GMV wins a contract with ESA to study the orbital neighbourhood of a space mission

Operational collision avoidance (CA) is traditionally performed for a time interval of up to two weeks into the future at maximum. As a result, significant changes in the number of close approaches outside of this time horizon can come as a surprise to operators triggering sudden increase in the workload needed for the preparation of collision mitigation strategies and/or the coordination with the other objects’ operator, in case they are operational. Furthermore, the growth in traffic in LEO, fuelled by the emergence of large constellations and the launch of small satellites, together with the continuing occurrence of fragmentations (deliberate or not) requires operators to gain an increased and faster awareness of their orbital neighbourhood. This ranges from the capability of quickly estimating the impact of a newly detected fragmentations to the assessment of expected conjunction increase due to changes in the manoeuvring patterns of satellites in proximity. 

It is therefore clear that better awareness of the near and mid-term collision avoidance risk is needed.

GMV, in cooperation with Politecnico di Milano, has won a contract with ESA to develop the mathematical models and an operational application needed to monitor and predict the frequency and sudden changes of collision risks for a spacecraft mission in a time horizon going from a couple of weeks to several months in the future, considering elements such as debris cloud evolution, active satellites pattern of life, space traffic predictions or inference metrics. 

The development phase of the project will last 16 months, followed by a 6-months warranty period. GMV will be responsible for the overall management of the activity and for the development of the operational tool,  as well as  for the collection of historical data to feed the models and for the validation of the tool. At the same time, the company will provide its expert support in operational CA activities. Politecnico di Milano will derive the mathematical models that will be implemented in the operational tool.

This is a big achievement for GMV since it represents the first contract awarded by ESA as prime contractor from France and it strengthens our position in the SST domain, while allowing GMV to continue developing technology to ensure the sustainability of space operations.