Historic Session

Historic evolution of the Power System for Space application in Europe

Monday, 2 October 17:00 -18:20

AUdiTORIUm

Presenters: José A Carrasco (Universidad Miguel Hernández) and Ferdinando Tonicello (ESA)

This session is a tribute to the individuals who contributed their ingenuity to the different power system technologies and shared their ideas with us through the ESPC. The European space era started with precarious computers and software, few basic components and not much flight heritage and has developed over the years to amazing power system engineering products, some of which remain in use today. We hope you will be inspired by the brilliant minds on stage and by the iconic papers in the booklet, given with the conference kit, that paved the way for all of us and made this conference what it is today.

Guests:

ALan Weinberg

"We were proud of the fact that our designs were copied by the rest of the world and are used even today in most high power Sats as well as the ISS. Some concepts, like current-mode control are also used in commercial industry.”

Alan Weinberg got his first power electronicsexperience at Plessey UK designing solid-state standby emergency generators and aircraft Cycloconverters. Moved to BAe Stevenage and worked on the GEOS and Bluestreak rocket.

Recruited to Join ESRO at Estec in 1973 working in the power electronics section, where he supported many projects such as OTS; ECS; Meteosat; Olympus; Hipparcos; Hubble Space Telescope and in addition mentoring Spanish trainees in the art of space circuit design. He left ESA in 1995 and as a consultant he was involved in many projects, the most significant being designing the Power System for two prototype spacecraft i.e. the First European GPS Giove-A and Esail Marine Sat. He presently runs a consultancy company.

Ed Bongers

“In-orbit short circuits on ECS and the findings of NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) taught us that both GEO and LEO environment were even more harsh than expected. In-orbit failure investigations on ECS yielded more knowledge on design and test requirements, which are still applied today.”

After studying physics and a research period of 6 years at Leiden University, EB joined Fokker Space in 1983. His first Solar Array task was technical responsibility for the Eureca solar array PVA and electronics and the development of the ARA Mk2 PVA and Thermal Knife HDRS. In 1991 He became head of solar array engineering at Fokker Space & Systems and project manager of many solar array development projects. After being company head of Technology and Innovation from 2006 till 2014, his last carrier step has been Senior Expert Solar Arrays within Airbus. In the meantime, he has been leader of the European diode working group and convenor for the ECSS-E-ST-20-08. His final activity was the design, development, and qualification of the recently launched JUICE Solar Array.

He retired in 2021.

Albert Crausaz

“As an anecdote, at that time in ‘86, a IRF150 was worth 50 dollars, that was quite some money, and those transistors were really not robust, so I remember Dermot O’ Sullivan telling me the all the IRF I had destroyed during that week will be removed from my salary...”

Albert graduates from Ecole PolytechniqueFédérale de Lausanne in 1986 and joined directly ESA as Young Graduate Trainee, YGT. That was the first session of YGTs in ESA. He was hired by ESA and worked 9 years in the power conditioning division. Albert left ESA for ETEL as head of space electronic division, ETEL is a Swiss SME active in the field of motion control . When ETEL decided to leave the space market, Albert left the company and the space domain, and worked in various positions, as business area manager in machine tool industry ISMECA, then as vice director in a

University of Applied science (HE-ARC), to finally close the loop coming back to space and to ESA in the telecom department first as power engineering for Alphasat, than as system engineering in Neosat and finally project manager for ESAIL and TRITON X.

Albert is now enjoying retirement: travelling, hiking, skying, hunting and fishing.

Geoff Dudley

“Tests in the ESTEC lab on how to recharge Ni-H2 and NiCd cells with frozen electrolyte helped in the Olympus recovery. Another example of successful troubleshooting was an improvement in the management of Cluster-2 Ag-Cd batteries following a faster than expected deterioration in flight performance. They are still operating at a reduced level after 22 years!!!”

After a Post-Doc in solid state electrochemistry at Imperial College London and a period in charge of lithium battery development at the Berec Advanced projects group in Abingdon (UK), Geoff Dudley became head of the Energy Storage Section at ESTEC in November 1982. Retiring in 2011, he has continued to develop his lithium ion cell model and to follow the in-flight performance of the batteries aboard Mars Express.