Six Finalists for the Space Science and Technology Innovation Prize

The Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Deimos Engenharia, LC-Technologies, Lusospace, D-Orbit Portugal and ML Analytics are the six finalists for the Innovation in Space Science and Technology Prize, launched this year by the Portuguese Space Agency – Portugal Space.

The pre-selection process, conducted by the Portugal Space team, identified these projects as the ones that best fit the criteria of Innovation, Applicability and Impact defined in the award regulations. 

“We received various projects with a great diversity of ideas, both from academia and industry, and we were pleased to see that there is a huge potential for innovation in these projects. Some of them are already being implemented, and others are extremely promising,” says Ricardo Conde, president of the Portuguese Space Agency. “It’s very encouraging to see that the national ecosystem is developing projects of enormous relevance in the space sector, which clearly contributes to Portugal’s increasing strength in the international context,” he adds. 

The submitted projects cover the disciplines of Earth observation, propulsion systems, aerodynamics, astronomy and aerospace medicine. 

The six pre-selected applications will now be evaluated by a jury composed of several personalities linked to the science sector, and the winner will be announced in March.

The award is symbolic in nature, and serves as public recognition of a project or initiative that stood out for its innovative capacity in the past year, according to criteria related to its level of innovation in the space sector, applicability, viability and impact.  

 About the finalist projects:

The Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences was selected with its CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) and the ESPRESSO projects, both of which have already demonstrated results. The CHEOPS project resulted from a collaboration with DEIMOS, allowing the development of fundamental software to operate the mission. 

D-Orbit was selected through the AURORA project, which offers software for controlling satellites and satellite constellations by means of a fully customisable interface. It is web-based, and therefore allows control from any location through various digital platforms.

LC-Technologies was selected for its design of a ground station to demonstrate and study the propagation of W-band (70/80GHz) signals transmitted from LEO satellites. In addition to the inherent development challenges related to innovative technology, the ground station relies on an auxiliary system that uses a set of highly efficient antennas arranged around the main antenna, forming an interferometry network with two or more baselines to solve the challenges of determining signal origin and feedback for orientation and indication.

Lusospace presented the ARCE project, an augmented-reality system for engineering activities. It allows users to visualize a 3D model in real space, and to manipulate parts of the model, as well as to create new parts at the corresponding scale.  

Finally, ML Analytics presented an Artificial Intelligence project developed for the Ariel mission. It introduces innovations at the level of the modelling algorithm, formulation of objectives, and data encoding processes in the characterisation of exoplanets – that is, planets orbiting other stars than the Sun.