Automation of Operation and Testing for European Space Agency's OPS-SAT Mission

This thesis presents a solution for mission operation automation in European Space Agency's (ESA) OPS-SAT mission. To achieve this, the ESA internal mission automation system (MATIS) in combination with the mission control software (SCOS) are used. They control the satellite and all ground peripherals and programmes to enable fully automated and unsupervised satellite passes. The goal of this work is the transition from the existing manual operation, with a human operator watching over and controlling all systems, to an automated system. This system supports the operation engineer and replaces the operator himself. A large section of this thesis consists of the setup, configuration, integration of all programmes and virtual machines and testing of the MATIS software, as well as the Service Management Framework (SMF) which connects MATIS to non-MATIS applications like SCOS. During testing, a lot of problems could be identified, not only OPS-SAT specific ones, but also general problems applying to all missions that consider using MATIS for future operation automation. These findings and bugs discovered during testing are reported to the responsible authorities and presented in this work. Further features of this thesis are the elaborations of the mission operation automation concept and the satellite pass concept, providing an in-depth view of the automation and passes of OPS-SAT as well as the general concepts and thoughts, which can be used by other missions to accelerate integration. An additional key feature of this thesis is the newly developed standard for operation notation in Excel, which has been achieved in close cooperation with the operation engineer. Furthermore, to accelerate the process of switching from manual to automated procedures, several converters have been developed iteratively with the new standard. These converters allow fast transformation from Excel to the procedure programming language called PLUTO used by MATIS. Not only do the results and converters of this work accelerate the procedure integration by 80%, they also deliver a more stable mission automation system that can be used by other missions as well. Operation automation reduces the operational costs for satellites and space missions significantly, as well as reducing the human error to a minimum. Therefore, this thesis is the first step towards a future with complete automation in the area of satellite operations. Without this automation, future satellite cluster configurations, like Starlink from SpaceX, will not be possible to put into practice, due to their high complexity, exceeding the comprehensibility and reaction time of humans

Calathus: A sample-return mission to Ceres

Ceres, as revealed by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, is an ancient, crater-saturated body dominated by low-albedo clays. Yet, localised sites display a bright, carbonate mineralogy that may be as young as 2 Myr. The largest of these bright regions (faculae) are found in the 92 km Occator Crater, and would have formed by the eruption of alkaline brines from a subsurface reservoir of fluids. The internal structure and surface chemistry suggest that Ceres is an extant host for a number of the known prerequisites for terrestrial biota, and as such, represents an accessible insight into a potentially habitable “ocean world”. In this paper, the case and the means for a return mission to Ceres are outlined, presenting the Calathus mission to return to Earth a sample of the Occator Crater faculae for high-precision laboratory analyses. Calathus consists of an orbiter and a lander with an ascent module: the orbiter is equipped with a high-resolution camera, a thermal imager, and a radar; the lander contains a sampling arm, a camera, and an on-board gas chromatograph mass spectrometer; and the ascent module contains vessels for four cerean samples, collectively amounting to a maximum 40 g. Upon return to Earth, the samples would be characterised via high-precision analyses to understand the salt and organic composition of the Occator faculae, and from there to assess both the habitability and the evolution of a relict ocean world from the dawn of the Solar System.The attached document is the authors’ final accepted version of the journal article provided here with a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Creative Commons Licence. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.

Cardiovascular Efficacy and Safety of Bococizumab in High-Risk Patients

Bococizumab is a humanized monoclonal antibody that inhibits proprotein convertase subtilisin- kexin type 9 (PCSK9) and reduces levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. We sought to evaluate the efficacy of bococizumab in patients at high cardiovascular risk. METHODS In two parallel, multinational trials with different entry criteria for LDL cholesterol levels, we randomly assigned the 27,438 patients in the combined trials to receive bococizumab (at a dose of 150 mg) subcutaneously every 2 weeks or placebo. The primary end point was nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, hospitalization for unstable angina requiring urgent revascularization, or cardiovascular death; 93% of the patients were receiving statin therapy at baseline. The trials were stopped early after the sponsor elected to discontinue the development of bococizumab owing in part to the development of high rates of antidrug antibodies, as seen in data from other studies in the program. The median follow-up was 10 months. RESULTS At 14 weeks, patients in the combined trials had a mean change from baseline in LDL cholesterol levels of -56.0% in the bococizumab group and +2.9% in the placebo group, for a between-group difference of -59.0 percentage points (P<0.001) and a median reduction from baseline of 64.2% (P<0.001). In the lower-risk, shorter-duration trial (in which the patients had a baseline LDL cholesterol level of ≥70 mg per deciliter [1.8 mmol per liter] and the median follow-up was 7 months), major cardiovascular events occurred in 173 patients each in the bococizumab group and the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.99; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80 to 1.22; P = 0.94). In the higher-risk, longer-duration trial (in which the patients had a baseline LDL cholesterol level of ≥100 mg per deciliter [2.6 mmol per liter] and the median follow-up was 12 months), major cardiovascular events occurred in 179 and 224 patients, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.65 to 0.97; P = 0.02). The hazard ratio for the primary end point in the combined trials was 0.88 (95% CI, 0.76 to 1.02; P = 0.08). Injection-site reactions were more common in the bococizumab group than in the placebo group (10.4% vs. 1.3%, P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS In two randomized trials comparing the PCSK9 inhibitor bococizumab with placebo, bococizumab had no benefit with respect to major adverse cardiovascular events in the trial involving lower-risk patients but did have a significant benefit in the trial involving higher-risk patients

Cardiovascular Efficacy and Safety of Bococizumab in High-Risk Patients

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