Martin Ditter of ESA UK Harwell research centre

Harwell, near Oxford, is one of the UK’s premier hubs for science and technology. For many years the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, it’s now the home of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the ISIS X-ray source and the Diamond synchrotron light source. It’s also now home to a new European Space Agency (ESA) research facility: the ESA UK Harwell Centre.

The centre is directed by Martin Ditter, a German rocketry engineer. He said: ’There’s enormous potential in the UK space sector, and we at ESA felt that we weren’t connected to it in an optimum fashion. We felt that by being here on-site, we would be able to build the connections we need to bring the competence that exists within the UK into ESA.’

Ditter cites the strength of the commercial space industry in the UK and the UK’s involvement in EADS Astrium as proof of the nation’s potential. ’You have a very strong industry in this region. We felt that in the more institutional sense, which is where ESA operates, we weren’t making the best of it. It’s a case of connecting to the existing space communities and the university research.’

Ditter believes that forming stronger connections to the UK will benefit ESA in terms of shaping its projects. ’We felt disconnected from the space community here, and we were conscious that a lot of the work being done here was relevant to the subjects that ESA covers or wants to cover. Our research is done on the basis of programme proposals, and they don’t come from ESA cooking them up in its own little corner, isolated from everything else. It’s a matter of connecting the community and trying to sense what the various groups of researchers would like ESA to do. Then we compile this information into a Europe-wide consolidated proposal and ask the member states to fund that. We felt that by being in Harwell, closer to the UK research and commercial space community, we could do better at bringing the UK’s interests and expertise into that process.’

Another reason for the UK location is that ESA is in awe of the entrepreneurial culture in UK science and technology — possibly the fruit of the increased activity of universities in spinning-out research companies over the past decade. This is not only a way to realise the commercial possibilities of space research, Ditter said, it also feeds back into the research. ’What we’re trying to do is both look for new ways to commercialise space science — that is, ways to reach the investment community — and to look for the areas and applications in the wider industrial context where there is potential for commercialisation. The process of identifying these new services and finding the new applications will invariably lead us to identify the gaps in our research coverage.

’For example, we’d come across cases where a user proposed to develop a service or a technology, but after evaluating the proposal we’d find that the technology isn’t mature enough to do the job. That pertains to our role as a research and development agency, and we might then be able to say that there’s customer demand in this particular area for a service that we hadn’t thought about, but there’s also demand in the same domain — we hope — from scientists. In that way, we widen the user base for space technologies and identify where we need to invest in the research, with targets both in space and in industry.’

The Harwell Centre’s research priorities are keyed into strengths within the UK space community. The Earth Observation/Climate Change unit will be particularly concerned with improving the integration of data obtained from Earth observation into simulated climate models, to improve the accuracy of predictions derived from the models. The UK’s ATSR (Along Track Scanning Radiometer) instruments — high-resolution infrared cameras carried aboard ESA Earth observation satellites — provide data on sea surface temperatures; the UK also has expertise in using computer graphics to visualise complex climatic data.

ESA is also planning on deploying the UK’s expertise in robotic space exploration. Ditter said: ’We have some heritage with the UK in robotics, with the Beagle 2 project that unfortunately crashed onto Mars, but the robotics onboard represented major innovations in miniaturisation and autonomy. We believe that if you look beyond space, there are a lot of applications, not strictly to do with robots but very much connected with autonomy; that’s very relevant for the wider engineering user base, for intelligent transport systems and for technology to help the elderly retain their independence.’

Another part of this is an area that ESA calls ’planetary protection’, which encompasses both protecting other planets from potential contaminants from Earth’s environment, and, for missions involving sample return, protecting Earth’s environment from contaminants on other planets. With Mars sample-return projects scheduled for the 2020s, this is an important consideration. The technology is related to clean-room techniques developed for the prevention of contamination in biomedical laboratories. Ditter said: ’It’s essential to the exploration programme, and the UK has considerable expertise in the field; it gives us a chance to build links with another industrial sector and bring them more closely into the space science community.’

Among the resources to be built at Harwell is a curation facility, which will initially be used to store samples from bodies that are lifeless, such as the moon, asteroids and interplanetary space. It will also house samples taken during the construction of spacecraft, to provide a record of potential contaminants from Earth. A Mars sample-return mission would require the construction of a dedicated facility, which the Harwell Centre will research and design.

The centre will also research power sources for space exploration, which are vital for missions where solar power will not be available. These will be based on the heat given off by radioactive elements; a technology that the US and Russia have both used in the past, but which is new to ESA.

There are two types of radioisotope technologies of interest to ESA: heating systems, to keep the electronics onboard a spacecraft warm enough to operate properly; and thermoelectric generators, which convert heat into electricity. Both use plutonium dioxide as their active element. Ditter said: ’We’re unearthing this expertise in the UK. It dates back a long way but it still exists, and it’s an important part of the robotic exploration portfolio.’

Human spaceflight research is a possibility for the Harwell portfolio, but Ditter is cautious about this. He said: ’It isn’t an area where the UK has been contributing thus far, although it does have an astronaut in the ESA training programme. We’d welcome UK involvement in the human space programme, but at the moment the question isn’t on the table.’