centrally coordinated systems. Examples range from how ants work together to protect their queen, to how a flock of birds create the most breathtaking figures together without collisions. Applying this to a space based system provides a number of advantages. First of all, complexity can be divided over the elements of the swarm and therewith keep every element as simple and robust as possible. A swarm satellite is typically a nano-satellite that does not have the required resources for orbit and attitude control to strictly keep position with respect to other satellites in the swarm so it would not be capable of maintaining position in a constellation or a formation. This disadvantage can be turned into an advantage when the mission is designed such that it is not important where the swarm elements are. As such, the swarm satellites can be produced quite inexpensive and rely on COTS technology that make them suited for mass production. A large number of nano-satellites in a swarm make the swarm extremely robust and omnipresent. The revisit time of a swarm can be near instant. Swarms are very well suited for global earth observation, but can also form large scientific instruments of which the radio telescope OLFAR is the most exciting example. In essence, OLFAR is a large aperture radio telescope that can produce a detailed sky map at yet unseen frequencies that is with current space mission design thinking, beyond present means, both technically and financially. Yet another fascinating application that can be enabled with swarms is to form an Internet Of Things (IOT) backbone in Space. As such, in-situ sensors measuring environmental and/or geolocation parameters all over the world, can transmit their data whilst a swarm of small satellites collects this data and further manages how to deal with it. With the emergence of swarms, a totally new space system with features incomparable to traditional space systems is becoming available and the full use and benefits are still hardly discovered.