Materials for Space Exploration

Cosmical Seeds_A dialogue between Art, Science, Technology and Space

The artist as a pollinator of ideas, experiments and insights. Belgian artist Frederik de Wilde is working at the interstice of art, science and technology. Frederik's talk will cover his artistic crossover praxis and a selection…

Thin-Ply Hybrid CFRP Materials for Lightweight Structures

Thin-Ply carbon-fibre-reinforced plastics are high-performance materials in applications where a low density combined with high stiffness and strength are required. A layer thickness below 60 µm characterizes them. The limiting factors to…

Material for space applications – Challenges and new frontiers for OHB

OHB business fields cover a multitude of different satellites, orbits, applications for space and therefore different challenges for the materials used in the different designs.

After a brief introduction on the company…

Enabling Space made in Germany

The upperstages of the European Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 launchers are built in Bremen under the prime industrial leadership of ArianeGroup. Ariane 6 is  now taking shape despite the Covid crisis while Ariane 5 succeeded its third launch of 2020 last August.  But the…

Hybrid Sandwich Structure for passive Crash Protection in a small Landing Probe

In Order to study the formation of the solar system and the evolution of life it is necessary to study smaller bodies like comets, asteroids and smaller moons. All these objects have a common property, they have very…

AI enabled Robotics

How does artificial intelligence enable space robotics and allow for space exploration via autonomous robots? What role does the construction and the material of the intelligent systems play in this context. With its Space Exploration Hall and the Research Team Space, the…

Flexible Diggers for Interacting with Granular Surfaces in Low Gravity

For spacecraft visiting rubble pile asteroids it is important to safely interact with the granular materials at the surface of these objects. We propose the use of flexible probes for digging into a granular material under…

There is order within disorder: approaching phase boundaries in high-entropy systems

Critical understanding of large amount of data leads to new descriptors for discovering entropic materials. The formalism uses the ensembled spectrum of sampled states near stability [Chem. Mater. 28, 6484 (2016)]…

Nanocomposite ablative materials for thermal shields of re-entry vehicles

Carbon-phenolic ablative heat shields represent an effective solution for the thermal protection of reentry spacecraft and they are typically composed by a porous carbon preform partially filled by phenolic resin. In this…

High-throughput with particle technology for materials discovery

High-throughput screening is a well-established method for scientific experimentation in chemistry and biology. The tests are designed to quickly obtain easily accessible data (called descriptors) that are related to the desired…