PERASPERA Programme Support Activity

The PERASPERA Programme Support Activity

The project “Per aspera (ad astra)” (Latin meaning “Through hardships to the stars”) aims at developing an integrated master plan (a.k.a. roadmap) of activities and associated activity descriptions, for a Strategic Research Cluster in Space Robotics Technology. The roadmap will be implemented within a Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) through operational grants, which will be Recommended by PERASPERA and issued by the European Commission. The overall objective of the SRC is to deliver, within the 2023/2024 framework, key enabling technologies and demonstrate autonomous robotic systems at a significant scale as key elements for onLorbit satellite servicing and planetary exploration.

The PERASPERA objectives will be measurable through the immediate deliverables of the project, these being:

  • The roadmap, i.e. the master plan to coordinate all the activities for the whole duration of the SRC (delivered during the first year and updated twice)
  • Draft text for the calls to award operational grants

These technology maturation activities aim at designing and manufacturing building blocks, with the goal of producing reliable, dependable and high performance subsystems, components, and software that can be used at later stages for the composition of robotic concepts.

The concept studies will produce designs and breadboards of space robotics applications, making use of the building blocks to showcase the increased performance and lower cost of missions making use of space robotics. To overcome some of the obstacles for a broader application of robotics in space missions these concept studies have to cover not the robotics aspects only, but also the impacts on the servicing objects, like the satellite design or the design of the robotic carrier.

Finally the roadmap shall concentrate on some of the concepts to bring them into demonstration, at-a-Significant-scale, in the most relevant environment (i.e. space itself for orbital robotics and Earth analogs for planetary exploration) allowed by the space application.

Concept and approach, quality of the coordination and support measures The PERASPERA consortium will plan and analyse with transparency the Space Technologies SRC envisaged roadmaps through activities that can be conceptually modelled in the processes of:

  • taking stock of the situation,
  • choosing the end goal and preparing a plan for it,
  • facilitating and caretaking the activities of the SRC to guarantee the coherence and quality of the results, and
  • disseminating the knowledge and plans of the PSA and the results of the SRC.

At the same time the PERASPERA project will put specific focus on periodically reviewing and updating the roadmap, taking into account the progress of the operational grants. This is intrinsically related to a thorough risk analysis of the SRC, which the project team will carry out and use as one of the tools for its roadmap review.