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.