As the TU Delft Space Institute (DSI) is almost 2.5 years in existence, DSI organized a TU Delft Space2020 workshop last Thursday March 30th. It took place at the inspiring venue Lijm & Cultuur in Delft, and was well-attended by over 60 people. The purpose of this internal workshop was to gather input on the general future of DSI, and possible research topics.
During his opening words to university staff, PhDs, and master students, Institutes Director Prof. Eberhard Gill, gave a special welcome to Rinze Benedictus, current dean of the Aerospace faculty and his successor Henri Werij (TNO). Furthermore, he highlighted some successes of DSI:
- Establishment of a Space Minor at TU Delft
- TU Delft/SRON payload on STO-2 Terra-Hertz NASA balloon
- Memorandum of Understanding with ISRO, providing preferred launch access to space for DSI
Roger Walker (Systems Engineer, ESTEC) gave a presentation about ESA’s future projects on CubeSats and he emphasised the high potential to reduce the entry-level cost of deep space exploration by an order of magnitude, using CubeSats.
In the following workshop discussions, more than 60 possible and creative research topics for DSI were addressed. The topics were varying from Space TV (using formations of CubeSats as light pixels to transmit visible messages) to Cloud-based CubeSats operations. Finally, three topics were chosen: OLFAR, DSI Flagship mission with high-precision GNSS/spectrometer, and Micropropulsion laboratory. After the workshop, there was time to network and to have some drinks with other TU Delft people.
