Salma Fahmy, team member on the Solar Orbiter Project Office at ESTEC Credit: ESA/D. Lakey
ESA’s Solar Orbiter team have been busy for the last few months preparing for the first ‘Spacecraft Validation Test’ – referred to in engineering-speak as ‘SVT-0’ – which is the first opportunity the mission control team to establish a data link to the actual flight hardware and send commands to the spacecraft.
The mission controllers are working at ESA’s ESOC control centre in Darmstadt this week, joined by representatives from the mission’s two instrument teams, the ESA Project Team based at ESTEC in the Netherlands and the AirbusDS-UK industrial team. The spacecraft itself is located in Stevenage, UK.
Yesterday and today, the team will validate flight control procedures and the database that describes the commands and telemetry of the spacecraft. It’s a lot of work but at the end of it, a real milestone will have been passed.
Spacecraft Operations Engineer Daniel Lakey explains, “This is the culmination of months of work by us, our colleagues across ESA and, of course, the teams at AirbusDS-UK, who are leading the build of the spacecraft and are supporting these test connections from the cleanroom in Stevenage.”
“We have a list of over 250 procedures that we will methodically go through, to ensure they are ready for flight. This first contact with the real spacecraft is an exciting step after having spent years working on paper!”
More tests are planned over the coming months, and next year.
#Solo
#ESOC
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Salma Fahmy, team member on the Solar Orbiter Project Office at ESTEC Credit: ESA/D. Lakey
ESA’s Solar Orbiter team have been busy for the last few months preparing for the first ‘Spacecraft Validation Test’ – referred to in engineering-speak as ‘SVT-0’ – which is the first opportunity the mission control team to establish a data link to the actual flight hardware and send commands to the spacecraft.
The mission controllers are working at ESA’s ESOC control centre in Darmstadt this week, joined by representatives from the mission’s two instrument teams, the ESA Project Team based at ESTEC in the Netherlands and the AirbusDS-UK industrial team. The spacecraft itself is located in Stevenage, UK.
Yesterday and today, the team will validate flight control procedures and the database that describes the commands and telemetry of the spacecraft. It’s a lot of work but at the end of it, a real milestone will have been passed.
Spacecraft Operations Engineer Daniel Lakey explains, “This is the culmination of months of work by us, our colleagues across ESA and, of course, the teams at AirbusDS-UK, who are leading the build of the spacecraft and are supporting these test connections from the cleanroom in Stevenage.”
“We have a list of over 250 procedures that we will methodically go through, to ensure they are ready for flight. This first contact with the real spacecraft is an exciting step after having spent years working on paper!”
More tests are planned over the coming months, and next year.
An aerial view of ESTEC from this year. Credit: ESA
The International Space University’s Space Studies Program will officially open today at ESA in the Netherlands. The nine-week programme will see more than 130 participants representing 37 nationalities take part in lectures, workshops and team projects to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of all aspects of the space industry.
This year’s ISU programme is co-hosted by the Technical University Delft and the Netherlands Space Office, in close cooperation with ESA and Leiden University.
Two groups of participants will focus in particular on issues of space safety and sustainability as they prepare project reports on the role space should play in human adaptation to global climate change and on new ideas for the removal of space debris from Earth orbit using ecologically sound technology.
Looking ahead to sustainable innovation
Omar Hatamleh Credit: ISU/NitzanZohar
“Working with young professionals reminds us all of the need to keep space sustainable for the generations to come,” says Omar Hatamleh, ISU’s Director of the Space Studies Program. “We look ahead to a future of great innovation and technology, but we also realise the importance of making those great advances available to everyone and to make them sustainable over the long term.”
The space debris project will examine some of the proposals by space agencies and commercial companies that include the deorbiting of defunct satellites, moving them to safer orbits or salvaging them for reuse on other satellites or spacecraft, before composing a plan for an original mission. The participants at ISU come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences and will be encouraged to bring new approaches to the problem.
Rüdiger Jehn Credit: ESA/Euronews
“I’m looking forward to seeing exciting new ideas from the participants in the project,” says team project co-chair Rüdiger Jehn, who is also Co-Manager for Near-Earth Objects within ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Programme.
“We need to guarantee the long-term safety and security of space operations, so that all of the generations to come can benefit from knowledge we gain from space data. Developing awareness of the issue and good ideas for addressing it is really important for everyone with an interest in space.”
