Space missions, a backstage view
Behind the scenes of space: anecdotes, items of interest, unexpected events and experience for the future
A close look At sMes
Luigi Broglio and the San Marco satellite: the start of the Italian era in astronautics by Daniela Amenta
Behind the scenes of the San Marco project by Barbara Ranghelli
the legacy of an enabling technology for a world-leading programme by Giovanni Rum
OHB Italia’s contribution to the Iride constellation of satellites protecting our planet by Editorial Staf
- made in Italy by Salvatore Pignataro
tradition of propulsion, from Gaetano Crocco to VEGA by Rocco Carmine Pellegrini
legacy of Cassini by Enrico Flamini
'ingredients' of probes, shuttles and the rest
ASI and the Italian industrial supply chain: the important role of Associations by Silvia Ciccarelli
Thales Alenia Space: building the second generation Galileo satellites by Editorial Staf
An Italian habitat on the Moon by Simone Illiano
Italy on the Moon: the LuGRE receiver by Claudia Facchinetti
Exploring the hidden face of the Moon by Silvia Natalucci and Marco Di Clemente
Moonlight, the lunar navigation system of the future by Giancarlo Natale Varacalli
Water on the Moon: The ORACLE project by Michèle Roberta Lavagna
Towards a sustainable future, between Earth and space by Editorial Staf
Fe Atured
Generation Space: space technologies and professions to protect our planet by Germana Galoforo Edited by
We thank all our colleagues at ASI who contributed to this edition
Managing director: Gianni Cipriani
Editor: Manuela Proietti, ASI Multimedia Unit
Graphic design: Paola Gaviraghi
SPA zIo ItALIA - how E xPERtISE wAS BoRN
SPACE - wIth BAtED BREAth
Behind the scenes of space
by Giuseppina Pulcrano
Space missions are enormous undertakings. And as with all big projects, it is unexpected circumstances, changing scenarios, technological capacity, funding, national and international collaborations and resourcefulness that decide the outcome.
Space programmes cannot do without in-depth knowledge of the target environment, and every mission demands a combination of skills to solve the puzzle, the genesis of which is often a question in search of an answer.
In the feld of space exploration, innovation is a sine qua non: future space missions are always dealing with new technological challenges and cutting-edge scientifc research.
We are fascinated by the daily sight of man's intelligence and control over the machine (...and gravity) when SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, after launching its satellites into orbit, returns to Earth and lands vertically on its platform. The journalists report the event, the theatrical spectacle taking place on the stage, but little or no mention is made of what happens behind the scenes of a space mission. This issue of Spazio 2050 starts with the genesis of a space mission, narrating the mandatory procedures for its execution such as quality controls. And it continues, with frst person testimonies, all the way
to the backstage of individual missions and projects, where even unforeseen factors have contributed to scientifc understanding, experience, and the testing of innovative technologies later used in subsequent missions.
This behind-the-scenes view is brought to us by the members of our Italian teams, always composed of a long chain of large, medium and small enterprises and the scientifc community in universities and research institutes, and narrates how the successful outcome of a mission is also a matter of resourcefulness, like an explorer who continues exploring without being discouraged by the problems that await him just around the corner.
The men and women who have chosen daring and unprecedented solutions to achieve the expected result, have had to take action to handle unexpected events, such as troubleshooting malfunctions in orbit. They also act as intermediaries between the
The Leonardo module in orbit.
Credits: NASA
recondite world of academic science and the community of industrial managers, when diversifed interdisciplinary teams are working to combine their knowledge and expertise.
The issue then takes a look behind the scenes of high profle missions with anecdotes and little-known stories: Rosetta, 2016's ExoMars, in which the Schiaparelli module was destroyed, Euclid, Juice and Solar Orbiter, whose orbital commissioning was handled remotely under Covid-19 restrictions. And it reveals how LiciaCube, the mission to flm the collision of a probe with an asteroid in real time, was conceived during a break at the bar of an international conference, not to mention the epic story of Agile, the gamma- and X-ray detector, which had to operate outside its expected mission envelope because of a malfunction, and still managed to generate excellent scientifc knowledge. We also look at some historic missions, starting with the launch
in the feld of space, innovation is a sine qua non.
of the Italian San Marco satellite, with a story dedicated to the fgure of Professor Luigi Broglio, one of the pioneers of Italy’s space adventure, creating a heritage of experience and know-how that has now passed into the hands of his successors, developed over the thirty-seven years since the establishment of ASI, the Italian Space Agency. The experts are well aware how we built the COSMO-SkyMed constellation of satellites, but we must emphasise that expertise and know-how in the space industry presuppose resourceful experimentation, which is often the harbinger of distinctive technologies that drive international competition. This is why the success of Cassini which, with its high and low-gain antenna, still represents the state of the art worldwide in terms of design and technology, has itself been critical to the success of other important missions as well. COSMO-SkyMed's radar and Prisma’s hyperspectral instrument are heirs to the Cassini's instrument, as is the Ka-band, frst tested between the rings of Saturn.
Not to mention how Italy has earned itself a leading role in Europe’s space transport and propulsion sector with the development of the Vega launcher, an emblem of the Made in Italy brand.
A look into the near future immerses us in the progress of new missions, new challenges we don’t want to miss.
Italian capacity in this sector also thrives on the Italian technological and scientifc capacity that supports industries and research into new technological solutions that would not be possible without materials science - the key to cutting-edge technologies for the on-board and ground instrumentation of payload components, novel fabrics and ever more resistant and reliable materials.
That process of maturation demanded by space missions is the true human and technological capital they generate.
One example of this is the Multi Purpose Logistic Modules, pressurised cargo modules for transporting equipment, supplies and experiments to and from the International Space Station on the Shuttle, which frst launched in 2001 and today, twenty-two years later, have made Italy one of the few countries in the world to bid for the construction of the space habitats will give humans refuge and comfort in the new colonies on the Moon.
How space missions are made
by Maria Libera Battagliere
In modern economies, economic growth is almost always driven by technological innovation, and this is also often decisive at the start of a new space programme. Each project, regardless of its complexity and duration, consists of a sequence of phases that identify its objectives, requirements, constraints, characteristics, performance, costs and risks, set out in accordance with specifc international standards. The frst step in the conception of a new space mission is to identify its objectives; this phase is known as Phase 0 or also Pre-Phase A and concludes with the Mission Defnition Review.
Innovation is one of the mission drivers in scientifc programmes, and even pre-operational missions, where a high technological risk may be accepted precisely for the purpose of verifying and validating the instrumentation and future applications in operational missions, while in programmes whose end use is the commercialisation of data, technological innovation represents a risk factor, which may have a major impact on the programme's implementation schedule and costs; this is why a low technological risk is usually preferred, resulting in the reuse of mature, qualifed technologies with standard industrial processes, to maximise return on investment, as Armando Tempesta makes clear in Space Magazine 5 (2014).
To launch a scientifc programme, one typically sets up a Call for Ideas or an Open Call to the scientifc community, which describes the objectives, class and cost of the mission, along with details of the programme and its implementation. Proposals responding to these open calls are evaluated and selected by subject-matter experts serving on the agencies' scientifc advisory boards. This process usually produces three or four mission concepts for a program-
me, which must undergo evaluation and a feasibility study, typically lasting one year. This is Phase A of the space project. The feasibility study does not identify potential projects, but verifes the conditions for the development of an already identifed project, provi ding all the elements for the start of implemen tation by identifying appropriate technical-programmatic solutions on the basis of pre-defned criteria, with a specifed schedule and economic constraints. This phase ends with the Preliminary Requirements Review, which provides all the elements for the start of the project specifcation, confguration and interface defni tion phase, known as Phase B of the project. For an operational programme like the COSMO-Sky Med satellite constellation, one of the largest investments in space systems for Earth observation made by Italy, the project feasibility study concluded with the development of the technologies required to make it viable. And it was precisely one of the key technology contracts, for the development of the technology and qualifcation model for a high-resolution X-band synthetic aperture radar, that set the foundation for
Background:
Credits: ASI/eGeos
the fnal (phase C/D/E) contract for the defnition, development, deployment, in-orbit launch and operational start-up of the COSMO-SkyMed Earth Observation system for dual use (civil and military), as reported by Arnaldo Capuzi in Space Magazine 5 (2014). Phase C draws up the detailed specifcation for the realisation and validation of the design, which ends with the Critical Design Review prior to the production and qualifcation testing phase or Phase D, which leads in turn to the Qualifcation and Acceptance Reviews.
On conclusion of phase D, the satellite/payload is authorised for shipping to the launch site, launch site operations and the launch itself. The next phase in the operational life of a mission is known as Phase E, and includes satellite commissioning (in-fight validation), nominal steady-state activities, and contingency/emergency operations. Before the launch, endof-mission or end-of-life (phase F) strategies are also usually established, which position the satellite for atmospheric re-entry or fnal departure from Earth (depending on the type of mission), in a manner regulated by international standards. For example, residual propellant must be discharged to avoid explosions, and this can even take several months, as in the case of the third satellite of the frst generation of the COSMO-SkyMed mission.
“For a dual-use system,” Alessandro Coletta explains in Space Magazine 5 (2014), “like the Italian COSMO-SkyMed constellation, there are both constraints on the design and implementation of the system, and constraints on its use, with impacts throughout the programme's life cycle. The operational management phase of the mission, for example, required the defnition of regulations to enable the two components, civil and military, to coexist for the use of the system, the efective collaboration between which yielded benefts to the civil component, both institutional and commercial, including positive repercussions at the international level.
The COSMOSkyMed Second Generation PFM satellite before launch.
A representation of the COSMOSkyMed Second Generation satellite.
an image captured by COSMOSkyMed of the Fram Strait between the Svalbard Islands and Greenland.
The devil’s in The deTails: Product Quality assurance
by Rita Carpentiero
Space is an extremely hostile and complex environment, where even a small mistake can prove fatal and undo years of work. Established engineering and project management techniques, deployed in the space project/product lifecycle, are not sufcient to guarantee successful completion of the mission. For this reason, a fundamental role is played by Quality Assurance (QA), run by a specialised facility and responsible for ensuring that the quality of processes and products/services conforms to specifcations throughout the process of development.
Unintentional errors, random events and combinations of exceptional adverse factors - both exogenous and endogenous - are unfortunately always lurking in wait. These unforeseeable eventualities must be intercepted in good time and thoroughly understood if they are to be handled methodically and professionally.
QA and Product Assurance (PA) teams do not act merely by intuition or on the basis of past experience, but by analysing data, including data gathered from non-conformities, anomalies and failures.
Most of the time, blocking problems occur during manufacture, assembly, integration and testing, when tight development, qualifcation and acceptance schedules prior to launch are prone to result in rushed analyses and investigations. The work of the Product/
Credits: ASI/OHB
Quality Assurance teams, thanks to their interaction with all fgures and processes in the feld, their ability to view unexpected scenarios and take action methodically, critically and even creatively in response to them, and their rigorous investigations and recordsall these make it possible to track the operational conditions of events and enable failure mode diagnostics and recovery actions. Hidden defects that can already be detected on the ground are the main source of malfunctions in orbit, even irrecoverable ones. Downplaying or neglecting even small problems along the way amplifes such risks.
Examining details, precursors of errors but sometimes also of mitigation actions and opportunities for improvement, is critical to the fnal result. Due weight must therefore be given to accurate observation, as well as any issues, without blaming errors, if one wants to learn from and grow with mistakes, and capitalise on experience in the feld.
PA/QA teams are incisive, independent exemplars of operational excellence, especially on site, known for their professional detachment, able to rise above conventional compliance controls with their contractually prescribed plans and requirements. The result is the ability to seal and demonstrate Space-Quality product claims operationally - a universal mark of excellence.
The ASI Prisma satellite in the OHB Italia clean room, Tortona.
Space - with bated breath
Anyone who has followed a mission launch live knows the feeling when a satellite reaches orbit and is released from the launch vehicle: a feeling of having faced the most challenging of tests and passed a huge milestone. But in reality, that’s only the beginning of a new story - as yet unwritten - in which the unexpected is always lying in wait to jeopardise the outcome of the mission. The following - mostly untold - stories tell of cases in which things didn’t go according to plan, often leading to unexpected outcomes. But that's space, baby!
by Manuela Proietti
The Philae lander 'found' by the Rosetta probe after a search lasting more a year. While attempting to land, Philae bounced off the soft surface of comet 67P three times, fnally coming to rest in a crevasse. The lander was still able to communicate with the Rosetta probe and send it photos and data of great scientifc value.
Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/ LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA; context: ESA/Rosetta/ NavCam - CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
Mission
iMpossible: RosEttA
"I always say that when we decided to launch the Rosetta mission, which required us to reach the same speed as a comet 600 million kilometres from the Sun, we were not in full possession of our faculties." On the face of it, Rosetta was an impossible mission. At least, so says Amalia Ercoli Finzi, no stranger to extreme challenges. In 1962, she became the frst Italian woman to graduate in aeronautical engineering, from Polytechnic University of Milan, where she also continued her career in aerospace engineering. She then worked as a scientifc advisor on several NASA, ESA and ASI space missions.
"When I started university in 1957," Amalia Ercoli Finzi continues, "Sputnik was orbiting Earth. You can really say that I was present at the birth of space exploration. And over the years since then we have achieved many wonderful things.”
For instance, sending a space probe into the orbit of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and putting a lander on its surface. Rosetta, a European Space Agency mission, was one of the most innovative space projects of all time.
But few people know how much creativity went into the design and construction of Rosetta. Starting with one of its principal instruments, for which Ercoli Finzi was herself responsible: SD2, the drill that was to drill into the comet's surface.
by Giulia Bonelli
Amalia Ercoli Finzi tells the behind-the-scenes story of the historic mission to unveil the secrets of comet 67P
The project, which was contracted to Galileo Avionica, was missing some critical components. The project was very challenging: to get a drill to work under extreme conditions, including almost zero gravity. No one in the traditional space supply chain was willing to take the contract. And so Amalia Ercoli Finzi had the idea of looking for a solution from the automotive industry. She turned to her former student, Giampaolo Dallara, founder of the company which bears his name.
“I knew that Dallara was highly skilled in making carbon fbre racing car parts. We worked together with them to develop an extremely complicated yet very lightweight instrument, weighing less than 5 kilograms. The drill tip was made of synthetic diamond, with the rest made in platinum, while the lens used to analyse the experiments was sapphire."
In short, a real gem, requiring motors capable of controlling its two main movements to work properly: rotation and the downwards drill stroke itself. “We needed motors capable of running dry," Ercoli Finzi continues, "because you can’t use lubricants in space. We found the right motors in Switzerland. They worked perfectly, but during testing we took things a little bit for granted: we used the same voltage for ground testing as the space system, 28 volts for both motors. The risk in space was that starting the rotational movement would also lower the drill, which could damage the instrument. Fortunately this didn’t happen in practice, but it was a constant source of worry for us.”
The fact is that all ambitious space missions have one thing in common: it’s efectively impossible to foresee all possible problems, since there are many more than we can imagine.
In February 2004, after years of testing, Rosetta was fnally ready for launch. And that was when emotions behind the scenes ran highest, starting with two postponed launches: frst due to weather conditions, then due to technical problems with Europe’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle.
"The second postponement was a real surprise," recalls Amalia Ercoli Finzi, "because we found out at the very last moment. During the countdown itself!" But on 2 March 2004, Rosetta fnally began its long journey to comet 67P. In 2011, the probe went into hibernation for the section of its fight that took it farthest from the Sun. And it stayed in hibernation for
Amalia Ercoli Finzi. Credits: Piedmont
two and a half years. When it woke up on 20 January 2014, it was faced by the most crucial stage of the entire mission.
As Ercoli Finzi recounts, “ESA had one hour to wake Rosetta up, which was by then just a tiny dot in the Solar System. Do you know how long it took for the probe to wake up? 50 minutes! You can imagine what those 50 minutes felt like to us."
After celebrating Rosetta's awakening, Amalia Ercoli Finzi now faced one of the most difcult tests of her career: waking up 'her' instrument, the SD2 drill. “I was at the ESA facility in Toulouse. When the time was right, I contacted the SD2 instrument. And the answer came back: ready. It was such an emotional moment for me that I started crying. The chances of contacting the probe were very low, but we made it.”
And so Rosetta arrived at last at its destination. On 6 August 2014, it rendezvoused with comet 67P, and the Philae lander landed on 12 November. But unknown factors and unforeseen events were only to be expected even then.
“We were going to be working in a completely unfamiliar environment. We didn’t know what type of surface
view of the descent of the Philae lander on comet 67P, captured here by Rosetta's navigation camera. Credits: Esa/Atg medialab; Esa/Rosetta/ NavCam
the drill would encounter: 67P could have been covered with very dense ice, which would have been difcult to drill into. And indeed, when Philae landed on the comet, its anchoring harpoons did not work. This is because it encountered a soft surface, like snow. The lander bounced almost 3 kilometres, a bounce that lasted more than two hours, and then came back down to the surface. This second time, the lander was able to anchor itself properly."
The Rosetta mission ofcially ended on 30 September 2016, after 12 years of operation that yielded a goldmine of data and left an invaluable technological legacy. The Rosetta drill is the inspiration for the drill on board the planned European ExoMars mission to Mars. This mission too bears the name of Amalia Ercoli Finzi: the ground rover which the ESA team is testing to prepare the Rosalind Franklin Mars rover is named after her.
And so Rosetta, the impossible mission, now hands the baton on to other seemingly impossible missions.
Artist’s
Replica of the Philae lander. The red arrow indicates the SD2 drill. Credits: Esa
Schiaparelli, anything but a failure
Пойдем! Lift of!
by Pino Di Feo
A distant glow, a growing roar you can feel in your chest. Roscosmos’ big Proton launch vehicle slowly rises towards the sky, and disappears from sight in the low clouds of a freezing cold Kazakh March.
In this vintage setting which calls to mind the Forties, a rough amplifed voice counts of the frst stages of the launch in Russian while a host of cameras take their pictures, accompanied by the applause, hugs and emotions of a crowd of Italian scientists, technicians and researchers.
And the Exomars mission is of; on 14 March 2016, from the Russian launch station at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Italy’s ASI agency set of to Mars together with its partners in this ambitious project, the European ESA and Russian Roscosmos agencies.
After 7 months, the probe arrived at Mars with its two principal components: the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) which would remain in orbit, analysing the planet’s atmosphere, and the European Demonstration Module (EDM).
Schiaparelli was a descent/landing technology demonstrator, designed and built in Turin, Italy, by Thales Alenia Space, which was to descend to the Martian surface as the pioneer for future exploration missions, including manned missions, and which was to conduct scientifc tests with the Italian Amelia and Dreams experiments.
But... things don’t always go according to plan. All it took was a small gyroscope malfunction du-
Behind the scenes and lessons learned from the 2016 Exomars mission
Credits: ESA
On 19 October 2016, while the world anxiously held its breath, ESA confrmed that the small Italian landing vehicle had crashed on Mars at a speed of 300 kph. The frst images, taken by TGO from orbit, show a black smudge where Schiaparelli hit the ground, confrming the failure of the mission. But was it really a failure?
Rafaele Mugnuolo, director of ASI’s Unità Esplorazione, Infrastrutture Orbitanti e di Superfcie e Satelliti Scientifci (Exploration, Orbital and Surface Infrastructure and Scientifc Satellites Unit), begs to disagree.
“It was anything but a failure,” he says; “the TGO has been working without a hitch since 2016. The project has been fully operational for 7 years now, providing both science and communications infrastructure. For instance, ESA made the TGO available to NASA’s
The TGO orbiter and Schiaparelli lander.
ring the fnal phases of landing to turn Schiaparelli into Crasharelli.
Insight mission in 2018 as well as the Mars 2020 mission with the Perseverance rover.
NASA also used the European satellite for communications during certain phases of the descent to the Martian surface. And its scientifc instrumentation is producing a vast amount of data and important results, like its detection of methane gas in the Martian atmosphere, and we’re expecting many more in the years to come.”
“A lot of the data processed by the TGO,” adds Mugnuolo, “will be confrmed in the near future, including its analysis of the Martian atmosphere, among others. It’s also taking amazing HD photographs of the surface with its CASSIS instrument, which are of great value to studies of the morphology and geological history of the planet and, in 2021, also helped to identify the best landing site for NASA’s Perseverance rover, in the Jezero crater.”
So the operation of the TGO in Mars orbit has been an indisputable success… but Mugnuolo also insists that Schiaparelli itself was not a total write-of.
Indeed, the descent and landing procedure was 99% successful, producing data which will be of value to upcoming missions to Mars.
“It’s only in the very last seconds that there was a problem - a small problem we were able to identify, and so we’ll be able to correct it in the future. One of the sensors thought that the lander had already touched down, and the on-board computer switched of the thrusters earlier than it should have, causing it to crash. But the entire Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) sequence is divided into three stages: atmospheric entry, descent and landing, and the frst two of these were completely successful.”
“That’s no small matter, because the frst stage (entry into the Martian atmosphere) is absolutely critical; even a fraction of a degree of the specifed trajectory would be disastrous, and in some cases the probe can bounce of the atmosphere and continue of into space without ever descending. On the other hand, if the entry angle is too steep, the speed and temperature of entry would overcome the probe’s defences and destroy it. You can’t leave it to the last moment to decide what to do, you have to have calculated it right from the beginning and corrected the trajectory during the approach to the planet, because once you’re in Mars orbit, there’s no time to correct errors: so we must congratulate the ESA control team, because this stage of the EDL sequence was perfect. As was the descent stage, with the opening of the supersonic parachute which braked the probe, and the heat shield, so that the descent module was working exactly as planned for the few seconds it was operational.”
after 7 months, the probe arrived at Mars with its two principal components: the TGO and the eDM.
“But it was the last stage, landing, that went wrong,” says Mugnuolo: “the sensors reported touchdown a few seconds too early, the thrusters turned of and the probe crashed. This stage must certainly be corrected, but there’s no way you can say that the entire mission was a failure. We got information that has enabled us to understand what worked properly, as well as what went wrong and needs to be improved.”
The cup is half full, in other words, especially when we look at the data Schiaparelli gathered during its descent and which will certainly be very useful when we return to Mars - and not only then.
Euclid and JuicE - science on thE EdgE
by Fulvia Croci
The two ESA missions have overcome critical moments that kept the scientific community holding its breath
The critical phase of a space mission does not end, as many believe, with launch and placement into orbit. Frequently, the greatest difculties in starting the operational phase of a mission are due to problems with the software or other critical issues that occur days or months after launch, putting successful completion of the mission at serious risk. This is exemplifed by two probes belonging to the European programme of cosmic and Solar System exploration: Euclid and Juice. The frst was launched on 1 July, with the mandate of improving our understanding of dark matter and dark energy, one of the central problems in modern astrophysics. The second was launched on 13 April, to explore the planet Jupiter and its moons.
At the end of August, Euclid was forced to take a break due to a problem with its Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), which interrupted its self-testing protocols prior to the start of scientifc observations. In practice, the FGS sometimes failed to recognise the catalogued guide stars used for pointing the instrument. At the time of the interruption, the probe was already in its intended orbit around the second Lagrange point, one and a half million kilometres from Earth, from where it will observe the distant universe to create a 3D map of billions of distant galaxies. The solution was provided by a software upgrade from the mission's industrial partners: Thales
Alenia Space and Leonardo, who tested the upgrade on a ground-based model of the satellite. Following positive results of this testing, the team then tested the software in orbit for ten days and the problem was resolved.
Since then, Euclid has continued to work perfectly and the telescope has sent its frst images back to Earth: fve extraordinarily detailed photos depicting a variety of celestial objects. Italy is involved in the Euclid mission in many ways: in the construction of subsystems for the two on-board instruments, in the scientifc management of the ‘ground segment’, the survey and the in-fight operation of the instruments, but also playing a major role in the technical and scientifc aspects of the mission. Italy, together with France and Great Britain, is a leading participant in the mission, primarily thanks to the support of the
In the background:
Credits: ESA–M. Cowan
Italian Space Agency. Another participant in the mission is NASA, which provides the detectors for the NISP instrument.
"The solution to the pointing problem was a huge relief for the over three thousand people involved with the Euclid mission over the last ffteen years," said Elisabetta Tommasi of the Italian Space Agency. “We were actually quite optimistic, particularly since it was clear that the problem was not a fault with the satellite’s hardware or instruments, but could rather be solved by uploading a new version of the on-board Fine Guidance System software from Earth. In contrast, the issue of straylight, i.e. light scattered inside one of the instruments by a thruster housing located outside the satellite which was not properly shielded from sunlight, had to be handled diferently; in this case, the observations had to be re-planned to ensure that the satellite was always oriented in such a way as to keep this element in the shade. Such problems are not unusual in the early operational phases of a space mission, which is why a lot of time is spent after the launch on all sorts of checks, followed by performance controls, calibrations and, after all that, the scientifc observations themselves.”
