EUCASS

Hermitage, St Petersburg

I'm just back from attending the European Conference on Aerospace Sciences (EUCASS) in St Petersburg.  Visiting Russia and the imposing city of St Petersburg was a great experience, but I'll try to keep to the technical side in this post.

There was much coverage of launchers, not really my field but interesting anyway.  A concept caught my eye for using a GlobalHawk UAV to lift a launcher rocket for small satellites, similar to the Pegasus system - only got a brief glimpse though.

My student Colin Greatwood presented his work on collision alerting for helicopters, while colleague Massimiliano Saponara from Thales Alenia Space Italy presented results from our ORCSAT study with ESA.  It was interesting as well to see Princeton Satellite Systems proposing something MPC-like for rendezvous in their Space Rapid Transit system.

Finally, an idea: has anyone ever tried MPC for aircraft fuel system management?