Looking at key risks of climate change
The host nation of the Netherlands has a particular interest in another of the team projects, as it looks at two key risks of climate change – flooding and diminished air quality. Lying at or below sea level, the Dutch interest in flood mitigation is clear, while scientists from the Netherlands were also key in developing the Tropomi instrument measuring air quality on board the Sentinel 5P satellite launched last year.
“We welcome participants from many countries to their summer of space in the Netherlands this year,” says Erik Laan, co-chair of the team project on adaptation from space for climate change. “We are interested in understanding how climate change affects different environments and ecosystems, and how our knowledge from space can help us all to minimise the impacts of a changing climate for people on the ground. This international group will allow us to explore new ideas for what will be our common future.”
The opening ceremony of the Space Studies Program will be attended by HM the King of the Netherlands and addressed by ESA Director General Jan Wörner. The ceremony is available to view on ISU’s YouTube channel.
Today’s post contributed by Ruth McAvinia. Ruth is an ATG-Europe editor for ESA and a member of the global faculty of ISU.
An aerial view of ESTEC from this year. Credit: ESA
The International Space University’s Space Studies Program will officially open today at ESA in the Netherlands. The nine-week programme will see more than 130 participants representing 37 nationalities take part in lectures, workshops and team projects to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of all aspects of the space industry.
This year’s ISU programme is co-hosted by the Technical University Delft and the Netherlands Space Office, in close cooperation with ESA and Leiden University.
Two groups of participants will focus in particular on issues of space safety and sustainability as they prepare project reports on the role space should play in human adaptation to global climate change and on new ideas for the removal of space debris from Earth orbit using ecologically sound technology.
Looking ahead to sustainable innovation
Omar Hatamleh Credit: ISU/NitzanZohar
“Working with young professionals reminds us all of the need to keep space sustainable for the generations to come,” says Omar Hatamleh, ISU’s Director of the Space Studies Program. “We look ahead to a future of great innovation and technology, but we also realise the importance of making those great advances available to everyone and to make them sustainable over the long term.”
The space debris project will examine some of the proposals by space agencies and commercial companies that include the deorbiting of defunct satellites, moving them to safer orbits or salvaging them for reuse on other satellites or spacecraft, before composing a plan for an original mission. The participants at ISU come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences and will be encouraged to bring new approaches to the problem.
Rüdiger Jehn Credit: ESA/Euronews
“I’m looking forward to seeing exciting new ideas from the participants in the project,” says team project co-chair Rüdiger Jehn, who is also Co-Manager for Near-Earth Objects within ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Programme.
“We need to guarantee the long-term safety and security of space operations, so that all of the generations to come can benefit from knowledge we gain from space data. Developing awareness of the issue and good ideas for addressing it is really important for everyone with an interest in space.”
Looking at key risks of climate change
The host nation of the Netherlands has a particular interest in another of the team projects, as it looks at two key risks of climate change – flooding and diminished air quality. Lying at or below sea level, the Dutch interest in flood mitigation is clear, while scientists from the Netherlands were also key in developing the Tropomi instrument measuring air quality on board the Sentinel 5P satellite launched last year.
“We welcome participants from many countries to their summer of space in the Netherlands this year,” says Erik Laan, co-chair of the team project on adaptation from space for climate change. “We are interested in understanding how climate change affects different environments and ecosystems, and how our knowledge from space can help us all to minimise the impacts of a changing climate for people on the ground. This international group will allow us to explore new ideas for what will be our common future.”
The opening ceremony of the Space Studies Program will be attended by HM the King of the Netherlands and addressed by ESA Director General Jan Wörner. The ceremony is available to view on ISU’s YouTube channel.
Today’s post contributed by Ruth McAvinia. Ruth is an ATG-Europe editor for ESA and a member of the global faculty of ISU.
A special, high-level youth and space panel will be held at UNISPACE+50 in Vienna on 19 June, including astronaut Scott Kelly, the UN’s ‘Champion for Space’. The panel will provide a forum to discuss technical advancements and findings in space and new opportunities for society, focussing, as the title implies, on young people!
We asked several young Europeans working at ESA for their perspective on the future and what they hope to see in coming years.
Aybike Demirsan
Hometown: Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Work: Young Graduate Trainee at ESA working on software for the Cluster mission
Aybike Demirsan
Two years ago, I entered ESA’s Young Graduate Trainee programme with a position at the Agency’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany. I am working on the Cluster mission, comprising four structurally identical spacecraft that fly in formation to measure the solar wind’s effects on Earth’s magnetosphere.
