Keynote address I: The Space reference scenario: From the present solutions to the future challenges for Thales Alenia Space

In the current Space reference scenario different missions' targets and needs are driving the capabilities required to the space actors (agencies, industries and suppliers) for providing the right solutions and meet the customers requirements in terms of performance, reliability, safety and costs. Missions are more and more challenging and ask for extended on-board capabilities (as well as ground facilities) to manage high and secure data transmission rates, accurate pointing, fast reconfiguration, autonomous management, failure detection, isolation and recovery. Moreover, the on-board HW is required to work in an hostile environment, considering for instance the wide range of temperatures and radiation, and has also to cope with physical constraints, such as mass, dimension, launch vibrations and limited resources in terms of power (relying mainly on Solar arrays and batteries). In the future, the exploration missions to remote planets and celestial bodies will be even more demanding with the need to cope with more stringent constraints, such as visibility, link budget, communication delays, energy, etc. The spacecrafts have therefore to be more autonomous and to implement capabilities to manage the planned operations but also to safely react to unplanned situations or to move in an unknown environment such as a planet terrain. This presentation will focus on the main Space missions that are currently the reference of the Thales Alenia Space activity. Thales Alenia Space, as one of the major payers in the Space Business, covers a wide range of applications: from Telecommunications to Navigation, from Observation to Science and Exploration. The activity is carried out in 10 industrial sites in Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Belgium e Germany) with more than 7.200 employees. The major successful achievements are presented, such as space systems, instruments and spacecrafis, focusing in particular on the activities carried out in Turin, where the AHS conference takes place and where Thales Alenia Space Italy is present since years with a plant where many modules of the International Space Stations have been built, as well as National and International Scientific satellites, and where today the T AS leading activity in the Exploration and Science is performed. An outlook to the future is also presented addressing the main reference European missions in terms of exploration and identifying the major challenges for the on-board autonomy and HW /SW features and trends.