The MELOA project proposes to develop a low-cost, easy-to-handle, wave resilient, multi-purpose, multi-sensor, extra light surface drifter for use in all water environments, ranging from deep-sea to inland waters, including coastal areas, river plumes and surf zones. The device will be developed as an upgrade to the WAVY drifter conceived by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, which was used to measure the surface circulation forced by wave breaking, including detailed structure of rifts and the littoral drift current (Jorge da Silva et al, 2016). The philosophy of the WAVY drifter will essentially be respected: a small-size sphere with just enough room to accommodate power source, GPS-receiver, communications modules, antennae, sensors and data processor; optimised buoyancy to prevent the drifter trajectory responding to the wind instead of the current, while providing just enough exposure of the antennae to ensure acquisition of the GPS signal at the required rate and reliable near real-time communications. Given the low influence of wind upon the drifters’ displacements, MELOA will provide a cheap effective way to monitor surface currents and surface dynamic features anywhere in the World Ocean. Through equipping the drifters with thermistors at two different levels, the possibility is open for monitoring “near-skin temperature” and near-surface vertical temperature gradients, which will be invaluable for calibration/validation of satellite derived SST fields.

EFESTO-2 is the natural follow-on of the project EFESTO (H2020 grant 821801) and it aims at increasing the European know-how and technology capabilities in the field of Inflatable Heat Shields (IHS). It will lean on the great achievements obtained in the frame of the father project EFESTO by implementing the needed forward advance to improve the current TRL for future re-entry missions. The project pillars will be: -to consolidate the use-case applicability through a deep business case analysis for a meaningful space application -to extend the investigation spectrum of the father project “EFESTO” to other critical aspects of the IHS field -to increase the confidence-level and robustness of tools/models and know-how developed in the frame of the father project “EFESTO” -to ensure continuity in presiding the IHS field in Europe among the scientific and industrial community The inflatable heat shields can be considered as a fundamental mean to both decelerate and protect the space system during re-entry, thus providing key contribution to the functions of re-entry and descent, therefore EFESTO-2 will satisfactorily fulfil the objectives of the HE call “HORIZON-CL4-2021-SPACE-01-23” contributing to the part of the scope strictly related with entry/descent systems and solutions. In particular EFESTO-2 will contribute to: -expansion of commercial space transportation offer and services because maturation of Inflatable Heat Shields will allow their applicability to recovery and reuse of launcher’s stages -execution of design and performance studies as well as business cases analysis with ad-hoc work packages -maturation of relevant technologies up to TRL 5-6 through a ground test campaign -matching the EU Green Deal objective because maturation of Inflatable Heat Shields technology can replace propulsion devices in end-of-life disposal/de-orbiting of space systems, hence reducing environmental impact of space debris as well as of chemical propulsion.