Getting flight heritage for innovative space technologies can be a challenge. While options exist for flying in Low Earth Orbit, few opportunities exist for flying outside the Van Allen belts, especially on the Geostationary orbit where are located the majority of commercial satellites. The PLUGIN project, or PayLoad Universal Geostationary Interface, aims at developing an open standard for hosting innovative packages as passenger payloads on-board commercial satellites. PLUGIN will propose a generic approach, including technical interface requirements and implementation schedule. PLUGIN will also present the business models for hosting such payloads on commercial spacecraft and associated contracting principles, together with a list of opportunities. Airbus Defence and Space (Formerly Astrium) is the leading European manufacturer of GEO communications satellites with 4 launchs per year to GEO orbit, and as such is in the perfect position to promote such initiative. Developing PLUGIN will benefit the whole European industry, by providing a recurring access to GEO orbit. Developing PLUGIN will also improve Airbus DS commercial offers. Airbus DS is teaming with ISIS and SSTL., 2 innovative industry leaders. The combined experiences and mindsets of the 3 companies will allow to assess the whole variety of requests for IOD/IOV in GEO and GTO orbits. The PLUGIN project will be structured around 2 groups : an Advisory Group and a Passenger Representative Panel. The Advisory Group will help the PLUGIN team to propose solutions commercially and technically acceptable by the various stakeholders of the industry. Participants will be ESA, satellite operators and insurers. The Passenger Representative Panel will focus on technical interfaces. The panel will include space hardware manufacturers from various European countries, both large companies, SMEs, and research labs. PLUGIN outcomes will be made public and available to the whole European Industry.

Geostationary satellites carry our TV channels, weather monitoring and communications (and military observations), and are a vital resource as we develop space technologies. Their altitude of 36000km has always suggested that the effects of debris would be small. However, in the last few months 2 geostationary satellites have literally broken apart. Furthermore, as spacecraft at GEO are too distant to de-orbit, towards the end of their operational lifetimes they are ejected out of the GEO into the so-called graveyard orbits. Here they are literally turned off and left to age. What happens to them past this point is conjecture: it is expected that they age and given the hostile space environment this itself could lead to breakup. However we are starting to expect that these spacecraft can be differentially acted upon by the solar wind, hence causing the spacecraft to start spinning. On a short timescale this could also lead to breakup. This proposal is about identifying the constitution of the debris field at GEO and also studying the effects of radiation field on the state of elderly satellites.

The UK has a world class reputation for design and manufacture of space based technologies. A new National Space Academy has been launched this year to help boost the size and quality of the UK's science and engineering expertise. The proposal supports strongly The UK Space Directory, an organisation of eight groups representing and supporting the UK space community and including the Technology Strategy Board that state "the UK Space Industry has come together to propose an ambitious 20 year strategy to capture 10% of the global space market, £40 billion, by 2030 and in doing so create 100,000 UK jobs". The UK houses some of the leading companies in space applications such as; Inmarsat, Rolls Royce, Logica, Vega Space, Astrium, Qioptiq Space Technology and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited. The latter two companies strongly back the research detailed within this proposal and have both provided satements of support. This proposal seeks to offer an alternative PV technology for large area arrays and to be the first to report thin film cadmium telluride (CdTe) deposited directly onto toughened cerium-doped microsheet glass (CMG), explicitly targeting a significant increase in specific power by a step-change reduction of system weight. The Qioptiq Space Technology CMG microsheet glass is optimised to match the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of gallium arsenide (GaAs) based space solar cells. With the CdTe CTE almost identical to that of GaAs the choice of CMG is ideal for the prevention of delamination under the severe thermal gradients to which space PV is exposed. This adventurous approach, using the CMG as both the radiation barrier and substrate, will be proven by characterisation of 5 x 5 cm2 deposited devices and finally scaled to 10 x 20 cm2 on the Centre for Solar Energy Research (CSER) pilot metalorganic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) system. This proposal has the content and vision to make a significant contribution to the UK's flourishing space industry. Key to the success of the project will be the dissemination and pathways to impact of the research outcomes; this will be ensured through regular reporting to and feedback from a steering group of potential exploiters-Industrial experts and through targeted press releases. This proposal offers UK research the chance to impact the space PV market either through licencing of the arising IP and more excitingly in the current economic climate through manufacture of the final product.