My job, thanks to my background in computer science, is to reengineer the mission’s monitoring tool, so that it would be easier for the flight control team to monitor the upcoming contacts between our spacecraft and the ground stations. The tool employs a simple visual timeline, with many more functionalities than before, to make our lives as spacecraft operations engineers and spacecraft controllers easier.
I also received training on every subsystem of the spacecraft and learned how to operate spacecraft and how to deal with anomalies, which has been a great journey.
However, it’s not only what we do that fascinates me, but also the way we do it. Never before have I worked with such a diverse crowd of people, and as well I have never before worked in such a peaceful, nourishing environment where knowledge is shared, help is always offered and there is belief and trust in others and yourself to do your job with your best effort. For space in the future, I think youth today can look forward to worldwide collaboration and to overcoming artificial human-created borders!
Artur Scholz
Hometown: Erlangen, Germany
Work: Spacecraft Operations Engineer at ESA working on the Cluster and JUICE missions
Artur Scholz
For space in future, youth today should most look forward to work together openly, with a focus on sharing and collaboration.
The spirit of open source, which comes from the software world, should be applied to all areas of space exploration – because what we need to truly advance access to space is to allow everyone to get involved!
Dr Francesca Letizia
Hometown: Cagliari, Italy
Work: Space Debris Engineer at ESA working on assessing compliance with space debris mitigation guidelines
Francesca Letizia
There are three main aspects of future space activities that I find exciting. The first one is related to exploration: In the upcoming years, we will witness increasing efforts to send astronauts to Mars and, in general, beyond low Earth orbit. Several projects – like the Lunar Orbiing Platform – Gateway and Moon Village – are evaluating extended human presence in orbits much more distant from Earth than the current International Space Station. These initiatives could contribute to a deeper understanding of the limits of the human body (and mind) in space and how to handle these.
Another interesting field is the development of planet-hunter missions, such as NASA’s Kepler spacecraft now in orbit and the planned ESA Plato and Cheops missions. The goal of these spacecraft is to find planets outside our Solar System and, in particular, to identify planets with a habitable environment. The findings of these missions are incredibly fascinating as they shed light on where life could have developed outside of Earth.
Finally, in the future, space will be more and more an enabler of new technology and applications. This is already happening right now with navigation services such as GPS and could be even more exploited and integrated thanks to the improved accuracy offered by Galileo. Other opportunities are offered by the processing of satellite images in fields such as agriculture or monitoring of land and water use.
Adam Vigneron
Hometown: Wilcox, Saskatchewan, Canada
Work: Navigation Engineer, on contract from Telespazio VEGA Deutschland, at ESA’s Navigation Support Office
Adam Vigneron Credit: J. Martin
My work in the Navigation Support Office has given me a profound example of the way in which space technology is an integral part of our everyday life. The work I do now inspires me to dream of a future where the line between space and daily life continues to blur…
For fifty years, uncrewed spaceflight has been a one-way trip. Two related mission families, active debris removal (ADR) and on-orbit servicing (OOS), are looking to turn this trip on its head. Briefly, ADR involves the removal of dead satellites from useful orbits, while OOS includes the refuelling and repairing of satellites already in orbit.
After numerous stops and starts, rumblings are happening in all the right places. Technology demonstrations of advanced robotics are ongoing on the International Space Station, proving technologies for fuel transfer and battery replacement. It looks as though the world’s first ADR mission, e.Deorbit, will gain attention at next year’s ESA Ministerial Council. Discussions continue at UNCOPUOS, the UN body which allows countries to agree on standards and norms for the peaceful use of outer space. Industrial players around the world are jockeying for position as this market emerges. All the while, valuable orbits in LEO and GEO are slowly but steadily filling up with active satellites and debris alike.
ADR/OOS promise an economically viable revolution in space activities to which today’s globally-minded, engaged youth are well-suited. There is a lot of work to be done, but with determination, we can make these missions come to life and change the way we look at space itself by making in-space repair as everyday ordinary as satellite navigation is today.
Editor’s note
Find out more about the misisons and activities mentioned above:
A special, high-level youth and space panel will be held at UNISPACE+50 in Vienna on 19 June, including astronaut Scott Kelly, the UN’s ‘Champion for Space’. The panel will provide a forum to discuss technical advancements and findings in space and new opportunities for society, focussing, as the title implies, on young people!
