Over the past reporting period, the HYADES team has transformed an ambitious idea into tangible scientific and technical progress. To address the mission’s diverse goals, four working groups were established.
The astronomy group built detailed models of cometary hydrogen and deuterium comae, capturing the complex physics of water photodissociation and velocity distributions of atoms. They also created a powerful data simulator that generates realistic synthetic images through the eyes of HYADES, including instrumental effects and noise, and complemented it with a stochastic detector model reproducing how photons are converted into electronic signals. These tools allow us to test data-analysis pipelines long before the satellite flies. Parallel work with archival Hubble data highlighted the limitations of empirical methods, reinforcing the need for our own advanced models.
In physics, the focus was on developing the satellite’s unique gas absorption unit. Laboratory infrastructure was constructed, including a dedicated Lyman-alpha port at the national synchrotron facility and new vacuum facilities. A breakthrough was achieved when the team pioneered application of a novel hydrogen-dissociation technique, which is more efficient, consumes less power, and promises far longer lifetimes — making it a game-changer for ultraviolet space instrumentation.
Engineering activities culminated in the successful Mission Definition Review, performed with Creotech Instruments SA and following ESA’s rigorous ECSS standards. This milestone delivered a full set of core mission documents: requirements, payload concepts, and operational scenarios, all formally validated by external experts.
Together, these achievements demonstrate that HYADES is not only scientifically innovative but also technologically ahead of the state of the art, paving the way toward world first orbital telescope mission dedicated to transformative planetary science.