The Juice probe also overcame a problem with the deployment of the Italian RIME (Radar for Icy Moons Exploration) antenna, a radar optimised to penetrate the icy surface of the Galilean satellites down to a depth of 9 kilometres with a vertical resolution of as little as 30 metres.
After the problem was detected - three days after launch, on 17 April - technicians worked for three weeks to unlock the pin preventing the full deployment of one of the antenna’s two arms. Having assessed a number of solutions, the team decided to use its thrusters to rotate Juice eight times in a fortnight, gradually increasing its exposure to direct light. This made it possible to rotate the probe into a position in which it could use the heat of the Sun to release the pin mechanism.
"Without the full deployment of the antenna," said Barbara Negri, Head of the Human Flights and Scientifc Experimentation unit at ASI, "we would not have been able to use the RIME radar, so waiting for the solution was a very anxious time. The data produced by this instrument will allow scientists to see below the icy crust of the moons to understand their subsurface characteristics and identify whether liquid water is present.”
Graphical representation of the Euclid telescope. Credits: ESA
a miniature model of the Juice probe at ESA's Estec centre.
Solar orbiter and the first remote commissioning in history
by Marco Stangalini
On 10 February 2020, Solar Orbiter, ESA's mission dedicated to studying the Sun, was ready for launch at NASA's Cape Canaveral centre. The teams for the ten on-board scientifc instruments had spent many months planning every detail of the power-up procedures and checks to be run over the following weeks. This phase, commissioning, consists in switching the scientifc instruments on for the frst time after launch to check their operation and prepare them for the science programme. It is a very delicate time, during which technical hitches of all kinds can crop up, putting the team under a lot of pressure. Everything therefore had to follow well-tested protocols and, in the case of Solar Orbiter, very tight deadlines, given the urgency of completing the process before the satellite moved too far from Earth, which would have limited the teams’ ability to communicate with it and download all the scientifc and telemetry data required to set the instruments up properly to Earth.
However, on 10 February, as Solar Orbiter took of along its trajectory which would bring it close to the Sun on its very elliptical orbit around our star, no one could have imagined that all these plans would soon be turned upside down.
Under normal conditions, the procedure for switching on and testing the scientifc instruments on-board Solar Orbiter would have required the respective teams to be present at the ESA operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany. These would include the team for the Italian Metis instrument, dedicated
High-contrast image of the extended solar corona (acquired by Metis) and of the solar disc in the UV frequency range (acquired by EUI) during Solar Orbiter's frst close pass by the Sun on 25 March 2022.
Credits: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI & Metis teams, D. Telloni et al (2022).
to studying the outer layers of the solar atmosphere with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. However this was not to happen: with Italy being the frst of the programme partners to be hit by the outbreak of Covid-19, the Italian team was the frst to have to cope with this unforeseen circumstance. Indeed, on 28 February 2020, when Metis was scheduled to be switched on for the frst time, the Italian team that had planned to travel to the ESA operations centre was decimated by the frst restrictions put in place to limit the spread of the pandemic. This caused considerable difculties, as people who were essential to running the procedures, sending remo-
te commands to the instrument and analysing the returning telemetry and scientifc data, were forced to phone in their support, since it was not possible to access the real time telemetry data from the instrument.
Every single procedure, carefully planned for months ahead of time, had to be completely rethought in a matter of hours. The ASI Solar Orbiter team itself, which was initially intended to follow operations in person, joining the scientifc team at ESA Darmstadt, was forced to cancel its travel plans only a few hours before departure, due to the travel restrictions put in place by the public health authorities.
the pandemic forced us to revise all our procedures.
But thanks to the thorough preparation and expertise of the Italian scientifc team and the ESA team providing operational support, all procedures and checks were successfully completed. Metis turned on correctly, and the data acquired and transmitted to Earth was more than satisfactory. This was doubly satisfying in view of the conditions under which the work had to be done.
The problem, which initially appeared to be limited to the Italian team alone, would unfortunately spread to the other European teams within a few weeks, leading to the temporary closure of the ESA operations centre in Darmstadt. This led to a completely unprecedented situation of total uncertainty, and the need to quickly revise the commissioning plan for all the on-board instruments so that it could be done remotely - something entirely new and untried.
The following weeks and months severely tested the teams, and forced the scientifc managers to reschedule their activities on a daily basis to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances and sometimes, unfortunately, the temporary unavailability of key fgures in their teams who had been afected by Covid-19.
But however hectic and tense those months were for the teams, that did not prevent them from achieving their goals. Only a few months after the outbreak of the pandemic, in July 2020, ESA released the frst scientifc images from Solar Orbiter’s on-board instruments. Those very frst images testifed not only to the scientifc value of the instruments themselves, but also to the enormous preparation and know-how of all technicians and scientists involved in the mission, that had made it possible to achieve the result in a completely unprecedented manner.
Almost four years later, Solar Orbiter has achieved - and continues to achieve - important scientifc results, allowing us to observe the Sun from just a third of Earth’s distance from it. This privileged vantage point allows us to observe dynamic processes in the Sun's atmosphere as never before, and to better understand how our star controls physical conditions in interplanetary space with efects, such as geomagnetic storms, that can also be measured on Earth.
The Liciacube mission: the daring child of a chance meeting
by Giuseppe Nucera
A technological challenge in deep space may frst be imagined across cocktails. This is what happened with ASI’s LiciaCube nano-satellite, the frst Italian interplanetary mission, the images from which documented the frst planetary defence test with an asteroid: the 26 September 2022 impact of NASA’s Dart probe with Dimorphos, aimed at altering its orbit around its big brother Didymos. This was a historic collision, but before the LiciaCube satellite was conceived as a companion to Dart, its efects were to have been measured using telescopes on Earth, 12 million km away.
This plan was changed at a Washington workshop held on the occasion of the stipulation of an agreement between ASI and NASA’s SSERVI Institute, a body dedicated to the exploration of the Solar System, successor to the previous NASA Lunar Science Institute.
“It was 14 June 2017; as a participant at the seminar, I presented a number of ASI nano-satellites, still under development, including the ArgoMoon CubeSat,” says Simone Pirrotta, LiciaCube Program Manager for ASI.
“NASA had invited Andy Rivkin, Project Scientist for the Dart project, I believe because his was the NASA-SSERVI team closest to Washington.”
This enabled the Italian team to learn more about the Dart mission, scheduled for launch 5 years later, while NASA learned about the potential of the ArgoMoon nano-satellite. Contracted to be developed by Argotec on ASI’s behalf, and scheduled to be part of NASA’s Ar-
Top: an image of the LiciaCube nano-satellite, together with one of the images documenting the impact of Dart with Dimorphos from very close up.
temis 1 Moon mission, ArgoMoon was designed to manoeuvre in orbit and acquire images of the principal visible objects - the Space Launch System, Earth and Moon - pointing its instrument autonomously with its on-board software.
“We were chatting during the closing cocktails of the event, in a sort of informal brainstorming session,” Pirrotta continues, “and it was then that we had the idea of accompanying Dart with a nano-satellite, with a similar confguration and capacity to ArgoMoon, to document the impact with the asteroid from close up.”
On their return to Italy, the ASI team evaluated, frst with Argotec and later with the partners of INAF and Bologna and Milan Universities, the idea of building a CubSat with the necessary performance and features in the four years remaining before the launch: while ArgoMoon was designed to remain in orbit close to its target for a long time, LiciaCube would need to fy past the asteroid immediately the impact of Dart, at more than 6 km a second - one of the closest and fastest fybys ever attempted. “We also had to design and monitor the trajectory with enormous precision.”
In the event, the mission was a success, and one that NASA, at the time, would probably not have come up with by itself.
“After NASA’s twin MarCO CubeSats, LiciaCube was the third to be used in deep space exploration, and it added enormous value to the Dart mission,” Pirrotta concludes.
Photograph taken by LiciaCube which shows the larger Didymos asteroid with its moon Dimorphos behind it, with the plume of ejecta resulting from the Dart collision.
The aGiLe case: unexpected science
by Barbara Negri
It was 2007 when the Italian science satellite AGILE (Light Imager for Gamma-ray Astrophysics), built by ASI together with INAF (National Astrophysics Institute), INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) and the Italian private sector, lifted of from the Sriharikota base in India. AGILE was designed to study the universe in the X-ray band, focusing especially on very violent distant phenomena like neutron stars, black holes and very distant large objects. Costing less than half a medium sized European space mission, AGILE was designed to work for just 2 years, with a potential extension of another 2. Now, sixteen years later, AGILE is still working, producing excellent scientifc observations, despite a serious unexpected malfunction. After commissioning, AGILE spent nearly a year and half in pointing mode, its specifed mode of operation, with a weekly pointing schedule.
But this changed in April 2009: a serious malfunction of the inertial pointing system had forced the satellite to transition to Sun Pointing Spinning mode. The reaction wheels had malfunctioned, probably due to the failure of some components, and it was not possible to restore the mission’s operational mode.
AGILE changed its observation method: from pointing mode it transitioned to scanning mode, rotating around its axis once every 7 minutes, thus covering a good part of the sky every day. The mission scientists
soon understood that this new mode was ideal for monitoring the variability of celestial sources across the entire universe.
And it was the section of sky that includes the Crab Nebula, so far considered a stable high energy source, that ofered them a truly sensational unexpected discovery: AGILE discovered a variability in the Crab Nebula’s gamma emissions.
This was a discovery of such import that it won the AGILE science team the prestigious Bruno Rossi Prize for high energy astrophysics in 2012.
This unexpected mode of observation was able to give a rapid response to transient astronomical events, and the alert system was also able to observe terrestrial phenomena, like Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs), very brief high intensity events produced by extreme atmospheric phenomena.
Before AGILE, TGFs associated with extreme atmospheric conditions like tropical storms or events of elevated electrical intensity had been measured by other satellites at lower levels of energy. AGILE demonstrated the existence of much more energetic TGFs, up to 100 million electron volts (MeV).
This discovery revolutionised the study of these phenomena, which also has applications in terrestrial avionics.
ASI’s AGILE science satellite (Light Imager for Gamma-ray Astrophysics).
FS GROUP MOVING TO ZERO-EMISSIONS MOBILITY
by Editorial Staf
The FS Group, led by CEO Luigi Ferraris, has set 2040 as the target date for achieving carbon neutrality, with an intermediate milestone: on a 2019 baseline, FS wants to halve its direct and indirect emissions (Scope 1 and Scope 2) by 2030 and reduce value chain emissions (Scope 3 emissions from vendors, clients, employees, etc.) by 30%.
According to the Group's latest GHG Report - which analyses the management of energy and climate-altering gas emissions - 2022 saw a post-pandemic increase in rail trafc, accompanied by a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of around 4 per cent. In order to reach its net-zero target and contribute to the reduction of transport industry emissions, FS Italiane is taking action in four directions: modal shift, phasing out fossil fuels, energy efciency and renewables.
Modal shift. FS is aiming to move more and more people by train, bus, soft mobility and other collective and shared means, as well as transporting an increasing share of goods by rail, thus taking cars and goods vehicles of the roads. It is making its rail network more extensive and widespread, adding 1,000 kilometres of new high-speed railway lines. It is transforming stations into intermodal nodes and local development hubs.
Phasing out fossil fuels. The FS business plan provides for the electrifcation of more than 2,000 kilometres of line by phasing out polluting and energy-intensive diesel locomotives. The Group is also investigating potential hydrogen-powered solutions. Qbuzz, a Busitalia subsidiary in the Netherlands, has a feet of electric buses as well as a number of hydrogen-powered buses (yielding a reduction of 1,375 tonnes of CO2 per year). Qbuzz is a leader in using low environmental impact buses (it has 310 zero-emission buses in its feet, of which 32 are hydrogen-powered and 278 electric, representing best practice at the European level today) and in experimenting with low impact fuels like HVO, which is already being used with excellent results.
The Frecciarossa and the Rock train.