We asked several young Europeans working at ESA for their perspective on the future and what they hope to see in coming years.
Aybike Demirsan
Hometown: Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Work: Young Graduate Trainee at ESA working on software for the Cluster mission
Aybike Demirsan
Two years ago, I entered ESA’s Young Graduate Trainee programme with a position at the Agency’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany. I am working on the Cluster mission, comprising four structurally identical spacecraft that fly in formation to measure the solar wind’s effects on Earth’s magnetosphere.
My job, thanks to my background in computer science, is to reengineer the mission’s monitoring tool, so that it would be easier for the flight control team to monitor the upcoming contacts between our spacecraft and the ground stations. The tool employs a simple visual timeline, with many more functionalities than before, to make our lives as spacecraft operations engineers and spacecraft controllers easier.
I also received training on every subsystem of the spacecraft and learned how to operate spacecraft and how to deal with anomalies, which has been a great journey.
However, it’s not only what we do that fascinates me, but also the way we do it. Never before have I worked with such a diverse crowd of people, and as well I have never before worked in such a peaceful, nourishing environment where knowledge is shared, help is always offered and there is belief and trust in others and yourself to do your job with your best effort. For space in the future, I think youth today can look forward to worldwide collaboration and to overcoming artificial human-created borders!
Artur Scholz
Hometown: Erlangen, Germany
Work: Spacecraft Operations Engineer at ESA working on the Cluster and JUICE missions
Artur Scholz
For space in future, youth today should most look forward to work together openly, with a focus on sharing and collaboration.
The spirit of open source, which comes from the software world, should be applied to all areas of space exploration – because what we need to truly advance access to space is to allow everyone to get involved!
Dr Francesca Letizia
Hometown: Cagliari, Italy
Work: Space Debris Engineer at ESA working on assessing compliance with space debris mitigation guidelines
Francesca Letizia
There are three main aspects of future space activities that I find exciting. The first one is related to exploration: In the upcoming years, we will witness increasing efforts to send astronauts to Mars and, in general, beyond low Earth orbit. Several projects – like the Lunar Orbiing Platform – Gateway and Moon Village – are evaluating extended human presence in orbits much more distant from Earth than the current International Space Station. These initiatives could contribute to a deeper understanding of the limits of the human body (and mind) in space and how to handle these.
Another interesting field is the development of planet-hunter missions, such as NASA’s Kepler spacecraft now in orbit and the planned ESA Plato and Cheops missions. The goal of these spacecraft is to find planets outside our Solar System and, in particular, to identify planets with a habitable environment. The findings of these missions are incredibly fascinating as they shed light on where life could have developed outside of Earth.
Finally, in the future, space will be more and more an enabler of new technology and applications. This is already happening right now with navigation services such as GPS and could be even more exploited and integrated thanks to the improved accuracy offered by Galileo. Other opportunities are offered by the processing of satellite images in fields such as agriculture or monitoring of land and water use.
Adam Vigneron
Hometown: Wilcox, Saskatchewan, Canada
Work: Navigation Engineer, on contract from Telespazio VEGA Deutschland, at ESA’s Navigation Support Office
Adam Vigneron Credit: J. Martin
My work in the Navigation Support Office has given me a profound example of the way in which space technology is an integral part of our everyday life. The work I do now inspires me to dream of a future where the line between space and daily life continues to blur…
For fifty years, uncrewed spaceflight has been a one-way trip. Two related mission families, active debris removal (ADR) and on-orbit servicing (OOS), are looking to turn this trip on its head. Briefly, ADR involves the removal of dead satellites from useful orbits, while OOS includes the refuelling and repairing of satellites already in orbit.
After numerous stops and starts, rumblings are happening in all the right places. Technology demonstrations of advanced robotics are ongoing on the International Space Station, proving technologies for fuel transfer and battery replacement. It looks as though the world’s first ADR mission, e.Deorbit, will gain attention at next year’s ESA Ministerial Council. Discussions continue at UNCOPUOS, the UN body which allows countries to agree on standards and norms for the peaceful use of outer space. Industrial players around the world are jockeying for position as this market emerges. All the while, valuable orbits in LEO and GEO are slowly but steadily filling up with active satellites and debris alike.
ADR/OOS promise an economically viable revolution in space activities to which today’s globally-minded, engaged youth are well-suited. There is a lot of work to be done, but with determination, we can make these missions come to life and change the way we look at space itself by making in-space repair as everyday ordinary as satellite navigation is today.
