Welcome to SpaceTech Ireland — a fast, Ireland-focused read on the space economy.

This week: How a Dublin-built AI tool won Irish scientists a front-row seat on Europe's mission to Mercury. Réaltra hardware moves closer to flight on Europe's Themis reusable rocket demonstrator, a €40m Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund call opens to space-relevant projects. Plus Space Week events, Sophie Adenot's return to Earth, and jobs at Mbryonics, Ubotica, Manna, Starlink and ESA.

Early in September, Caitriona Jackman sat in a conference room in Leuven, Belgium, watching a live link to mission control. Around her were scientists who had spent careers building towards that moment - in some cases, two decades. The Mercury Transfer Module, the propulsion stage that had carried BepiColombo on its eight-year journey from Earth, had just separated cleanly from the two science spacecraft it was built to deliver.

“Those are the real career highs,” she told SpaceTech Ireland. “Someone said, ‘Oh I wrote the proposal for it like 26 years ago.’”

Jackman leads the planetary research group at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. She was in Leuven for the Mercury 2026 conference, there as one of 11 guest investigators on BepiColombo, selected internationally by the European Space Agency and its Japanese counterpart JAXA.

Next month, Mercury’s gravity will capture the spacecraft and humans will get their most detailed view yet of the closest planet to the Sun. Jackman’s team will be among the first people anywhere to see what it finds.

Jackman was appointed a guest investigator on BepiColombo after responding to an Open Call run by ESA and JAXA last year. Eleven were selected from an oversubscribed international field. Each of the mission’s scientific instruments is run by an established team, mostly the people who helped design and build the hardware.

For scientists outside those teams, the guest investigator call is the only other formal route onto the mission. The DIAS application succeeded, Jackman said, because of a machine learning model developed by her PhD student Daragh Holman that can classify the magnetic and plasma regions around Mercury and predict what the spacecraft will encounter next.

"This guest investigatorship came about because we developed tools and data analysis methods that are useful to the team."

Selection gives the team early access to the data. "You're in that circle of trust," Jackman said. “That first group of people in the world who get the first look at the data as soon as it comes down from the spacecraft."

It also brings a seat at the science working team meetings. "It's really important for just being at the coalface and being in a position to be involved in those big scientific breakthroughs, to have first peek."

BepiColombo's sensors can take several measurements per second of the magnetic field and charged particles around Mercury. But the spacecraft can send only a fraction of that data home and anything it can't transmit before the mission ends is gone. BepiColombo will crash into Mercury’s surface when its work is done. “You have to be super selective of what you get,” Jackman said.

What to prioritise depends on where the spacecraft is. Mercury has its own magnetic bubble - a magnetosphere, the smallest in the solar system - and as BepiColombo passes through it, conditions shift between distinct regions. Holman trained his model on data from NASA's MESSENGER mission, which orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, and from BepiColombo's own earlier flybys. The model learns to recognise those regions.

The model could help scientists identify where the most valuable measurements are likely to be made, and potentially guide decisions about which data to prioritise for transmission to Earth.

“If we have a tool that can predict what kind of regions of field and charged particles we're sampling, we then know what's most interesting,” Jackman said. “When you're flying in that region, we want to see what's happening once a minute. Or when you're flying in that region, we want to see what's happening once a second. And so that really helps us with making smart, on-board decisions - like scientifically motivated decisions.”

MESSENGER was the only previous spacecraft to orbit Mercury. It showed that Mercury's magnetosphere changes far faster than Earth's. Space weather events that take hours on Earth play out at Mercury in two to three minutes. “It's like blink and you miss it,” Jackman said.

BepiColombo carries two spacecraft. MPO (Mercury Planetary Orbiter) will orbit close to Mercury; JAXA’s Mio (Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter) will spend much of its time outside the magnetic bubble, in the solar wind. That lets scientists watch the solar wind and Mercury's response to it at the same time.

“If you only have one spacecraft, you're measuring the consequences of space weather, but you're slightly flying blind in terms of knowing the full picture.” It will be the first time two spacecraft have studied Mercury at the same time.

The science working team meets in Lisbon in the first week of November. On 21 November, Mercury's gravity captures the spacecraft. On 9 and 10 December, MPO and Mio separate from each other and take up their independent orbits.

BepiColombo is not the only major mission DIAS is involved in. Jackman's group is also a co-investigator on JUICE, the ESA mission currently en route to Jupiter. Other DIAS researchers have worked on Solar Orbiter and JWST.

None of these roles came from building hardware. The JUICE involvement came from the group's expertise in understanding how spacecraft become electrically charged in space.

“We didn't build any of JUICE, but we know the effect of what the charging is going to do for them.”

The guest investigatorship on BepiColombo came from Holman's tool. “Instrument building is just one way to be involved in huge telescopes and huge spacecraft,” Jackman said.

Ireland has “a huge knowledge base in software and mission design and in downstream” - the applications and services built around space technology and data.

Europe’s Themis reusable rocket demonstrator has completed its second wet-dress rehearsal in Sweden, a step towards its first short ‘hop’ flight. Dublin-based Réaltra, which highlighted the successful test last week, has supplied an HD camera and space-ready Ethernet network switch that have been integrated into Themis through the EU-funded SALTO programme.

The camera is designed to record the vehicle during flight, while the switch connects onboard systems and handles data. Themis is being developed to demonstrate technologies that could eventually allow European rocket stages to land vertically and be reused, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

🚀 Space Week Ireland runs until Saturday, with events around the country aimed at encouraging students and young people into the sector. A careers event at UCD on Wednesday outlined routes into the European Space Agency, while the Irish Student Space Conference takes place at MTU in Cork on Thursday, bringing students and recent graduates together with researchers and industry. The programme is part of World Space Week, which runs to 10 October.

🚀 ESA ministers will meet in Rome on 15 December to decide how far Europe should go in building its own capacity for exploration. Options include European astronaut transport, a continued presence in low Earth orbit after the International Space Station is retired, a larger role on the Moon and independent access to space. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told the International Astronautical Congress this week that the moment "could be historic". The national space agencies on the panel with him came from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and Slovenia. Ireland was not represented. SpaceTech Ireland will look at what is at stake for Ireland ahead of the Rome meeting.

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€40m disruptive technology fund open. Applications are open for Ireland's eighth Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund call, relevant to space technologies including photonics, AI and advanced materials. Minimum funding requests are €1.5m. Partner-matching events take place in Mullingar on 13 October and Dublin on 15 October. Deadline: 3 February 2027.
Enterprise Ireland

ESA seeks space-enabled solutions for major companies. A new ESA contest invites businesses to develop satellite-enabled solutions for challenges set by Coca-Cola, P&G, Galp and Tomorrowland, covering water, renewable energy, logistics and other areas. Selected teams gain access to corporate partners to test their ideas. Deadline: 4 November.
ESA Space Solutions | Details

PICTURE: ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and her Crew-12 crewmates are due to splash down off the California coast today, Thursday, at 16:34 Irish time, after nearly eight months on the International Space Station. The crew undocked aboard SpaceX Dragon Freedom on Wednesday at 13:05 Irish time. Adenot will head to ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne for post-flight checks and rehabilitation. Her εpsilon mission set a new European single-flight duration record and included the first spacewalk by a French woman.

Next week: more funding, contracts, and careers in Ireland's space economy.

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