Energy efciency. Reducing consumption starts with using trains and buses with improved environmental performance, like the regional Pop, Rock and Blues trains. The Group's primary infrastructures is being upgraded in numerous ways. With the Smart Station project, RFI telemonitors and telemanages lighting systems and the gas and water consumption of stations to maximise energy savings and efciency; in Trenitalia's workshops, measures are being taken to reduce energy consumption by using radiant strip heating, LED lighting and energy-efcient compressors for processing, and installing photovoltaic panels on the roofs; Anas’s Green Light 2.0 project envisages installing advanced lighting systems in 800 tunnels around Italy, for average annual savings of 750,000 MWh and a 18,500 tonne reduction in CO2 emissions; the Green Island project will install solar-powered fast-charging stations for electric cars along the motorway network.
Renewables. The Group is investing heavily in renewables. In 2022, the company consumed a total of
Two
solar panel installations: The Foligno Workshops and the Scalo San Lorenzo Plant in Rome
In the Offcina Manutenzione Ciclica Locomotive (Foligno Workshops), 2,564 monocrystalline silicon solar panels were installed on the roof of the turnery and the main factory hall, for a total area of 5,560 square metres. The solar power installation, inaugurated in March 2023, will produce 1.4 GWh per year when fully operational, amounting to 20% of total demand, thus avoiding the emission of around 740 tonnes of CO2 per year.
In Rome, at the Impianto di Manutenzione Corrente dei treni Alta Velocità (High-Speed Train Maintenance Plant) at Scalo San Lorenzo, a 1,108 kW system was installed on the roof of the sheds, which will generate 1.5 GWh per year, saving almost 800 tonnes of CO2 per year. In addition to renewable generation systems, Trenitalia has invested in energy effciency and reduced its energy consumption for lighting and heating to a level of self-suffciency amounting to 39% of its energy needs.
New regional trains
The regional Pop and Rock trains, fnanced with Green Bonds, are reducing consumption by 30% in comparison with the previous generation of trains. Built with light alloys, they feature naturally ventilated engines, LED lighting and an airconditioning system with CO2 sensors, and use smart parking technology which provides additional savings by switching on-board equipment off during stops.
The Blues trains feature hybrid technology with a triple power supply: diesel, electric and battery. They use their diesel engines on non-electrifed lines, electric motors on electrifed lines, and batteries to cover the frst and last miles on nonelectrifed lines. All this results in a 50% cut in fuel consumption and a signifcant reduction in CO2 emissions in comparison with diesel rolling stock. In Calabria, the Blues trains also run on pure HVO, a biofuel supplied by Eni Sustainable Mobility that cuts CO2eq emissions by up to 80%.
about 27 million GJ, of which about 74% was electricity, mainly for powering trains. But the Group has transitioned to thinking like a producer of energy, and has earmarked EUR 1.6 billion to install photovoltaic systems in its own premises. The objective: to produce 2.6 TWh per year when fully operational by increasing its solar power capacity by 10%.
In January 2023, the frst European call for tenders was launched, amounting to 130 million euros to build the frst photovoltaic plants in Italy: these will be connected to the Group's own electricity substations, converting and transforming energy to power rail trafc. Energy from the Sun to drive our trains.
The Blues train.
Spazio Italia how expertise was born
Perhaps not everyone knows that the future moon station will include a number of Italian modules. Or that our country has the world's only constellation of radar satellites for observing the Earth. Or what Italian made scientific instrumentation is used on board the most important missions in the Solar System. But how did we get there? The first spark was lit on 15 December 1964 with the launch of the San Marco satellite, thanks to the enterprising vision of Luigi Broglio. This debut at the highest level immediately positioned the country alongside the 'big boys' of space exploration. The story continues from there, a long history of synergies between strategic sectors in which Italy is today an acknowledge world leader.
Luigi Broglio and the San Marco satellite: the start of the Italian era in astronautics
by Daniela Amenta
Sixty years ago, in 1964, Italians were driving FIAT Seicento cars, the Milan-Naples Autostrada del Sole motorway had just been opened, and while the economic boom was beginning to falter, there was still plenty of work. The majority of Italians now had TVs in their homes, so they could watch Gigliola Cinguetti sing “Non ho l’età” at the Sanremo festival. We were a country full of resources and self-confdence, a simple country dreaming of new domestic appliances and the quiet life. Few people in 1964 were aware of what was happening above them - far, far above them. And yet Italy, way back then, had already developed a project of international scope - the San Marco satellite - and launched its own satellite into space, the third nation
in the world after the United States and the Soviet Union, from the frst equatorial launch base of the coast of Kenya. All of this was due to a highly intelligent, rather shy man of extraordinary moral and civic stature. His name was Luigi Broglio. His achievement, even from today’s perspective, was truly incredible for its time and the manner in which it was done, and it has left us a legacy of know-how, talent and national pride that are still driving us towards the future.
Luigi Broglio: engineer, soldier, and the father of Italian astronautics. Broglio was born at Mestre in 1911, but moved to Rome as a child, where he graduated in civil engineering in 1934 with an innovative thesis on the balanced forces method, a structural calculation that was soon adopted worldwide. In later years, he also graduated in aeronautical engineering and mathematics. It was he who had the idea for the School of Aerospace Engineering at La Sapienza University, Rome, and served as its dean from 1952
to 1987. In the only biography that recounts his life and his incredible career, Nella Nebbia in attesa del Sole (In the Mist Waiting for the Sun) by Giorgio Di Bernardo Nicolai, the professor recalls: "My father wanted me to be a doctor. Over the years, I have often asked myself if I would have done better by following his advice. My excuse is that I have always tried to act with the good of others at heart, and the prestige of our country in mind.” There is little doubt that he succeeded, and Broglio can be certainly compared to the likes of Fermi and Marconi.
Among Broglio's many qualities is that of having pursued a military career (frst as a lieutenant in the Air Force, rising to the rank of inspector general) in parallel with his studies and scientifc practice. After 8 September 1943, he chose, as a Catholic, to join a group of partisans led by Paolo Emilio Taviani, and after the war he fnally obtained his professorship in aeronautical engineering in Rome, a professorship that a fa-
Above: Luigi Broglio; left: the San Marco satellite.
scist law had barred him from simply because he was a bachelor. This opened many other paths and possibilities to him. Starting with trips abroad, especially to America. It was in Indiana that he met a number of aerospace specialists, and in particular Hugh Dryden, the future associate administrator of NASA. And thanks to the support of the United States, which recognised his brilliance as an engineer, he began in 1951 to initiate studies and set up futuristic projects, all this in spite of very little, indeed almost non-existent funding.
In 1954, Luigi Broglio built the frst supersonic wind tunnel (Mach 4) in Italy using old Navy compressors, and in 1956 he built a Mach 6 tunnel, the only one of its kind in Europe. These were truly miraculous achievements for the time. In the book “In the Mist Waiting for the Sun” he confesses: "In the feld of research, I have always tried to do things economically, but perhaps it would have been more useful to develop a big programme. However, I did what I did because I believed in it, paying the price myself: for instance, I prefer to work alone. Yet, in order to set up a school, a culture, a technology, I also took on administrative work that I don't enjoy, and I left a feld in which I was a master, aeronautics, to enter a new world that I knew nothing about.” And yet somehow this lonely, shy and introverted man managed to change history.
The new world of which Broglio speaks was proposed to him by physicist Edoardo Amaldi, who asked him to leave aeronautics for space. Despite his initial doubts, he fnally accepted the invitation: he introduced the degree in Aerospace Engineering to Italian universities and, in 1959, as chairman of the CNR's Commission for Space Research, he proposed a revolutionary project to Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani: to build an Italian satellite and put together an Italian team to launch it into space from an Italian base. This was beyond the wildest dreams of a country driving FIAT Seicentos and dreaming of new washing machines while singing popular songs. That we, little Italy, would join America and the Soviet Union in setting up an autonomous space programme, something that the rest of Europe was not even contemplating. It sounds like science fction but it was nonetheless real: the proposal was accepted and Broglio even obtained the support of NASA for his project. Within a few years, the project was completed by the team of Italian scientists and technicians he had put together. On 15 December 1964, Broglio’s team launched the San Marco 1 satellite using an American rocket, the Scout, from the American base at Wallops Island, Virginia. The satellite was carrying an innovative instrument for its time: the Broglio balance, an instrument designed by the Italian scientist to measure the density and molecular temperature of the upper atmosphere with great precision. Everything went perfectly as planned, and this success enabled Luigi Broglio to realise his ideas.
launch
Broglio obtained the launch platform, later baptised San Marco, from the Americans: it was an army landing barge converted for the purpose at the La Spezia shipyards.
The frst idea was to use marine platforms positioned close to the equator: a truly daring project, the frst of its kind, which Broglio set up with very few resources and in record time. On 26 April 1967, only three years after the frst launch, the San Marco 2 satellite was launched from the Italian ocean base in Kenya, near Malindi.
Broglio obtained the launch platform, later baptised San Marco, from the Americans: it was an army landing barge converted for the purpose at the La Spezia shipyards. The control room was housed on a second mobile base just 600 metres away: this was a former Eni drilling platform, donated to Broglio by Enrico Mattei. It was called Saint Rita, after the saint of impossible miracles - miracles that sometimes come true.
Today, the San Marco equatorial base, now the Luigi Broglio Space Centre, no longer used for launches, is an important centre for satellite data reception, telemetry, and tracking launch vehicles and space missions. A total of nine satellites were launched from the base between 1967 and 1988: four from the San Marco programme, four from the USA and one from the UK, as well as some 20 orbital launches. The base, initially under the management of the National Space Plan, in collaboration with Rome's La Sapienza University, is now an operational centre of the Italian Space Agency, the only example in the world of a space base outside its country’s national territory.
Luigi Broglio left the scene discretely, as was his style, on 14 January 2001, at the age of 90, having brought many wonderful, futuristic projects to completion, but above all having honoured the idea of a united Italy, concrete, confdent and industrious, driving down the Autostrada del Sole while gazing up at the sky.
The
of the San Marco 2 satellite from the Italian base in Malindi.
Behind the scenes of the San Marco project
by Barbara Ranghelli
Recounted by franco Quintilli
Franco Quintilli is an aerospace engineer. But not just any aerospace engineer. After graduating in Precision Engineering in Switzerland, he became a member of the San Marco project team.
“When the frst satellite was launched from Wallops Island, I was in Pachino, Sicily. The satellite was fying towards Europe: our job was to record its signals and give the green light for orbital injection. Hearing the frst “beep” from San Marco was a really emotional moment! Broglio called to congratulate us. But we were all confdent about the work we’d done. All the missions went well, despite a few initial problems. The second satellite, for instance, was to be sent to the United States for testing after assembly. But even though it was to be carried in a Super Constellation, the crate couldn’t pass through the plane’s cargo bay door. In the end we took the door of and were fnally able to load the satellite - you should have seen the look on the captain’s face! I should mention another incident, which says a lot about Broglio’s character. We were in Kenya, waiting to launch San Marco 3. The weather was terrible and we had to stop the countdown. So Broglio said to me: “Quintilli, seeing as how you’re a devotee of Santa Rita, the saint of impossible undertakings, could you go up to the surface and ask her to open a gap between the clouds?” Well I did, and for whatever reason the clouds parted, the countdown started again - and the rocket lifted of. Another time, I think it was the San Marco 4 mission, the satellite’s batteries registered a voltage drop just before laun-
ch. One of my colleagues went to the launch platform, disconnected the umbilical by hand, short circuited three batteries together and the voltage returned to its proper level. After that everything worked as planned. It’s a pleasure to remember these episodes, they show that in the end we always managed to launch. There were never any problems - except for politics, of course...
Living in Africa wasn’t easy. Before the bungalows were built, we lived in tents, and in some seasons you could wring the sheets out - I’m not exaggerating; and then there were the snakes. But the local people appreciated what we were doing, it injected money into the community and gave a lot of people work. One time, Carmen Russo came to Malindi on holiday with her husband, and someone at the hotel told her that there was a group of Italians just 25 km away. Of course when she visited the base we were all excited, and work had to take second place for a while. We showed her the instrumentation, and how we received the signals from the satellite. We were lucky because one was fying over us just then: she saw the signal, but she had thought she was going to see the satellite itself.
I’m still in contact with NASA even now, for a project we developed with Professor Carlo Buongiorno. And I give talks to schools about space programmes - there’s a lot of interest in space, and I try to encourage them.”
A Scout rocket during the Wet Dress Rehearsal on the San Marco platformphoto by Franco Quintilli.