Editor’s note
Find out more about the misisons and activities mentioned above:
Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta has been working at the European Space Agency since 1991 and she is currently Chief Diversity Officer.
Ersilia Vaudo | Credits: Zoe Vincent/Wired Italy
Today at Unispace+50, the role of women in space has been placed front and centre, and rightly so.
The topic of diversity and inclusiveness (D&I) has been recently placed high on ESA’s corporate agenda. Through this initiative, ESA intends to enhance its wealth of diversity, and at the same time ensure that the values and the objectives pursued through D&I actions become an inherent feature of the Agency’s policies and business practices.
Last September, as part of this effort, ESA’s commitment toward diversity and inclusiveness was made visible, reinforced and underlined in a policy statement that you read on ESA’s official website. The Agency’s final aim is to create and ensure a modern, inclusive working environment where people value diversity in teams, take others’ perspectives into account and feel comfortable being themselves – regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age or working experience, sexual orientation, physical or mental challenges, ethnicity or educational, religious or social background.
Actually, diversity is already a distinctive feature of ESA and is one of its greatest assets – same as for its international character. People from 22 European member states (plus Canada and Slovenia as Cooperating State and Associate State, respectively) – speaking more than 18 different languages – work together, discussing and solving problems every day by combining their different cultural backgrounds. It is that richness of diversity, in competences, skills and points of view that allows us to achieve results that could be impossible to reach on the effort of single nations. The Agency has put a renewed effort into striving to enhance the innovative perspectives brought in by a diverse and gender-balanced pool of talent.
Among the different activities undertaken to foster diversity and inclusiveness at ESA, a special focus has been put in ensuring that space jobs are increasingly attractive to women in ESA member states.
In fact, we observe that, although space is recognised as one of the most inspirational sectors in science and technology in Europe, and the number of girls in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) is growing in member states, applications from women to ESA are are only holding steady. In addition, if the situation in Europe is improving in terms of girls graduating in STEM fields, this is still a ‘boys’ club’.
Furthermore, in terms of perspectives, we see that the number of women decreases along the different steps of a STEM career. It becomes therefore clear that we need to challenge stereotypes, become more proactive in promoting space jobs and work for the right conditions for retaining and ensuring career perspectives to women.
ESA is part of a number of external networks with other international organisations to promote discussions on these issues, exchanging ideas as well on current measures and best practices. It is with this aim that ESA has established a network with member states on diversity and inclusiveness, is part of the ad-hoc EIROforumWorking Group on Diversity, and has initiated a collaboration with the OECD on the topic of gender and stereotypes in science. ESA is also corporate member of Women in Aerospace Europe.
Ersilia Vaudo | Credits: Zoe Vincent/Wired Italy
With the Agency facing a significant retirement wave coming over the next 10-15 years, this moment really represents the perfect occasion to project the ‘ESA of the future’ and to start injecting more diversity into the workforce.
ESA already has a long-standing commitment to promoting gender diversity and equal opportunities. Focusing on, and strongly committing to, the involvement of women in STEM is more important today than ever in order to continue and expand ESA’s enduring value – and enhance it in the future from a Space 4.0 perspective. In fact, in the next decades we will be more and more in need of a creative and diverse pool of talent to address challenges of the future.
With this overarching objective in mind, the Agency is now working to achieve measurable goals in terms of female recruitment and representation. For example, in terms of new recruitments we will be aiming at a minimum 30% of new positions filled by women by 2019. In addition, efforts have been put in place to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions, which is at ESA around 10%.
Furthermore, since the Agency receives a gender-balanced number of applications at the young-graduate level while the number of women interested in permanent jobs drops to about 20%, ESA is opening the early-career scheme also to people in their 30s with some years of working experience.
Finally, the Chief Diversity Officer and many of ESA’s female professionals regularly engage in branding and outreach activities to inspire girls and young women across Europe to enter STEM disciplines, encouraging in particular careers in science, engineering and space.
Indeed, at ESA we are sure that diversity will help us strengthen innovation, lessen resistance to change, obtain a broader understanding of societal needs, boost motivation, inspire people and foster knowledge sharing. Spurred on by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular SDGs that aims at equal opportunities for all women and girls, ESA has a major objective to inspire the young generation of girls to enter the STEM field and in particular to attract more women to the wealth of careers and jobs that space can offer.
