November 2016
Rosetta - an eventful cruise phase
... to call back Andrea Accomazzo, who took my former position as Rosetta’s spacecraft operations manager. At the same time Elsa Montagnon was nominated spacecraft operations manager for the future BepiColombo mission to Mercury. She left the...
January 2020
Satellite-based IoT - the race is on
.... A 16 kg Target satellite built in the UK by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd for Astroscale’s End-of-Life Services demonstration (ELSA-d) mission due for launch in 2020. The mission is designed to simulate capture of orbital debris and validate key...
February 2020
Aeroshells – from LEO to Mars
... atmosphere. This three-step strategy is planned for demonstration for the first time in 2020 during the ELSA-d mission by Astroscale, a Singapore-based start-up. Astroscale is also working with ClearSpace (Switzerland) to increase the technology...
June 2022
In-orbit servicing and the future of the space industry
... supervision, these operations can now be performed by automatic vehicles thanks to modern technology, as demonstrated by Astroscale’s ELSA-d mission, where a 175 kg servicer satellite is currently testing a series of rendezvous, docking and release...
January 2023
Clearing space junk from orbit
... flown in the past few years, including the RemoveDEBRIS mission by the Surrey Space Centre in 2018 and ELSA-d by Astroscale in 2021. ClearSpace and ESA teams test the full-scale model of the ClearSpace-1 capture mechanism...
19 October 2018
Countdown begins for the launch of BepiColombo
... planet. “Mission teams have spent months simulating BepiColombo’s unique and complex journey,” explains Operations Manager Elsa Montagnon. “Taking turns, in 12-hour shifts, we have been practising the spacecraft’s various launch and early mission...