Franco Quintilli installing the data reception antenna for San Marco 2Nairobi 1967.
COSMO-SkyMed, the legacy of an enabling technology for a world-leading programme
by Giovanni Rum
Sixteen years have passed since June 2007, when the frst of the COSMO-SkyMed satellites was launched, and there are now six in orbit, all fully operational.
With that frst launch, Italy made a bid to take a position of leadership, in Europe and worldwide, in the use of radar technology for Earth observation.
What is the story behind this achievement? By the late 1970s European radar imaging technologies were already well established and, from the second half of the 1980s, found application in European programmes and in the national programmes of Germany and Italy, leading to a series of missions launched between 1991 and 2002, including ERS 1, ERS 2 and ENVISAT by ESA, and three missions, 2 Shuttle Radar Laboratory (SLR), and the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRT) resulting from collaborations between NASA, ASI and DLR, with the joint Italian/German development of X-band SAR.
These missions, of a predominantly scientifc character, demonstrated the efectiveness of SAR technology in a range of applications, initiated programmes for its application and consolidated the leadership of German and Italian companies, with German industry taking a slight lead since they were responsible for the SAR instrument system itself.
As for Italy, ASI received funding for SAR 2000 technology development during the late 1990s, with a view
to bridging the gap with German industry and increasing the operational fexibility of the instrument, as well as developing a national operating system, with a focus on the creation of a complete SAR instrument and the development of key technologies related to active element phased array antennas, as well as digital signal generation. Among other things, these developments enabled electronic orientation of the antenna in azimuth and elevation, and the option of implementing a variety of SAR imaging modes, including Stripmap, Spotlight and ScanSAR, all with diferent geometric resolutions and areas of observation.
1999-2000 was the turning point: the national and international framework for development was consolidated by the ASI-Defence agreements for the co-fnancing of technological projects, and the development and operation of a dual-use constellation of satellites: this was the start of the COSMO-SkyMed programme. Conditions were also ripe for an Italy-France agreement on the joint use, for dual purposes, of the French SPOT 5, Helios 2 and Pleiades systems and the Italian COSMO-SkyMed system. With the SIASGE agreement between ASI and the Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), Italian industry was able to develop know-how in L-band SAR, and Italian users gained access to the resulting data.
Synthetic Aperture Radar - SAR
The spatial resolution of radar data depends on the ratio of sensor wavelength to antenna length, i.e. for a given wavelength, the longer the antenna, the higher the resolution. For a C-band sensor (around the 5 cm wavelength), if one wants to achieve a resolution of 10 m, a 4250 m antenna would be required, which is obviously not feasible in orbit. This limitation is resolved by the Synthetic Aperture concept which exploits the orbital movement of the satellite to simulate a long antenna by combining multiple acquisitions of the target with a shorter antenna.
The secondgeneration COSMO-SkyMed SAR antenna.
OHB ITALIA CONTRIBUTES TO THE IRIDE SATELLITE CONSTELLATION TO PROTECT THE EARTH
by Editorial Staf
IRIDE is a unique, innovative and all-Italian constellation designed to observe from space what is happening on our Planet. Its data will be made available and permanently stored in a state-of-the-art archiving infrastructure.
IRIDE is one of the most important European space programmes for Earth observation in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and is a key component of the European Next Generation EU programme for the development of space in supporting the ecological and digital transition. Considered a 'constellation of constellations', IRIDE is an end-to-end system consisting of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (Upstream Segment), an operational infrastructure on the ground (Downstream Segment) delivering services for the public sector (Service Segment). The system includes all components to provide geospatial data at national and European level, targeting both public administration and private customers.
The IRIDE constellation is currently under development (it will be completed by 2026) and will be composed of a series of diferent technologies and sensing
instruments that will combine SAR (synthetic aperture radar) sensors, hyperspectral sensors, and optical payloads with resolutions of two or three metres (in some cases even less than one metre), all on board satellites of diferent types and sizes, exclusively made-in-Italy.
The three main targets of the IRIDE program are in short: high resolution, more frequent images and better responsiveness both in the ability to observe a phenomenon of interest and to quickly relay that information to institutional and commercial end-users. At OHB Italia, activities for the development of the frst batch of 12 satellites, named "Eaglet II", began in December last year; the industrial consortium led by
IRIDE work in progress at the CR of OHB Italia
OHB Italia also includes Telespazio, Optec and Aresys as main partners. The development of the Flight Operation System (FOS), used to manage the satellites during the calibration, acceptance and later operational life phases, is also underway. Eaglet II is designed to fy in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at a nominal altitude of around 500 Km.
The satellites primary mission is to acquire RGB images using an electro-optical payload designed by OHB Italia, with the data being downloaded with low latency to ground stations in X-Band. The secondary mission is to acquire and retransmit to ground AIS (Automatic Identifcation System) messages to track maritime vessels.
The IRIDE constellation is now in development phase and it will be completed by 2026.
“IRIDE represents the key know-how development essential to meet increasingly difcult challenges in the global space system.” – declared Roberto Aceti, Managing Director of OHB Italia. “OHB Italia is very proud to ofer its more than forty years Space-heritage to take part to this ambitious and all-Italian project. It will help the Civil Protection Department and other administrations to manage hydrogeological instability and fres, to protect coastlines and to monitor critical infrastructure, air quality and weather conditions. Moreover, it will provide analytical data for the development of commercial applications, all fundamental activities for a modern space-faring nation.”
SPACE MADE IN ITALY
From logistics modules for the ISS to the Artemis Moon programme
by Salvatore Pignataro
Italy’s collaboration with NASA has given it priority access to the International Space Station since the very beginning of the programme. By April 2001, when the ISS had only been occupied for a few months, the frst Italian astronaut, Umberto Guidoni, came on board, and the frst Italian scientifc instrument, HPA, arrived in 2003 together with a handful of American instruments, thus initiating the dawn of the station as a research laboratory. Since then, Italian astronauts have been to the ISS on a regular basis, and the Italian scientifc and technological community has run hundreds of experiments, while much of the habitable volume of the Station has been built by Italian industry, and the Italian Space Agency has been the only national agency in Europe to have a seat on the ISS steering committees.
This extraordinary collaboration is founded in the agreement between Italy and the United States to cooperate on the ISS’s Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules (MPLM), which tasked Italy with the construction of three pressurised modules for NASA, with the function of transporting equipment - essential to the operation of the ISS and its on-board living conditions - on the Space Shuttle, as well as research instrumentation. The fnal version of the Memorandum of Understanding between ASI and NASA on MPLMs was stipulated in 1997. Three years later, Italy delivered the three modules, named Leonardo, Rafaello and Donatello, to the USA. The MPLMs successfully completed
The three MPLM logistics modules were frst assembled at the NASA facilities at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, in 2004.
Credits: NASA
twelve missions between 2001 and 2011, the year of the Shuttle's retirement, and Leonardo was made into a permanent module of the ISS in 2021.
In return, NASA granted Italy a share in the use of the space station's resources for scientifc and technological research, along with launch slots for Italian astronauts. The Memorandum of Understanding was also a springboard for Italian industry, which launched an ambitious project for the construction of the ISS, culminating in the Italian construction of the station’s Node 2 and 3 habitable modules, which also provide life support to the Station, and the Cupola, the astronauts' window with a view of Earth and the Universe.
The 1997 Protocol was not just an agreement, but the frst chapter of a remarkable success story. Italy's journey with the ISS marked a crucial milestone and paved the way for a new adventure: NASA's new Artemis Programme. Italy, thanks to its successful participation in the ISS programme, has earned a priority position in the new race to the Moon.
With Artemis, Italy, which is responsible for developing a number of the programme's infrastructure projects, faces new scientifc and technological challenges, and will be able to consolidate its leading role in space exploration and inspire future generations.
A trAdItIon oF ProPulSIon, froM GAETANo CroCCo To VEGA
by Rocco Carmine Pellegrini
Over the years, Italy has carved out a leading role in Europe and worldwide in the feld of space propulsion, in which it has a long history of achievement. The international community frst recognised Italian astronautics with the work of Gaetano Crocco, a pioneer of rocket propulsion who was among the frst to propose a parallel-stage rocket as well as studying the gravitational slingshot, later widely used by interplanetary exploration missions. His son Luigi Crocco was one of the world's foremost students of rocket propulsion, and worked with NASA on the F-1 thruster of the Saturn V rocket that took man to the moon.
In the post-war years, engineer Luigi Broglio and physicist Edoardo Amaldi played central roles in initiating and promoting Italian space projects, and we are also indebted to them for the creation of a strong network of national and international political and scientifc relations. The experience gained at the end of the 1960s in designing and launching rockets from the Salto di Quirra base proved to be instrumental in shaping the San Marco project, which made Italy the third country in the world to launch a satellite into space. The San Marco Programme included a series of suborbital launches of rocket probes from NASA’s Wallops Island base, the launch of a prototype San
Marco satellite from the same base on the US Scout rocket, and fnally the launch of scientifc research satellite from Italy’s equatorial base in Malindi, again using a Scout launch vehicle.
All this has enabled Italy to grow its outstanding know-how in solid fuel propulsion, resulting in its role in the European Ariane launch vehicle programmes developed by ESA, as part of which it supplied the solid fuel boosters for the Ariane 3, Ariane 4 and Ariane 5 vehicles manufactured by AVIO (formerly BPD). The next step was the transition from the role of supplier to that of systems engineer for the entire VEGA launch vehicle. The initial concept was presented in 1988 as a successor to the Scout launch vehicle. The concept involved using solid fuel in a carbon fbre casing, which was lighter and stronger than previous metal casings. The fnal VEGA project started in 1998 following approval by ESA and with the support of ASI, which set up the ELV company together with AVIO to development the rocket, and contributed around 65% of its funding. After lengthy a development process, VEGA had its frst successful launch in February 2012.
Even before the VEGA launch, however, ASI had already begun to invest in developing Italian liquid propulsion solutions, with a focus on methane-oxygen propulsion because of the unarguable advantages of this combination of propellants. 2007 saw the launch of the Lyra Programme, with the aim of further developing VEGA by equipping it with an upper stage housing a 10-ton thrust LO2-LCH4 engine. Thanks to a collaboration between Russian company KBKhA and AVIO, the programme successfully completed the MIRA engine test campaign in 2014, thus setting the foundation for ESA’s approval of the VEGA-E Programme, which will replace VEGA's third and fourth stages by an upper stage equipped with the M10 methane engine, currently under development, which successfully completed the DM1 and DM2 test campaigns in 2022 and 2023 at the SPTF facility built by AVIO in Sardinia.
VEGA's frst launch from Kourou, 13 February 2012. Credits: ESA
The VEgA family of launch vehicles.
The legacy of Cassini
by Enrico Flamini
Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 15 October 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has been central to Solar System exploration for more than 30 years: from its initial conception until the grand fnale of its long life. It has left us an enormous amount of high quality scientifc data and amazing images of the Saturn and its moons, frst among them Titan. The mission was also a testing ground for new technologies and procedures, later developed and adopted by many other missions. Cassini-Huygens also played an important role in enabling a new generation of scientists and engineers to increase their knowledge and skills, expanding the experience of a generation trained on earlier missions like Voyager. The international nature of the mission is another standout feature of this adventure, led by a partnership between three space agencies: frst and foremost NASA, with its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, followed by ESA for the Huygens probe itself, and ASI. This cooperative environment enabled both ASI and ESA to adapt to the environment of deep space planetary exploration missions, and also involved scientists from 15 other nations, albeit in less central roles. This cooperative efort, headed up by the Project Science Group, lasted until the end of the mission and its grand fnale in 2017, when the probe plunged into Saturn's atmosphere.
Thanks to the excellent relations between the United States and Italy, including their highly successful collaboration in the 1960s on the San Marco project, followed in the early 1990s by the launches of IRIS-LA-
A rendering of the Cassini mission’s grand fnale as the probe plunges into Saturn's atmosphere.
Credits: NASA/ JPL/Caltech
GEOS2, TSS 1 and 1-R, NASA and ASI drew up a Memorandum of Understanding in 1991 to partner in the construction of the Cassini Radar, the Radioscience experiment, the construction of the visible light channel of the VIMS imaging spectrometer, and Italy’s design and construction of one of the most critical elements of the entire mission: the HGA (high-gain antenna).
Cassini's high- and low-gain antenna still represents the state-of-the-art in terms of its design and the technology used to handle the mission's many radio frequencies (S, X, Ku and Ka), for both experiments and telecommunications. The large white dish is also the satellite's most visible and distinctive element.
