GMV provides pilot collision avoidance services for ESA’s Swarm mission

In October 2022, through the Space Debris Office (SDO) the European Space Agency (ESA) awarded a contract to GMV to provide Conjunction Assessment (CA) Services under a pilot regime to the three Swarm satellites, controlled by ESOC. These services, based on GMV’s commercial CA service Focusoc, are provided for test and evaluation in parallel and complementing the current operations and will provide SDO and the Swarm flight control team with all the needed information and resources to assess the service, operate safely and mitigate collision risk.

The service will be based on GMV’s state-of-the-art COTS software for collision avoidance, Closeap, as core processing infrastructure located at GMV facilities. This includes the most relevant capabilities and functionalities related with CA: close encounter prediction, estimation of the probability of collision, collision avoidance manoeuvre computation, etc. In addition, Space Situational Awareness (SSA) data is continuously updated, processed and augmented to include it in the analyses, by means of the use of GMV’s flight dynamics tools based on Focussuite COTS software. To set an example, all the orbits present in the American 18SDS SP high accuracy catalogue are daily processed and extended, and operational ephemeris are screened against them, thus providing augmented services. Additionally, other available orbit or Conjunction Data Message (CDM) are also processed.

GMV provides CA services to more than 10 operators and more than 80 satellites through the Focusoc service, finding EUTELSAT, OPTUS, JSAT or HISPASAT among its users. This contract aims at enhancing this service by benefitting from ESA’s feedback on the pilot service and paving the way for a potential future external service provision to ESA. The focus will be on the enhancement of existing and established collision avoidance processes at ESA, e.g. via the incorporation of new data sources to the system, such as telescope or radar observations, and the improvement of the performances of the service with a substantial benefit for the commercial users, especially in the LEO regime.

With this new project, GMV strengthens its position as European industrial leader in Space Situational Awareness (SSA), Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) and provision of institutional and commercial CA services in Europe.