Jose Miguel Ezquerro

Materials science underpins national economies and infrastructures worldwide, contributing significantly to the delivery of key services, as well as underpinning multiple industrial sectors, including space. The space sector, represents a cornerstone of technological progress, driving both direct and indirect innovation across many terrestrial fields. Taken together, materials science and the space sector represent a transformative frontier for innovation that remains only partially exploited, offering opportunities for scientific, economic, and societal advancement. In this context, this roadmap presents a special focus on where such interplay can yield fruitful outcomes over the next two decades, exploring specific intersections between these fields. The rationale behind this is routed in the current demand and forward view for specialised materials to address both terrestrial challenges and extraterrestrial ambitions, with the global space economy projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, requiring a concerted focus on interdisciplinary collaboration. Microgravity provides a unique platform to achieve this, enabling critical insights, more precise control over material formation and the creation of advanced materials with enhanced properties for diverse applications. These breakthroughs are already informing terrestrial applications across industries, from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals, while laying the groundwork for advanced manufacturing in space. Emerging sectors such as the “In-Orbit Economy” and in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) further underscore this critical opportunity, emphasising the need for resilient materials that can withstand the harsh conditions of space and utilise extraterrestrial resources sustainably. This roadmap brings together a diverse array of contributions covering relevant subjects across these areas—from space exploration and ISRU to the production of new inorganic, organic, and even “living” materials on microgravity platforms—while paying special attention to concrete examples, i.e. cases with a technological readiness level of 4 or higher, which warrant continued attention and effort.

This work presents the design of an attitude control experiment for onboard OPS-SAT-1 satellite execution, conceived with inherent extensibility to future mission architectures. OPS-SATs are ESA nanosatellite mission series designed as an in-orbit testbed for validating novel software and control techniques under real space conditions, OPS-SAT-1 being the first mission. Equipped with an advanced payload computer, OPS-SAT-1 enabled experimentation with innovative mission operations, including real-time attitude control strategies. Two attitude control algorithms, a modified Proportional–Integral–Derivative (mPID) and a fuzzy logic controller, were designed and implemented for the OPS-SAT-1. The design methodology applied to these controllers consisted of (i) modelling the space environment and satellite characteristics, (ii) assessing actuator feasibility, (iii) determining the operational ranges for attitude error and angular velocity, (iv) parametrizing controllers within these ranges, (v) fine-tuning controllers using multi-objective genetic optimization, and (vi) robustness analysis using the Monte Carlo method. Despite the technical issues related to communication with the OPS-SAT-1 hardware, which prevented the execution of the experiment in orbit, this work presents the simulation results that were obtained. These results indicate that fuzzy logic controllers may outperform PID controllers in terms of the accumulated error, settling time and steady-state error, whereas power efficiency appears to be less robust than in the PID. This suggest that a large uncertainty in the model could lead the PID to become more efficient. Near the nominal scenario, the fuzzy controller achieves superior error–cost trade-offs, enabling precise attitude stabilization with lower energy consumption. These findings suggest the potential advantages of modern control approaches compared to classical methods, which will be further assessed through future in-orbit experiments.

This work presents an innovative attitude control experiment design and a novel application developed for in-orbit testing, leveraging the ESA Nanosat Mission Operations Framework in Java. This application was deployed on OPS-SAT-1, an ESA satellite in orbit until May 2024 which served as a powerful, reconfigurable flying laboratory for experiments. However, the experiment could not be executed on OPS-SAT-1 due to a malfunction in the I2C bus. The main advantage of the presented application is its adaptability for use on any satellite with a similar pointing strategy implementing the Nanosat Mission Operations Framework, which is the Service Oriented architecture that ESA will use in future nanosatellite missions. The experiment design could thus be reused in another satellite. The application incorporates two control algorithms for comparison: an experimental fuzzy controller and an experimental PID controller. However, it can be used to test any type of controller and the general objective of this work is to contribute to the advancement of in-orbit testing and validation of new spacecraft attitude control algorithms.

Here, we investigate the performance of phase-change materials (PCMs) in the passive thermal control of space habitats. PCMs are able to absorb and release large amounts energy in the form of latent heat during their (typically, solid-to-liquid) phase transition, which makes them an ideal choice for passive temperature control. In this study, a conceptual design of an igloo-shaped habitat is proposed. A scaled model for laboratory experiments is manufactured via 3D printing, using tap water as the PCM. The setup is used to conduct experiments and analyze PCM performance, based on temperature measurements inside and outside the habitat. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of PCMs in increasing thermal inertia and stabilizing the habitat interior temperature around the melting temperature, confirming that PCMs can be a suitable alternative for passive thermal control. The present study holds significant interest for the future of space exploration, with the emerging need to design habitats that are capable of accommodating astronauts.

We experimentally confirm the efficacy of submerged oscillating baffles for sloshing mitigation in a partially filled open container of water. As with the more typical applications of tuned mass dampers, when the natural frequency of the baffle is close to that of the first sloshing mode, the main resonance peak is split into two peaks of lower amplitude. The reduction in resonant sloshing amplitude is superior to that of a fixed baffle.