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.

The main objective of BETTER is to implement an EO Big Data intermediate service layer devoted to harnessing the potential of the Copernicus and Sentinel European EO data directly from the needs of the users. BETTER aims to go beyond the implementation of generic Big Data tools and incorporate those tools with user experience, expertise and resources to deliver an integrated Big Data intermediate service layer. This layer will deliver customized solutions denominated Data Pipelines for large volume EO and non-EO datasets access, retrieval, processing, analysis and visualisation. The BETTER solutions will focus in addressing the full data lifecycle needs associated with EO Big Data to bring more downstream users to the EO market and maximise exploitation of the current and future Copernicus data and information services. BETTER developments will be driven by a large number of Big Data Challenges to be set forward by the users deeply involved in addressing the Key Societal Challenges. The World Food Programme, the European Union Satellite Centre and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Zurich working in the areas of Food Security, Secure Societies and GeoHazards will be the challenge promoters. During the project each promoter will introduce 9 challenges, 3 in each project year, with an additional nine brought by the “Extending the market” task, in a total of 36 challenges. The Data Pipelines will be deployed on top of a mature EO data and service support ecosystem which has been under consolidation from previous R&D activities. The ecosystem and its further development in the scope of BETTER rely on the experience and versatility of the consortium team responsible for service/tool development from DEIMOS and Terradue. This is complemented by Fraunhofer Institute’s experience in Big Data systems, which brings to the consortium transversal knowledge extraction technologies and tools that will help bridge the current gap between the EO and ICT sectors.