Of the twelve scientifc instruments carried by Cassini and the six on board Huygens, fve were headed up by Italy or developed by Italy on equal terms with JPL. Those instruments, designed and built in the early 1990s, were ambitious technological milestones, the efects of which can be felt even today. The COSMO-SkyMed radar and the Prisma’s hyperspectral instrument are further developments of earlier versions carried by Cassini, as is the Ka-band, frst used in an operational mission back then.
Credits: NASA/ JPL/Caltech/ Space Science Institute
An image of Saturn captured by the Cassini probe.
The 'ingredients' of probes, shuttles and the rest
The materials set containers - PECs (Passive
for
by Valeria Guarnieri
Materials are key to the success of space missions
What does it take to make the cladding of a shuttle carrying astronauts to the space station? What materials are used to build a rover that can last for years on Mars? How will human settlements be built on the Moon and the Red Planet? These are some of the questions whose answers are provided by materials science, the discipline that studies the properties and production of new materials. This area of research - which has become of fundamental importance for so many felds, not only space - has grown enormously from the second half of the 20th century to the present day, and encompasses a number of scientifc felds, including physics, chemistry, engineering and biology. It is constantly evolving, committed to developing innovative solutions for current and future technological challenges.
Extreme temperatures, solar radiation, stray debris, stresses incurred at launch, dust storms on Mars and the friction of atmospheric re-entry: these are the main criticalities experienced by manmade artefacts in space or on other planets.
Experiment Containers) -
the MISSE-6A and MISSE-6B experiments. These samples were exposed to the environment of space from 22 March 2008 to 1 September 2009. Credits: NASA
The MISSE-8 experiment, which was placed on the ORMatE-III exposure platform on the exterior of ELC-2 during a spacewalk as part of the STS-135 mission. The samples were exposed to the environment of space from 20 May 2011 to 9 July 2013. Credits: NASA
Since space missions involve substantial investments - years of research and design, as well as fundingit is crucial that they have successful outcomes and comply with their planned operational life cycle. In some cases, the choice of materials has proved particularly successful, allowing the missions to be extended well beyond their initial duration: just think of NASA's two Voyager probes, still active since their 1977 launch, despite inevitable signs of wear and tear, or the NASA-ESA Hubble telescope, which continues to give us splendid images of the cosmos after more than 33 years in space.
The materials also change in relation to the type of stress the system will face, and what it is designed to do. Ceramics, metal alloys and multi-component materials are key areas of research and application.
Ceramics are used for the thermal insulation of spacecraft; one well-known example is the special ceramic tiles, made primarily of a silicon compound, used to protect the Space Shuttle against the enormous heat of atmospheric re-entry.
These are complex, hostile environments with completely diferent conditions from those familiar to us on Earth.
Consequently, the ‘ingredients' of which satellites, probes, shuttles, rovers and so on are made are crucial to mission success, and must be chosen with particular care: their behaviour in extreme conditions may be very diferent from how they behave under the conditions on our planet, despite lengthy study and testing prior to launch. Such tests, however realistically they simulate space scenarios, are nevertheless conducted on Earth. It is not always possible to prevent mishaps, because it is only when these products of human ingenuity are on their way into space that we can really see how their materials behave.
right:
just before its recovery during the STS-118 mission. The samples were exposed to the environment of space from 3 August 2006 to 18 August 2007.
Credits: NASA
Other materials of primary importance are metal alloys, such as the aluminium alloys used for astronauts’ living modules. Moreover, alloys are the focus of cutting edge studies of innovative materials, including High Entropy Alloys (Hea): these are multi-component composites that owe their name to their high entropy, due to their random combination of elements. These combinations are capable of combining low density, ductility, and resistance to oxidation, fatigue and deformation.
Precisely this type of alloy may well be used in the propulsion systems being considered by a European-funded project involving Italy: the Atlas project (Advanced Design of High Entropy Alloy Based Materials for Space Propulsion), a project coordinated by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic University of Milan and fnanced as part of the Horizon 2020-Space programme.
The scientifc community is continuously attempting to improve the performance, stability and long-term reliability of materials used in space.
Top
MISSE-3
An ItAlIAn voIce from outer space
by Marco Di Clemente and Lorenzo Simone
boration with Italian universities and research centres, and funding the research and development that has introduced new radio communications functions to satisfy a variety of ambitious mission objectives.
As well as acting as dedicated units for two-way communications with Earth, the transponders also provide information about the orbits of their probes to enable navigation and run important radio-science experiments, thus enabling us to obtain information about the gravitational felds of the planets around which the various probes are orbiting. Thanks to their unique characteristics and on-going development, all major European exploration missions (Rosetta, Gaia, Bepi Colombo, Solar Orbiter, Venus Express, ExoMars, EUCLID and JUICE) are using one version or another of DST. Venus, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, the Moon, Jupiter, asteroids, the comets... The deep space transponder is an essential component for deep space exploration, taking Italian technology and excellence across the Solar System.
Almost every day we are able to admire the extraordinary beauty of new images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, while scientists analyse data from the Bepi Colombo probe travelling towards Mercury, or from the recently launched Juice probe on its way to Jupiter. All these missions, and many others, have one thing in common: they are all operating in so-called deep space, millions of kilometres from our planet, and all are able to communicate with Earth thanks to an Italy technology, the Deep Space Transponder, designed by Thales Alenia Space in Rome and built in the clean rooms of its L'Aquila factory. This radio communications equipment, which combines state-of-the-art radio-frequency and digital technologies, makes it possible to control all in-fight operations from remote control and telemetry stations located on Earth, while also controlling the scientifc experiments during the missions.
Deep Space Transponders are one of the outstanding achievements of the Italian space industry, frst developed in the 1990s and refned since then with the support of the Italian Space Agency, which has supported their use in the most important exploration missions, guaranteeing their continued development in colla-
The Deep Space Transponder.
electrIc propulsIon: HT-100 an emblem of ItalIan excellence
by Vincenzo Pulcino
The era of space exploration has embarked on a new path: the use of electric propulsion on the large scale. This cutting-edge technology, which uses electricity to energise and expel gas, thus accelerating the vehicle through space, will soon be a concrete reality, and promises to change the face of space missions.
One of its key advantages is efciency. Conventional chemical thrusters require large amounts of fuel to generate thrust, thus limiting the duration of missions. Electric propulsion, on the other hand, can operate for longer periods, using signifcantly less propellant while generating higher speeds and reducing travel time over the long term. This will enable us to explore more remote regions of the Solar System without the need for massive loads of fuel, a crucial consideration for human exploration missions; furthermore, the versatility of such engines makes it possible to change orbit more often, enabling the interplanetary and in-orbit servicing missions Italy is investing in, funded by the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).
Notable successes include NASA's Dawn
Credits: ASI/ SITAEL
Credits: ASI/ SITAEL
mission, which used an ion drive engine to explore the Vesta and Ceres asteroids, and ESA's SMART mission, which explored the Moon using an electric motor that transitioned from Earth orbit to lunar orbit with only 82 kg of propellant.
In Italy, the main example of electric propulsion (EP) is the ASI PLATiNO programme: a collaboration between SITAEL, TAS-I, Leonardo and Airbus Italia to develop a versatile, high-performance mini-platform driven by the HT-100 low-power Hall-efect propeller (rated less than 200W), developed entirely in Italy by SITAEL itself; the system will complete qualifcation by early 2024. Thanks to its versatility, partly attributable to its EP system, the PLATiNO platform will lead to the deployment of SAR, optical and telecommunications missions: a PLT-1 SAR mission, PLT-2 MAIA in collaboration with NASA/JPL for the analysis of atmospheric pollution, a constellation of very high-resolution PLT-3 Earth observation satellites, a PLT-4 hyperspectral constellation (under the aegis of the PNRR), and the EAGLE-1 telecommunications mission with its SES client.
However, making electric propulsion a reality is not without its challenges. The need to supply the motors with large amounts of electrical power demands robust and lightweight power supply systems. The use of advanced solar panels and high-performance batteries is increasingly critical to the success of these missions.
In conclusion, electric space propulsion will revolutionise how we explore the cosmos. With its high energy efciency and ability to accelerate humanity to new horizons, it promises to become the heart of future space missions, opening the door to a new era of exploration.
The PLATiNO HT-100 Hall effect motor, assembled for qualifcation.
The PLATiNO HT-100 Hall effect motor undergoing qualifcation.
a showcase for italian small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups with the aim of highlighting their unique paths to growth, evolving business models and strategies for adapting and anticipating the most recent trends in New Space - an inspiration for the entire industry.
A CLOSE LOOK AT SMES
ASI And the ItAlIAn InduStrIAl Supply chAIn: the important role of associations
by Silvia Ciccarelli
Promoting industrial competitiveness is one of ASI’s institutional objectives. Italian industry plays a crucial role in our successes in space: without it, the frst pillar of the New Space drive would fail, and there would be no commercial return on institutional investments. The Agency, however autonomous its decision making, must consult and engage with industry on relevant industrial policy issues.
There are more than 250 Italian space companies, active with a variety of roles in every domain, from large integrators to small suppliers. 80% of them are SMEs, including the fast growing start-up community. ASI works with individual industrial players on a variety of specifc issues, including meetings on technology and projects run with ESA and third countries, but, as a matter of mere practicality, it can’t consult with everyone on a regular basis. How then can it interface efectively with such a varied reality?
For several years now, ASI has adopted a policy of regular consultation with the 3 Italian industrial associations: AIAD, AIPAS and ASAS. This relationship was consolidated by the Permanent Industry Round Table, which deals with topics of major interest. The Round
Table also established a working group to defne a shared agenda for international initiatives. Associations play a key role in the democratisation of space, since they promote widespread dissemination of information, counteract information asymmetries and act as ambassadors for the views of large groups of companies by summarising their positions. They connect and balance interests of fundamental importance for the Agency, which is mandated with supporting the competitiveness of the entire Italian supply chain.
As a testament to the heterogeneity of Italian industry, three Associations have sprung up over time, each with its own specifc mandate, which, taken together, represent the sector across a broad front. AIAD, which was established after the Second World War, is recognised by Confndustria as the primary Federation for the sector. AIAD is also a member of the European ASD, in which Eurospace represents the space sector.
AIPAS was established in 1998 to represent the interests of Italian SMEs, and its mandate has been expanded since 2006 to foster cooperation between SMEs and large companies. In 2006, it participated in the foundation of a similar Europe-wide association, SME4SPACE.
ASAS was established in 2004, with a mandate to enhance applications and services employing space technologies, so as to leverage their potential for terrestrial applications. ASAS, a member of Confndustria Servizi Innovativi e Tecnologici (Innovative and Technological Services), is itself a member of AIAD.
The potentialities ofered by ASI are of course always available to the entire industrial community, regardless of membership, via the various public channels through which the Agency communicates externally, including its website and Industrial Catalogue. ASI also interfaces with other associations, such as incubators and Technology Hubs.
