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Space exploration is going to play a relevant role within the just started decade, with the Moon at its centre. Many activities are on going to enhance science of\on and from the Moon and to develop the fundamental technology to accomplish the challenging objectives the foreseen missions to our satellite need. Among those the capability to detect, extract and manipulate the in situ resources is central for humans back on the surface and more. Politecnico di Milano, thanks to the activities started under the cap of an ESA study, developed in consortium with OHB-I and OHB-S, implemented a laboratory plant and run experiments to assess and tune the carbothermal reduction process on NU-LHT 2M in extracting oxygen from feedstock oxides. The experiments were successful and water has been produced, as expected. To accurately understand the process and address the technology for a flight test the numerical modelling of the whole process steps has been settled and a comprehensive characterisation of the feedstock simulant was performed as well. Results are presented and critically discussed. The paper will go through the simulant characterisation approach and results, the process description and modelling, the lab plant description and the experimental test campaign results, obtained with the implemented plant.

Deimos and Phobos are considered primary targets of investigation to understand the origin and evolution of Mars and more in general the terrestrial planets of the Solar System. TASTE mission aims complementing MMX investigation by focusing on Deimos surface, combining both global remote sensing observations from a close orbit and direct in-situ analyses of the surface thanks to a lander release on Deimos. With a synergy between orbital and in-situ investigations, the proposed mission will contribute to the Deimos global morphology understanding; its global elemental abundance; landing site morphology and texture; landing site organic content and surface composition. TASTE is conceived as a Cubesat-in-Cubesat mission: a 12U space asset composed by a 9U orbiter and a 3U lander. The former embarks an X-gamma ray spectrometer developed by OAT and a multispectral camera, the second is equipped with a miniaturized Surface Sample Analyser (SSA), composed by a new Sample Acquisition Mechanism (SAM), conceived by PoliMi and a Surface Analytical Laboratory (SAL) developed by INAF OAA. The mission is conceived to keep the orbiter on a QSO nearby Deimos to facilitate the lander release and the scientific operations in synergy with the lander itself. Details on science, space assets sizing and design and mission science operations will be discussed in deep.

The paper presents a novel 3-dimensional shape-based algorithm which extends the domain of analytical solutions to planeto-centric mission scenarios, which classically entail even thousands revolutions to transfer to the final orbit. Thanks to the strong physical meaning the proposed method keeps while shaping the trajectory, the method succeeds in outputting a solution close to the real optimum. The proposed approach allows to easily formalize practical mission constraints, such as maximum thrust threshold and eclipses; free and fixed time of flight is manageable as well. The approach is almost completely analytic, which is beneficial as it significantly decreases the computational load. It is well suited for complex mission scenarios and for fast detection near optimal solutions to support the whole mission design.

HERMES is a scientific mission composed of 3U nano-satellites dedicated to the detection and localization of high-energy astrophysical transients, with a distributed space architecture to form a constellation in Earth orbits. The space segment hosts novel miniaturized detectors to probe the X-ray temporal emission of bright events, such as Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), and the electromagnetic counterparts of Gravitational Wave Events (GWEs), playing a crucial role in future multi-messenger astrophysics. During operations, at least three instruments, separated by a minimum distance shall observe a common area of the sky to perform a triangulation of the observed event. An effective detection by the nano-satellite payload is achieved by guaranteeing a beneficial orbital and pointing configuration of the constellation. The design has to cope with the limitations imposed by small space systems, such as the lack of on-board propulsion and the reduced systems budgets. The paper describes the methodologies and the proposed strategies to overcome the mission limitations, while achieving a satisfactory constellation visibility of the sky throughout the mission duration. The mission design makes use of a high-fidelity orbit propagator, combined with an innovative mission analysis tool that estimates the scientific performances of the constellation. The influence of the natural relative motion, which is crucial to achieve an effective constellation configuration without on-board orbit control, is assessed. The presented methodology can be easily extended to any kind of distributed scientific space applications, as well as to constellations dedicated to Earth and planetary observation. In addition, the visibility tool is applicable in the context of the constellation flight dynamics operations, yielding optimized results and pointing plans based on actual satellite orbital positions., 31 pages, 18 figures, 3 tables. Published in Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems