Space Research Activities at the Centre for Energy Research supported by ONLYOFFICE

Collaboration with consortium partners and subcontractors is organized with ONLYOFFICE Docs in combination with Nextcloud at the Space Research Department of the Centre for Energy Research, Budapest, Hungary. Attila Hirn, head of the department and R&D manager of the Hungarian astronaut programme HUNOR, talks about his team’s experience.

About the Space Research Department of the Centre for Energy Research

The Space Research Department of the Centre for Energy Research (EK-UKL) in Budapest, Hungary has more than half a century heritage in developing space equipment, especially space dosimeter systems for estimating the dose to the astronauts from space radiation. The Pille thermoluminescent dosimeter system has been operating on board the International Space Station as part of the service dosimetry system since 2003.

It was a great recognition at the end of 2021 that the international consortium led by EK-UKL won the tender for developing and manufacturing the Internal Dosimeter Array (IDA) experimental module, the first ever European internal scientific payload, for the Gateway space station in lunar orbit. This was followed by winning the opportunity of developing a space dosimetry telescope for the Earth Return Orbiter, in the frame of the Mars Sample Return mission of NASA and European Space Agency (ESA).

In 2022, EK-UKL was also entrusted with the coordination of the Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) national research astronaut programme. R&D work at EK-UKL is performed according to the European space standards (European Cooperation for Space Standardization, ECSS).

Why ONLYOFFICE

EK-UKL’s consortium partners, contractors and subcontractors range from space agencies (DLR, ESA, JAXA, NASA) to space industry companies (Airbus Defence and Space, AxiomSpace, REMRED Ltd., etc.).

Collaboration with such entities requires a secure and location-independent tool for sharing project documentation, data packages, and measurement data. ONLYOFFICE undoubtedly has the advantage of being compatible with Microsoft Office and can be easily integrated into Nextcloud, which significantly facilitates everyday work.

File and document registers, department’s financial registers, project registers are all maintained in ONLYOFFICE. Recently, the electronic Review Item Discrepancy system for the HUNOR Research and Development Sub-Programme project reviews has been elaborated.

Attila Hirn, head of the Space Research Department at the Centre for Energy Research:

Each day, hundreds of e-mails land in our e-mail inboxes. A great advantage of ONLYOFFICE integrated into Nextcloud is that we no longer need to send tens of megabytes of documents via e-mail. Significant delays caused by e-mail exchanges can be also omitted this way. Without ONLYOFFICE, that could be hardly managed at the accelerated pace of the 21st century.