Leonardo and TeLespazio reward innovation

by Ivana Giannone

The chance to form a start-up and launch an acceleration pathway within the Leonardo Business Innovation Factory. This opportunity was the prize on offer for the winners of the 2022 Telespazio Technology Contest (#T-TeC), the Open Innovation competition promoted by Leonardo and Telespazio that was open to students and researchers from universities and departments from across the world.

With the objective of promoting technological innovation in the space sector among the younger generations, valuing their ideas and intuitions and imagining the technologies of the future together, the fourth edition of the T-TeC came to a close in Brussels on 24 January of this year during the first day of the European Space Conference.

This setting was by no means chosen at random, as Leonardo Space Activities Coordinator and Telespazio CEO Luigi Pasquali underlined during the awards ceremony. The intention, in fact, was to bring the young participants into the heart of the Space Economy, rubbing shoulders with its leading players.

First and foremost there was the astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, a special guest at the event, who reminded young people how much their contribution can make a difference. Enthusiastically welcomed by the award-winners, Cristoforetti then highlighted the importance of the presence of women in a sector where men still form a large majority.

Evidence of a change in this direction is clear, however, as shown by the fact that a female-led team took first place on the T-TeC podium out of 20 competing entries from all over the world. The first prize, giving access to the Leonardo Bifand a cheque for ten thousand euro, went to a team from the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and the Observatoire de Paris (France), led by Benedetta Margrethe Cattani.

Their project, Safe – System to avoid fatal events, is an innovative software solution that can be easily integrated into any ground station to assess the likelihood of collisions in orbit and to suggest the best possible manoeuvres to avoid them, minimising both fuel consumption and service downtimes.

The second prize, worth six thousand euro, was awarded to a team from Imperial College (UK), Max Planck Institute (Germany), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Stanford University (USA) and the University of Oxford (UK). The name of the project is Spaice, and it aims to support In-Orbit Servicing by means of a solution based on photorealism enhancement techniques, i.e. on improving the realism of synthetic (computer-generated) images of space assets. Through the use of ar- tificial intelligence, Spaice provides accurate images necessary for in-orbit operations aimed at approaching and docking a moving object, such as when refuelling or repairing a satellite. The project will be the subject of a pre-incubation pathway organised by the Politecnico di Torino I3P. With this preparation, the team may aspire to a place on the incubation pathway of the European Space Agency at the Business Incubator Centre of Turin (ESA BIC Turin).

The third prize, worth four thousand euro, was awarded to a team from the Politecnico di Milano with its SunCubes project. This seeks to provide an alternative to the current system for supplying electricity to orbiting assets by means of a satellite network with the main purpose of producing and storing energy, thus dramatically reducing the cost of on-board electricity generation and storage systems borne by satellite manufacturers.

A fourth team from the Politecnico di Torino received a prize introduced this year, namely the Test-it Award. In the opinion of the jury, its Constellation architecture in lunar orbit for energy wireless transmission on the Moon project is ready for a “proof of concept” financed by Leonardo with the technical collaboration of Telespazio. This will provide the team with the tools and resources to move from the idea to experimenting and verifying the design in the laboratory.

As well as Luigi Pasquali and Samantha Cristoforetti, the awards ceremony was also attended by other leading figures from the space industry and institutions, including: Franco Ongaro, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Leonardo; Marco Brancati, Head of Innovation and Technology Governance at Telespazio; Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency; and Giorgio Saccoccia, President of the Italian Space Agency. Also present were Cristian-Silviu Buşoi, Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy; Ambassador Stefano Verrecchia, Italian representative at COr EPEr ; Marian-Jean Marinescu, Member of the European Parliament and of the “Sky and Space” Intergroup; Ekaterini Kavvada, Director of Innovation and Outreach at the European Commission Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space.