Deployable flexible strips resembling carpenters' tape measures have been used to deploy and support devices such as antennas and solar panels for some time. These curved strips are often referred to as "booms", especially when they also act as structural members. Perhaps the most famous example was the Viking Lander soil collection arm, which could be reeled up or extended as required. These booms are usually constructed from thin curved sheets of metal, or laminates of fibre reinforced polymer. Some of these booms possess the property of "bistability", which means they do not need to be constrained once they have been coiled up. Flexible deployable booms have found other uses in deploying antennas and imaging systems on the battlefield, inserting monitoring equipment into nuclear power plants, deploying a flexible solar array from the International Space Station (ROSA experiment), and very recently in forming the masts of the InflateSail drag deorbiting sail: the first European sail to be deployed in space, and one of the first successful demonstrations of orbital debris removal technology. These booms have several advantages over deployable systems consisting of rigid links joined by hinges or sliders, including simplicity, a very small number of moving parts, and they often can be made to be very lightweight. However, two main limitations of these flexible booms are that the vast majority to those developed to date only deploy in a straight line, and that the exact geometry and deployed length of boom cannot be very accurately controlled. Recently, versions of these deployable booms that are not only curved in one direction (like a tape measure), but have "double curvature" have started to be studied in earnest. These booms can be deployed into a whole array of new shapes such as parabolas, a torus, and even helices. This opens up a number of new possible applications, such as lightweight deployable parabolic dishes, large tent supports, and as active elements in directional antennas. In our project, we will accelerate the technology readiness level (TRL) of this technology by developing the design and modelling tools required to work with doubly-curved deployable flexible booms (focussing mainly on fibre reinforced laminate materials), and improving the manufacturing methods and deployment mechanisms in an effort to make booms with the necessary geometric precision and dimensional stability to be used in RF and optical systems. To design these highly constrained flexible structures we will be adapting a very powerful equation solving technique called polynomial continuation to seek out the perfect laminate fibre angles and thicknesses to get the mechanical behaviour required. To model the behaviour of the booms we will be generating novel energy methods to predict coiled and deployed shapes, building on methods we have already developed in this field. To motivate the development of these technologies, the University of Surrey is partnering with Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) and RolaTube Technology Ltd. (RTL) to build two new devices making use of curved flexible deployable booms. With RTL we are constructing a directional helical antenna that unwinds from a small motorised hub, deploying its own ground plane at the same time. With SSTL we are developing a novel Earth imaging telescope barrel consisting of multiple curved strips which deploy simultaneously to form the outer barrel. The telescope strip is an especially interesting device because it requires a single curvature in the deployed state where it forms part of the barrel of the telescope, but quite a complicated double curvature when coiled into a ring around the base of the telescope.

Unrestricted access to Space low shock non-explosive actuators has been identified as an urgent action by the European Commission, the European Space Agency and the European Defence Agency. Project REACT proposal is oriented to permit the unrestricted access of Europe to the technology of high reliable non-explosive actuators based on SMA (Shape Memory Alloy) technology. The REACT (REsettable Hold-Down and Release ACTuator) device is a new Hold Down and Release Actuator (HDRA) for space applications that have been developed as an improved alternative to currently available devices. Specifically, the proposed project is focused on develop low shock resettable Hold Down and Release actuators and qualify them integrated in real space final user space applications that require this release devices, such as big structures deployment, space science payload subsystems deployment, launchers subsystems deployment and small satellites subsystems deployment. The TRL (Technology Readiness Level) expected to be obtained once the project concluded shall be 8. REACT project is aimed to optimize and evolve standard REACT devices designs recently qualified up to TRL6 in order to match the requirements of specific applications demanded by the space market and generate a competitive range of products. The product optimized for space market applications will be able to replace and improve the performance of currently available US components in different areas of application (launchers, science, telecom and Earth Observation applications). REACT project contemplates to develop new SMA material manufacturing techniques and new SMA alloys that fit the specific requirements of the final users also involved in the project. In addition, research and improve the actuator tribology will be a technical objective to be addressed during the project development. Finally it is addressed a complete qualification campaign in order to upgrade to TRL8 the REACT models.