Coordinated scheduling software for the EU SST sensors

Following a European open call for tenders GMV, European industrial leader in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST), has been awarded a new contract by the Spanish Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) to develop a coordinated scheduling software for planning and tasking the activities of the overall network of multinational sensors in the EU SST system.

To foster the development of the SST capability in Europe, the EU established in 2014 (through decision No. 541/2014/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of April 16, 2014) a Framework for Space Surveillance and Tracking Support. This Support Framework aims to develop an independent SSA/SST capability in Europe called EU SST. Since then, the incipient national SST capabilities in the countries within the EU SST consortium (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain since 2016, as well as Poland, Romania and Portugal since 2019) have been federated in a coordinated manner: EU SatCen acts as front desk for the SST services provided by the EU SST consortium.

This new project is part of the sensor planning and tasking activities within EU SST, under the responsibility of CDTI in Spain. Its main objective is to develop a single scheduling software to define a coordinated plan for the large network of SST sensors in the EU SST system. This includes radars, telescopes and SLR stations all over the world from all members of the EU SST consortium (as listed above). The new software, named COPLA, is a new development based on the GMV’s Senplanner SST sensors scheduler, which is currently used in the Spanish SST Operations Centre (S3TOC) to task the activities of the Spanish sensors contributing to the EU SST system. It is to be delivered to CDTI by March 2022 and has already passed in 2021 the first testing campaign, with fully satisfactory results.

GMV leads EU SST contracts in five countries (Spain, France, Germany, Poland, and Romania) and has additional capabilities and contracts in the UK and Portugal in the SST domain in Europe, working also for ESA and providing solutions and services in the commercial market through its proprietary focusoc Operations Centre. All in all, over 70 GMV engineers work at GMV on SSA/SST activities, making it the largest SSA/SST industry and team in Europe.