Within the next few decades it is hoped that several space missions will be able to travel to other planets, such as Mars, and bring material back. One of the potential risks of such missions is that the returned material may contain extant life, which could then interact with terrestrial life, with possibly dire consequences. Although the likelihood of such an event occurring is very small, it is potentially so devastating that it is necessary to assure that any returned material is fully sterilised on arrival on Earth. One concern is that the sterilisation procedure may subtly change the samples, and so prevent the scientists who study them from getting the correct picture about the true pristine nature of the returned rock. We are therefore planning a programme of research to investigate how various possible sterilisation protocols (e.g. irradiation) affects rocks, by measuring the characteristics of rocks similar to those we expect to find on mars, then sterilising them and re-measuring them. In this way we will be able to recommend suitable procedures for sterilisation that do not compromise them scientifically.

The general project aims are: - Promote careers in space science and engineering to KS3 & KS4 students aged 11-16 with a particular focus on 15 year olds who are making choices about A levels; - To teach students about ongoing activities in the exploration of Mars and about the Mars surface environment; - To launch up to 200 unique student made Mars experiments to an altitude with conditions analogous to that at the Martian surface (30km altitude) and get them to analyse the results; - To publicly promote the launch and project aftermath to further spread the message, and to lay the foundations for a recurring national program. The expected overall impact includes: - Communicating the benefits of space science and engineering careers directly to students via the distributed material to encourage uptake of maths and science A-levels; - Engaging students with the concept of Mars science and exploration by tasking them to design experiments that will test the response of materials to a Mars like environment, or investigate the conditions found there; - Engaging students with the daily activities of space scientists and engineers to get them to consider a similar career; - Engaging with teachers on Mars planetary science and the potential careers paths for their students who are interested in science and engineering; - Engaging with the public on current UK Mars exploration activities.

This proposal aims at studying new techniques for detection and classification of targets underwater using 3D and texture analysis. On simple seabed types such as flat sand, it is very easy to detect and classify targets. It becomes much more difficult when the seabed is either highly cluttered with rocky or coral structures, marine life such as seaweed or is of a complex nature (large rocky outcrops and sand dunes). In those areas, classical target detection and classification techniques fails as they tend to concentrate on the shape of the target, classically recovered using shadow analysis (the acoustic shadow is casted by the target on the seabed). On the other hand, the analysis of the target echo is difficult for classical high resolution sonars as they are susceptible to speckle noise and in general not resolved enough for classification. Detection and classification in such challenging scenarios can be improved by detectiing the targets as an outlier in the current texture field. This can be done using 2D or 3D texture measures but as most strong textures are due to the 3D nature of the seabed, we believe that 3D texture analysis will be more effective and therefore propose to focus on these. Classification can be addressed with the development of new higher resolution sonars (SAS) and new 3D sonars (Interferometric SAS / Side Scan). As resolution increases, the structure of the echo will become more apparent and techniques developed in the machine vision and pattern recognition communities can be used. This is the secondary objective of this proposal.

The vision of this project is to optimise the exploitation of space borne resources in future heterogeneous wireless comms systems by accelerating the deployment of new and higher mm-wave frequency bands for high data rate gateway links between satellite platforms and the terrestrial communication infrastructure. This will be achieved by virtue of a pioneering study that brings together expertise on wireless and satellite communication systems, mm-wave electronics and antennas, atmospheric propagation and digital channel modelling and characterisation. The urgent priority for new mm-wave bands in emerging sitcom systems is evidenced by ESA's TDP#5 mission involving a Q-band (38 GHz) beacon on board the ALPHASAT satellite, which provides a unique opportunity to experimentally characterise atmospheric fading at this frequency. Our world-leading consortium has exclusive access to all three UK-based receive ground stations for this mission as well as exclusive access to meteorological (incl. rain radar) and radiometric data at zero cost to the project.

Technology scaling has enabled fast advancement of computing architectures through high-density integration of components and cores, and the provision of systems on chip (SoC), e.g. NVIDIA Jetson, Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA, ARM big.LITTLE. However, such systems are becoming hot and more prone to failure and timing violations as clock speed limits are reached. Therefore, parts of SoCs must be turned off to stay within thermal limits ("dark silicon"). This shifts challenges away from making designs smaller, setting the new focus on systems that are ultra-low power, resilient and autonomous in their adaptation to anomalies, faults, timing violations and performance degradation. There is a significant increase in numbers of temporary faults caused by radiation, and permanent faults due to manufacturing defects and stress. ITRS (https://irds.ieee.org/) estimates significant device failure rates, e.g. due to wear-out, in the short term. Hence, a critical requirement for such systems is to effectively perform detection and analysis at runtime, within a minimal area and power overhead. This is at odds with current state-of-the-art, including error correcting codes (ECC), built-in-self-test (BIST), localized fault detection, and traditional modular redundancy strategies (TMR), all resulting in prohibitively high system overheads and an inability to adapt, locate or predict faults. In complex living organisms, the nervous system is a much more efficient and adaptive "subsystem" that detects environmental changes and anomalies that impact them by transmitting signals between different parts of the organism. The nervous system works in tandem with the endocrine system, triggering appropriate regulatory or repair responses. Nervous systems naturally scale up, adapt and operate autonomously in a de-centralised manner. In NERVOUS our vision is to rejuvenate modern electronic systems and particularly the way in which such systems are designed to act autonomously to become more reliable. The goal of NERVOUS is to develop a methodology for "self-aware" electronic systems with an embedded artificial nervous system that can sense its state and performance, and exploit the structure and computational power of these kinds of bio-inspired mechanisms for autonomous tolerance of faults. NERVOUS is an inter-disciplinary collaboration that brings together networks of spiking neurons with electronic systems, so that they form hardware platforms with inherently embedded artificial "nervous systems". This approach has never before been used to make the technology we all carry around in our pockets more efficient and reliable, making NERVOUS "blue-skies" research at the cutting edge of bio-inspired electronic systems design. To ensure feasibility, NERVOUS's research programme is built around a number of hardware demonstrators of increasing complexity. NERVOUS is making use of state-of-the-art UltraScale+ FPGAs for rapid prototyping of nervous system components and complementing with an electronic design environment. To ensure accessibility beyond the project, NERVOUS will develop a design methodology and an EDA tool supporting automatic integration and training of NERVOUS components with traditional circuit designs, allowing engineers to apply our technology without having to worry about the intricate details of electronic-neuron interfacing. NERVOUS will demonstrate this for digital FPGA designs at the HDL level in collaboration with Xilinx. To ensure scalability, we will verify and evaluate the NERVOUS methodology on a range of relevant large-scale processor designs provided by our partner ARM, who will also advise on fault performance requirements. To ensure a route to industrial application and exploitation, we will demonstrate the NERVOUS methodology in the context of a real-word space application, e.g. space networking IP and modular spacecraft controller, through collaboration and secondments with our project partner TAS-UK.