Over the years, the Agency has been a partner in numerous collaborations with these bodies, often involving other players, including ICE Agency, working systematically to beneft the entire supply chain and contribute concretely to Italy's success in space.
thales alenia space: we will build the Second Generation Galileo SatelliteS
In Thales Alenia Space clean rooms, construction is underway of the Galileo Second Generation satellites, the fexible European system that can adapt to users' needs
by Editorial Staf
Galileo is Europe's Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). The initial Galileo services have been operational since 15th December 2016 and are fully interoperable with GPS, providing users with an extended range in terms of performance and service, as well as more accurate positioning. To date, Galileo has been programmed for a constellation of up to 38 frst-generation satellites, transmission stations for satellite control and telemetry, mission data transmission stations, two security management centres (SaintGermain-en-Laye and Madrid) two system control centres (Oberpfafenhofen and Fucino) as well as 16 stations for orbit control and clock synchronisation. Thales Alenia Space, together with Telespazio and Leonardo, has been a key partner in Galileo since the project began in 1999 and also plays a major role in the Galileo Second Generation constellation. In the clean
rooms at Thales Alenia Space in Italy, more specifcally at the Satellite Integration Centre based in Rome, work began on one of the frst of 6 satellites under the contract signed with the European Space Agency (ESA), on behalf of the European Union. For the frst time, Thales Alenia Space's ground-breaking fully digital and reconfgurable navigation payload transmitted Galileo signals in line with the demanding requirements of the Second Generation Space Signal Interface Control Document (SIS-ICD). This demon-
The constellation of Galileo satellites. Credits: Thales Alenia Space
strated backward compatibility with the signals of the frst-generation Galileo system, as well as compliance with newly defned signals. The EM payload was developed and built remarkably quickly, especially considering the advanced features and performance required along with the stringent design requirements for the production of second-generation NSGUs and NAVANT units. The test campaign included actual signal transmission through the navigation antenna (radiated transmission) in the anechoic chamber at the
Hertz facility. This chamber is specifcally designed to operate in the frequency bands used by Galileo signals. This achievement further demonstrates Thales Alenia Space's expertise in space navigation and proven ability to develop high-performance satellite navigation systems. The Engineering Model (EM) of the Galileo Second Generation navigation payload recently completed its radiated test campaign at the European Space Agency's ESTEC centre based in the Netherlands. Thales Alenia Space is able to meet the objectives of this challenging programme thanks to its capabilities in terms of design, use of digital technologies and cutting-edge upstream technologies from our competence centres based in Italy, France, Spain, and Belgium, as well as its many years of experience and assets in the assembly, integration, and testing of satellite constellations at the facilities in Rome. The frst second-generation satellites will be launched into orbit by the end of 2026. With their new capabilities based on highly innovative technologies (digitally confgurable antennas, inter-satellite links and use of entirely electric propulsion systems), these satellites will improve the accuracy of the Galileo system, as well as the robustness and resilience of its signal, which will be paramount for the next digital decade, as well as for security and defence uses. Among other objectives, the Galileo Second Generation satellites will also increase the competitiveness of European industry in the highly strategic technology sector for EU sovereignty. The Galileo Second Generation will beneft not only from the company's outstanding heritage in constellations but also from its long-standing, extensive know-how in navigation solutions, most notably with Galileo and EGNOS. The Second-Generation satellites will be more robust and reliable, protected against cyber-attacks, with higher service availability and a 15-year lifespan. In Italy, Thales Alenia Space is the prime contractor for satellite construction and space-related activities that will lead an international team of European industries comprising the various entities of Thales Alenia Space, Thales, Spaceopal, Leonardo together with other experienced partners from 14 European countries: Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Czech Republic, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania, Poland, and Greece. Thales Alenia Space confrms its key role in the Galileo Second Generation programme (G2G) also thanks to recent contracts signed with the European Space Agency (ESA), on behalf of the European Union Space Programme Agency (EUSPA) and with the European Union represented by the European Commission, with regard to the ground mission segment and system activities. These two contracts, also involving Leonardo and Telespazio, will provide ESA with the ground infrastructure for the Galileo Second Generation satellite constellation as well as System-level Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) activities.
Behind the scenes of the new race to the Moon
The first mission to put Man back on the Moon since Apollo will be launched in 2025 or 2026. But this time we’re going to stay. The architecture of NASA's Artemis includes an orbiting station, a descent system, surface modules, rovers, communications systems and whatever else will be needed to establish a permanent human outpost on the Moon. This time, when astronauts arrive at their destination, they will find infrastructure and services waiting for them. These are currently being worked on behind the scenes, including with parallel development programmes. And Italy is at the forefront of this effort.
An Italian habitat on the Moon
by Simone Illiano
Italy, with the Italian Space Agency, was among the very frst to partner with NASA in the Artemis programme, having signed the Artemis Accords on 13 October 2020. The main objective of the programme is to return people to the Moon for long stays, for reconnaissance, research, experiments and logistical operations involving both humans and robotic systems. Compared to the era of lunar exploration spearheaded
by the Apollo astronauts, the central challenge of the Artemis programme is that of deploying operational surface infrastructure on the Moon for many years, to host multiple astronaut missions over the entire operational life of these complex systems. This is key to establishing a fully sustainable human presence on the Moon. Italian excellence in the feld of human space exploration is testifed to by the many Italian technologies
used in ESA and NASA robotic space exploration missions and by the long Italian history of designing, developing and building pressurised orbital modules for manned missions, which has expanded over the years from terrestrial orbital infrastructure (modules for ISS, Cygnus, AXIOM) to on-going lunar orbit projects (the Lunar Gateway: HALO, I-HAB, ESPRIT). To exploit and further enhance these capabilities, the Italian Space Agency
The lunar South Pole, with potential sites for Artemis missions.
ment in the Artemis programme, since in addition to its ability to guarantee a safe and comfortable habitat for missions to the lunar South Pole, MPH will also provide many useful functions at the lunar base camp, interoperate with other external assets (landers, rovers, etc.) while also being managed autonomously from Earth. NASA's long-term vision includes the goal of establishing a base camp (Artemis Base Camp - ABC) in the Moon's South Pole region, consisting of integrated, pressurised surface modules capable of operating together.
There are many technical challenges, mainly due to the nature of the lunar environment and the requirement that the module be able to survive and operate for ten years under conditions including extreme temperatures, cosmic radiation and solar storms, the risk of micro-meteorite impacts, contaminating lunar dust (regolith) and operation in vacuum, among others; but the benefts of building and using a lunar surface habitat module promise to have numerous technological and scientifc knock-on efects, as well as ofering commercial opportunities.
Space Wears Prada
The suits of future astronauts returning to the Moon will be designed by Prada. Texan company Axiom Space has chosen the well-known luxury brand from Milan to design the new generation of AxEMUs, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Units, the development of which was awarded by NASA as part of a contract worth $228.5 million.
aims to grow its assets by developing, designing and building the frst Italian pressurised habitat module, which will be emplaced at the South Pole of the Moon: the Multi-Purpose Habitat (MPH), the result of ASI’s co-engineering work with NASA over the last year and more.
As a result of these studies, NASA has recognised the Italian habitat module as a high added-value ele-
The logic with which the MPH module is being developed perfectly fts the long-term Moon to Mars (M2M) strategy, which will establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon with the aim of enabling the future exploration of Mars and confrming Italy’s position as one of the world leaders in space. On 13 November 2023, ASI celebrated the programme’s kick-of with Thales Alenia Space Italia (TAS-I), which has been contracted to build the MPH.
The module successfully passed Element Initiation screening, which is the formal milestone with which NASA authorises the continuation of Artemis projects, and thus transitioned to the Mission phase.
"Decades of experimentation, cutting-edge technology and design know-how established since the 1990s, when Luna Rossa competed in the America's Cup, are all combined in the Artemis mission spacesuit. This celebrates the creativity and innovation innate in the progress of civilisation,” says Prada Marketing Director Lorenzo Bertelli. For Axiom, Prada's expertise in composite materials will enable them to apply advanced technologies to ensure the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, while also taking into account human factors - as necessary now as they are lacking in traditional space suits. The number one objective is comfort. And this is a big change of pace from the past. But in reality, it is a wellestablished approach: future plans for the colonisation of the Moon and especially Mars, which will see astronauts staying away from Earth for long periods, consider the psycho-physical well-being of astronauts as key to the success of a mission.
Artemis III may be postponed until 2026, but one thing is certain: the frst woman and the next man to walk on the Moon will not only be at the cutting edge of technology, but also stylish... thanks to Italian design. by
Manuela Proietti
The MPH (MultiPurpose Habitat) lunar habitat module. Credits: NASA
Italy on the Moon: the luGRe ReceIveR
by Claudia Facchinetti
The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) is a bilateral collaboration between ASI and NASA, under the aegis of the ARTEMIS project to take Man back to the Moon. The LuGRE mission will test the use of satellite radio navigation signals outside the terrestrial environment. Designed to acquire weak signals from GPS/Galileo satellites, LuGRE will provide accurate Position, Navigation and Time (PNT) data to future assets on the Moon and in the cislunar environment.
Project NEIL (Navigation Earliest Investigation on Lunar Surface - named after Neil Armstrong, the frst man on the Moon), fnanced by ASI, has developed a GNSS Receiving System capable of withstanding the harsh conditions of space and the lunar environment, consisting of a dual-frequency (L1/E1/L5/E5a) and multi-constellation (GPS/GALILEO) receiver, signal reception chain (antenna, flters, cables) and ground unit for managing the on-board payload (p/l LuGRE). The latter will be integrated into the Blue Ghost M1 lunar lander (Fig. 1) built by Firefy Aerospace (FF) for NASA's CLPS 19D mission to the Moon’s Mare Crisium basin, in 2024 (Fig.2).
The CLPS 19D mission is intended to expand our knowledge of the Moon and enable a sustainable presence on the Moon; it will last 55 Earth days, of which at least 12 will be on the lunar surface, until the freezing night when operational power will be lost.
The LuGRE P/L weighs under 5kg and draws just 14W of power; the receiver is optimised for high-sensitivity acquisition, and integrates innovative solutions
employing specifc satellite signal processing algorithms; the high-gain antenna can point at Earth with a precision of 1 degree and intercept the weak signals of orbital satellites.
The Payload Operation Centre at NASA, which houses the LuGRE p/l command, control and monitoring tool and the science tool for mission data analysis and acquisition reporting, will be assisted by the Remote Troubleshooting Centre in resolving malfunctions and the Remote Science Processing Centre to extend its scientifc capacity.
The LuGRE p/l, after an intensive test and qualifcation campaign to verify its reliability and functionality, will be integrated into the Lander in December and follow the validation campaign with the mission’s 9 other p/ls.
LuGRE will produce information critical to the use of GNSS in the early stages of lunar colonisation and ensure a robust, secure and accurate positioning services for future satellites in lunar orbit. The conquest of the Moon is a rigorous test of the technological and adaptive capacities of humankind, which has always explored new worlds ('Ye were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge’, as Dante wrote) and now aims to make a home on the Moon prior to moving on to the Red Planet itself.
Fig. 1. The LuGRE lander. Credits: ASI and NASA
Fig.2. The LuGRE mission.
Exploring the hidden face of the Moon
by Silvia Natalucci and Marco Di Clemente
The last time humans set foot on the Moon was December 1972, with Apollo 17. We have never returned since, but in recent years interest in the human exploration of our moon has been rekindled, so much so that there is talk of a 'new race to the Moon'. What is the reason for this renewed interest?
The main reason is certainly to acquire the know-how necessary to tackle perhaps the most ambitious challenge in history: the construction of human bases on other worlds, using the Moon as an outpost to reach more distant celestial bodies and to practise the skills required to colonise them: extracting water, oxygen, energy and raw materials for both scientifc and economic purposes. Mining celestial bodies, should it become economically viable, could revolutionise the global economy, with far-reaching impacts on the energy and raw materials industries. However, establishing long term habitation on the Moon is no walk in the park, due to a multitude of factors that make the lunar envi-
Overview of the phases of the LUMIO mission
Credit: Polytechnic University of Milan
ronment particularly hostile, such as strong exposure to radiation and the countless meteorites that, in the absence of an atmosphere, violently impact the lunar surface. This is evidenced by the large number of craters on the Moon, of which there are 300,000 with a diameter of 1 km or more. But how many meteorites do actually hit the Moon? How often? And what risk do they pose to astronauts and lunar facilities?
These questions may well be answered by the Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) Mission, which will observe, quantify and characterise the impacts of meteoroids, small rocks that cannot be observed from Earth, on the far side of the Moon, by remote sensing the fashes of light generated by the impacts. This would complement terrestrial observations and lead to the frst complete and accurate model of the meteoroid fow in the lunar environment, thus providing important information about the most suitable sites for a human outpost - i.e. ones with a relatively low risk of impact.
The mission uses a CubeSat 12U measuring 30x20x20 cm and weighing about 25 kg, employing highly advanced miniaturised technologies such as micro-propulsion, miniaturised X-band transponder, solar panel control system, autonomous optical navigation, on-board image processing and a miniaturised camera payload. The latter, called LUMIO-Cam, is capable of detecting fashes of light in the visible and near-infrared spectrum. The LUMIO-Cam's processor autonomously scans the images to detect bright fashes so that only data of scientifc value is transmitted to Earth. The mission uses an unusual halo orbit around the L2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point, from which the far side of the Moon, not visible from Earth, is permanently in view.
The LUMIO project was a winner of the Lunar CubeSats for Exploration (LUCE) competition laun-
ched by ESA in 2017, and is part of ESA’s General Support Technology Programme (GSTP), supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA). In October, the preliminary design phase was successfully completed and the mission is ready to enter the detailed design and subsequent construction phase, with launch expected between late 2026 and early 2027, presumably as secondary cargo on of one of the many missions to the Moon to launch in the near future.
