The Advanced Concepts Team is a group of scientists, researchers and young graduates that operate within the European Space Agency. Located at the European Space Research and Technology Centre

European Space Research and Technology Centre

The European Space Research and Technology Centre is the European Space Agency's main technology development and test centre for spacecraft and space technology. It is situated in Noordwijk, South Holland, in the western Netherlands....

, in the Netherlands, the team was instituted in 2003 with the objective of fostering advanced research on space systems, innovative concepts and working methods.

Introduction

The Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) is a multidisciplinary research group at the European Space Agency. Its task is to facilitate disruptive changes in space technology by performing solid research on 'exotic' topics typically not considered by 'main stream' space science.

General research areas include:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Mission Analysis
• Earth System Science
• Computational Management Science
• Fundamental physics
• Biomimetics
• Mathematics and informatics
• Plasma Physics and Space Propulsion

Research

One of the founding philosophies of the team is the 'open source attitude' of all their projects. The research papers and reports produced are made available, whenever possible, in their publication web site. Downloads are also available of the software produced by the internal researchers of the team.

Some highlights

• (2003) The ACT starts a number of mission designs for asteroid exploration. The final outcome is a phase A study on an asteroid deflection mission named Don Quijotte

• (2003) The ACT starts the first phase of the European Solar Power Satellite assessment. Trade offs between placing solar plants in orbit and in the ground are performed.

• (2004) The ACT introduces for the first time in ESA a systematic research of inspiration from biological solutions to approach space problems. For a good introduction on biomimetic principles in space mission design see http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/bio/index.htm.

• (2004) The ACT starts the development of a distributed computing environment general for ESA computations. See http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/inf/pp/act-dc.htm

• (2005) The ACT demonstrate that asteroid deflection is technologically possible in some cases and shows how to deflect the asteroid Apophis 99942 with a small kinetic impactor mission. For more information go to http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/op/AsteroidsAndNEOs/maywedeflect.htm

• (2005) The ACT finds numerical evidence that formation flying missions can benefit from two previously unknown special inclinations (49 degrees and 131) where the control effort is minimal due to a perfect match between the in-plane and the off-plane frequencies, see http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/pp/magicinclinations.htm

• (2005) The ACT initiates and organizes an international competition on global optimisation applied to interplanetary trajectory design. The competition is a kind of America's cup with the winner organizing the next edition. See http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/op/GTOC/index.htm

• (2006) The ACT starts to test Web 2.0 technologies as working methods in the European Space Agency. Wikis, subversions and other concurrent working environment are tried and developed.

• (2006) The ACT coordinates a European research effort to determine for the first time the effects of microgravity on the emerging techniques for interfacing, non invasively, the human brain with a machine.

• (2007) US researchers confirm the ACT numerical findings on the magic inclinations see http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/pp/magicinclinations.htm

• (2007) Researchers from the ACT test for the first time a brain machine interface in micro-gravity http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/newsroom/NewsArchive/New29_Dec07_ParabolicFlightCampain.htm

• (2008) The ACT make available on-line the first semantic database containing trajectories to Near Earth Objects http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/other/other_misc.htm

• (2009) A first attempt to detect human curiosity from brain waves is done by the ACT in cooperation with EPFL and DCU http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/bng/op/CuriosityCloning/demo.html

• (2009) Elementary Motion Detectors inspired by the biological functioning principles of insect eyes are successfully used during a lunar landing simulation http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/bio/op/Neuromorphic.htm

• (2009) The island model for parallel computations is made available and extended to non evoultionary algorithm in the open source software suite PaGMO http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/bio/op/Neuromorphic.htm

• (2010) Participation in Goolge's initiative Summer of Code with its PaGMO open source platform. First time a space Agency opens up to open source development via such consolidated tools.

• (2010) The Space Game, an html5 web game developed by ACT researchers (also featured in Chromium experiments), is the most visited event of the 2010 World Space Week.

• (2011) Esa Summer of Code pilot project (http://sophia.estec.esa.int/socis2011/?q=about) is invented, organized and successfully run by the team, proving beyond any doubt the value of open source initiatives and tools for software development related to space.

• (2011) Evolutionary Robotics first time use in a space related application. The ACT successfully trained an artificial neural network to steer attitude and positions of the three MIT SHERES on board the ISS.

• (2011) PyGMO V.1.0.0 is released. The ACT developed 'generalized island model', a coarse grained massively parallelization approach to global optimization, is available cross-platform to solve, in a massively paralel fashion, complex global optimization problems.

External links

• Advanced Concepts Team - home page
• Advanced Concepts Team - publications