The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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STAR team from University of Padova during the 2016 Drop Your Thesis! programme launch campaign at the ZARM Drop Tower in Bremen, Germany.
The team focused their experiment on controlling a filamentous tether during deployment and retrieval of a free floating probe, during a catapult launch of their experiment. Controlling space tethers that have infinite degrees of freedom in microgravity are prone to getting tangled, thus novel mechanisms must be sought and tested. STAR team will now spend several months to analyse the abundant amount of data gathered during the campaign, but a preliminary assessment shows that the system worked beyond expectations.