Preliminary mission design was done by a European consortium consisting of Polytechnic University of Milan, Argotec, Leonardo, IMT, Nautilus and S&T Norway. Polytechnic University of Milan, in addition to being principal investigator, is the leader of the consortium, and as such is responsible for mission analysis, the satellite guidance, navigation and control system, the autonomous navigation experiment, scientifc data processing and project management.
Argotec is designing and developing the CubeSat platform, while Leonardo is building the LUMIO-Cam. IMT is heading up the development of the X-band transponder and the solar panel rotation mechanism, while Nautilus is designing the ground segment and will be responsible for fight control. Finally, Norway's S&T has been contracted to build the on-board processor that will process the LUMIO-Cam data in real time. A large community of scientists, coordinated by ASI, is preparing to process the data collected during the mission.
Once in orbit, the LUMIO mission, together with other projects supported by the Italian Space Agency under the aegis of the ALCOR programme, will help consolidate our country's leadership in the feld of system and mission design for interplanetary CubeSats that began with the Licia Cube and Argomoon missions.
3D Printing
The rapid growth of the space economy and the new challenges faced by the sector in recent years have driven research and the adoption of new technologies and production methods. Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, has been identifed as a key enabling technology for all major domains of space technology. This is an industrial process which manufactures objects from 3D computer models by adding one layer on top of another, as opposed to traditional subtractive manufacturing methods, which start with a block of material from which chips are mechanically removed.
Recent studies predict that the 3D printing market for the space sector will exceed USD 5.5 billion by 2027. 3D printing is mainly used to make small runs of one-off parts, but it is also being used to develop components for satellite mega-constellations.
Interest in 3D printing has shifted from rapid prototyping applications to the manufacture of functional parts, and from tertiary and secondary structures to primary and critical components for space missions, and has even been used in actual launches in some cases. It is critical that Europe maintain its position at the forefront of space hardware technology, and ASI and ESA are working to improve our understanding of materials and process technologies, focusing on the alignment between actual hardware and its 3D computer models (digital twin).
by Tanya Scalia and Marco pizzarelli
A concept for a 3D printed moon base. Credits: ESA/Foster + Partners
MOONLIGHT the lunar navigation system of the future
by Giancarlo Natale Varacalli
The exploration of the Moon is emerging as a global strategic priority, with governmental, scientifc and even commercial ambitions on the part of many nations. Globally, hundreds of missions to the Moon are now planned for the next 10 years.
The vast majority of these will need telecommunications and navigation services and, in the absence of dedicated infrastructure, will have to resort to ad-hoc solutions which will negatively impact their efciency and cost. In this context, all the world's major space agencies have more or less concrete plans to build telecommunications and navigation infrastructure in lunar orbit with the capacity and reliability needed for the long term.
At the European level, ESA's Moonlight programme, of which Italy is the primary funder and national industry leader, will help make many future lunar missions technically and economically viable with accurate positioning and telecommunications services. With four satellites orbiting the Moon by the end of the decade, Moonlight will have the capacity - optimised for the South Pole, as well as the far side of the Moon - to support communications with landers, precision lunar landings, rover navigation and, above all, to enable astronauts to communicate directly with Earth for precise positioning information, which is crucial for the safety and success of human missions.
Credits: ESA
Moonlight will be compatible with other future systems, e.g. those provided by NASA or JAXA, as it will adopt the international Lunanet standard, enabling it to be used not only for ESA missions - like the Argonaut lander - but also to communicate with the Gateway and provide services to other space agencies and private companies, subject to governmental and commercial agreements. Moonlight is therefore an essential component for future international collaborations with ambitious strategic goals, which goes far beyond merely providing telecommunications and navigation services.
Finally, one should note that NASA's Moon-to-Mars architecture envisages a steady increase in ever more challenging lunar missions over the next ten years, with the next big step being the robotic and human exploration of Mars. This will require permanent infrastructure to support Mars missions, of which the telecommunications and navigation component will be indispensable: Moonlight can thus be considered a precursor technology that will give Europe and Italy a competitive advantage in the exploration of Mars and beyond.
Moonlight satellites support the human presence on the Moon.
WaTer ON THe MOON: the oraCle projeCt
by Michèle Roberta Lavagna
The Moon is the Wild West of the 2020s, characterised by scientifc curiosity, the drive to explore, the fascination of the unknown, technological challenges and commercial opportunities. Its closeness, just four days away, one and a half seconds transmission time from Earth, makes it a prime opportunity for human exploration, with the objective of putting down roots rather than just stopping for a few hours, like Apollo. However, human beings are demanding creatures, especially when they’re travelling: they breathe, eat, drink, sufer temperature changes, move around and explore. We know how much more convenient it is for travellers to fnd what they need locally, without having to worry about bringing it with them, thus greatly lightening their luggage. If we were to ask ourselves what we absolutely can’t do without when we go to the Moon, or what would be the best thing for a traveller to the Moon to fnd on hand without any fear of it running out... then the answer is obviously water.
The ORACLE project is an attempt to answer such questions: using a high-temperature chemical process, it extracts oxygen trapped in the lunar regolith, the agglomerate of heterogeneous, non-cohesive materials that covers the frst few metres of the lunar surface. Thanks to an industrial process used to extract silicon, oxygen can be extracted from anhydrous (water-free) regolith and stored in reservoirs for future use. The sand, heated to a high temperature, is fooded with methane gas to extract the oxygen trapped in the minerals; the gaseous mixture containing oxygen as carbon monoxide is 'digested' by a second
The PoliMi GlobalWater-Moon Plant: a laboratory plant built at Polytechnic University of Milan for the extraction of water from dry lunar regolith.
Credits: PoliMI
reactor, and output as water vapour; the water is then separated from the mixture by cooling, and stored as such or separated once more into its hydrogen and oxygen components. The process difers from the analogous industrial application in not melting the regolith, which, while it results in a slightly reduced yield, is more suitable to an automated process, so that astronauts will not have to worry about servicing the plant.
Credits: PoliMI
ORACLE was tested in 2020 in a laboratory setting at the Milan Polythechnic’s ASTRA group, thanks to ESA and ASI; it does not depend on the type of regolith used, which is very important because the plant does not need to be installed in areas rich in a specifc mineralogical component: silicon oxide (the raw material for the process) can be found anywhere on the lunar surface. The choice of the area of installation will thus depend on the work and well-being of the astronauts, rather than the need to make the plant function properly. The proposed process is a new technology, and as such requires step-by-step testing and experimentation. The ASI-funded ORACLE project will soon transition from the laboratory to the Moon: a small mobile enclosure, it will be able to complete a few cycles of the oxygen extraction process on the Moon in the near future, producing a few grams of water. This will overcome a major barrier to the establishment of a permanent presence on the Moon, and hopefully enable us to raise our glasses for the frst time in space with Moon water!
Detail of the collector for water extracted from the condenser downstream of a production cycle, containing oxygen in the form of ice extracted from dry regolith.
Towards a susTainable fuTure beT ween earTh and space
by Editorial Staf
A global challenge that can embrace both planet Earth and space. Today, more than ever before, sustainability is a concept destined to transform how we live, work and explore.
Poised between the promise of a sustainable future and the threat of climate change, Earth forces us to consider the complexity of the bonds linking our planet with the space surrounding it. Our ability to understand it has been revolutionised by space tech-
Credits: COSMOSkyMed Image © ASI. Processed and distributed by e-GEOS
nologies, with their satellites and observation instruments, which have provided essential data to manage emergencies, optimise agriculture and deal with climate change from a very special perspective. However, knowing in itself is not enough; the next step will be to foresee events and act to prevent them.
The key to dealing with climate change and other global challenges lies in space technology. The satellites orbiting around our planet have become more than
A satellite image of the Amazon River.
“SPACE in our Hands”: a book on the new way of understanding sustainability by Telespazio and SEELab
just tools for observing, they are now true allies in our search for a more sustainable future. They monitor the planet’s temperature, air quality, sea levels and lots more. The collected information not only helps us understand our planet better, it also provides data that are essential for planning policies and interventions aimed at mitigating climate change.
Sustainability in space is just as important. The increasing amounts of space debris are a threat not just
to space activities but also to the ability of future generations to move among the stars. Orbiting space junk is a real hazard that can potentially damage or destroy active satellites and space ships. So while we use space to improve sustainability on Earth, we must also think about how to preserve sustainability in inner space.
This awareness has led to SPACE in Our Hands, a book published in March by Mimesis International. Stemming from the collaboration between Telespazio (Leonardo Group) and the SEELab of the Bocconi University of Milan, the book was written by the American author David W. Brown. A journalist and populariser with a clear, captivating writing style, Brown explains, in a way that all lay readers can understand, complex space-related issues ranging from sustainable architecture on other celestial bodies and solar space power to the creation of shared legislation governing the exploration and colonisation of inner space.
The book includes contributions from well-known people such as Paolo Nespoli, John C. Mankins, Paolo Gaudenzi, Simonetta Di Pippo, Waltraut Hoheneder, Barbara Imhof, René Waclavicek, Angel Abbud-Madrid, Kevin O’Connell, Moriba Jah, Cynda Collins Arsenault and Victoria Samson, who generously shared their experience and knowledge to ofer a daring and innovative vision of future in space.
There are major ethical issues linked to the exploration and colonisation of space. How should we manage the possible environmental impacts caused by humans on the moons or planets we may live on? How should extra-terrestrial resources be used? How can we guarantee that space exploration is fair and inclusive, involving diverse individuals and countries? These are complex challenges that require in-depth consideration.
The book is a window open onto a world in which working and living on other celestial bodies is no longer science fction but a tangible prospect. The vision of a future in which the colonisation of the Moon or Mars is imminent leads us to consider how these new frontiers can be made sustainable. The use of space resources, the management of space junk and the creation of closed ecosystems are but a few of the challenges we will have to deal with as we move further and further out into space.
It is a crucial challenge we will have to rise to responsibly while being fully aware that creating a sustainable future, on Earth and among the stars, is indeed possible.
FEATURED
The book Generation Space: Space technoloGieS and profeSSionS to protect our planet
by Germana Galoforo
Generation Space is the second volume in the Amici del Pianeta (Friends of the Planet) series from Giunti Editore, the outcome of a collaboration with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), which edited some of the text and provided scientifc supervision of the content.
The book opens with a preface by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, who tells about his experiences and feelings in space, and how being up there makes it very clear that Earth must be protected. It continues with an illustration of the Solar System, with information and points of interest about the planets, insights into the upcoming exploration of the Moon and Mars, and an overview of professions in the feld of space. One of the objectives of the book is to make young people understand how diferent professional fgures are needed in addition to astronauts: astrophysicists, aerospace engineers, agronomists, computer scientists, astrobiologists, as well as lawyers and experts in international diplomacy are all among the many professions and competencies needed on missions to explore our universe and develop space technologies, which are not only of value for learning more about the cosmos, but also for protecting our planet.
Among the latter, Earth observation satellites play a leading role: the book contains a selection of images taken by the Italian COSMO-SkyMed constellation of satellites and the Italian Space Agency's Prisma mission, which help us better understand how remote sensing data are used, for example, to optimise har-
authors:
Disney Libri / Giunti Editore / ASI
publisher: Disney Libri / Giunti Editore
Year of publication: 2023
price: 12 euro
luca parmitano tells about his experiences and feelings in space, and how being up there makes it very clear that earth must be protected
vests, monitor our forests and woodland heritage, and better organise emergency response to events like foods and earthquakes.
Generation Space also contains two comic strips which, though frst published a few years ago, are still very topical.
The frst is “Uncle Scrooge and the Ten Little Billionaires”, frst published in 2013, in which Uncle Scrooge once again demonstrates his fair for business by launching the business of space travel to the Moon.
Uncle Scrooge's fanciful idea is now, only ten years later, a reality: it is called space tourism and has already started taking wealthy space enthusiasts into orbit, 400 km from Earth. The second story, “Plan Dine from Outer Space!”, takes respect for the ecosystem as its main theme, and making a valuable ecological statement not only about the need to care for Planet Earth, but also of developing technologies for space that are mindful of sustainability.
title: Generazione Spazio
SPACE FOR LIFE
WE BELIEVE IN SPACE AS HUMANKIND’S NEW HORIZON TO BUILD A BETTER, SUSTAINABLE LIFE ON EARTH