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Guest post by Ersilia Vaudo
Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta has been working at the European Space Agency since 1991 and she is currently Chief Diversity Officer.
Ersilia Vaudo | Credits: Zoe Vincent/Wired Italy
Today at Unispace+50, the role of women in space has been placed front and centre, and rightly so.
The topic of diversity and inclusiveness (D&I) has been recently placed high on ESA’s corporate agenda. Through this initiative, ESA intends to enhance its wealth of diversity, and at the same time ensure that the values and the objectives pursued through D&I actions become an inherent feature of the Agency’s policies and business practices.
Last September, as part of this effort, ESA’s commitment toward diversity and inclusiveness was made visible, reinforced and underlined in a policy statement that you read on ESA’s official website. The Agency’s final aim is to create and ensure a modern, inclusive working environment where people value diversity in teams, take others’ perspectives into account and feel comfortable being themselves – regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age or working experience, sexual orientation, physical or mental challenges, ethnicity or educational, religious or social background.
Actually, diversity is already a distinctive feature of ESA and is one of its greatest assets – same as for its international character. People from 22 European member states (plus Canada and Slovenia as Cooperating State and Associate State, respectively) – speaking more than 18 different languages – work together, discussing and solving problems every day by combining their different cultural backgrounds. It is that richness of diversity, in competences, skills and points of view that allows us to achieve results that could be impossible to reach on the effort of single nations. The Agency has put a renewed effort into striving to enhance the innovative perspectives brought in by a diverse and gender-balanced pool of talent.
Among the different activities undertaken to foster diversity and inclusiveness at ESA, a special focus has been put in ensuring that space jobs are increasingly attractive to women in ESA member states.
In fact, we observe that, although space is recognised as one of the most inspirational sectors in science and technology in Europe, and the number of girls in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) is growing in member states, applications from women to ESA are are only holding steady. In addition, if the situation in Europe is improving in terms of girls graduating in STEM fields, this is still a ‘boys’ club’.
Furthermore, in terms of perspectives, we see that the number of women decreases along the different steps of a STEM career. It becomes therefore clear that we need to challenge stereotypes, become more proactive in promoting space jobs and work for the right conditions for retaining and ensuring career perspectives to women.
ESA is part of a number of external networks with other international organisations to promote discussions on these issues, exchanging ideas as well on current measures and best practices. It is with this aim that ESA has established a network with member states on diversity and inclusiveness, is part of the ad-hoc EIROforumWorking Group on Diversity, and has initiated a collaboration with the OECD on the topic of gender and stereotypes in science. ESA is also corporate member of Women in Aerospace Europe.
Ersilia Vaudo | Credits: Zoe Vincent/Wired Italy
With the Agency facing a significant retirement wave coming over the next 10-15 years, this moment really represents the perfect occasion to project the ‘ESA of the future’ and to start injecting more diversity into the workforce.
ESA already has a long-standing commitment to promoting gender diversity and equal opportunities. Focusing on, and strongly committing to, the involvement of women in STEM is more important today than ever in order to continue and expand ESA’s enduring value – and enhance it in the future from a Space 4.0 perspective. In fact, in the next decades we will be more and more in need of a creative and diverse pool of talent to address challenges of the future.
With this overarching objective in mind, the Agency is now working to achieve measurable goals in terms of female recruitment and representation. For example, in terms of new recruitments we will be aiming at a minimum 30% of new positions filled by women by 2019. In addition, efforts have been put in place to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions, which is at ESA around 10%.
Furthermore, since the Agency receives a gender-balanced number of applications at the young-graduate level while the number of women interested in permanent jobs drops to about 20%, ESA is opening the early-career scheme also to people in their 30s with some years of working experience.
Finally, the Chief Diversity Officer and many of ESA’s female professionals regularly engage in branding and outreach activities to inspire girls and young women across Europe to enter STEM disciplines, encouraging in particular careers in science, engineering and space.
Indeed, at ESA we are sure that diversity will help us strengthen innovation, lessen resistance to change, obtain a broader understanding of societal needs, boost motivation, inspire people and foster knowledge sharing. Spurred on by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular SDGs that aims at equal opportunities for all women and girls, ESA has a major objective to inspire the young generation of girls to enter the STEM field and in particular to attract more women to the wealth of careers and jobs that space can offer.
A tired but very happy Mars Express flight control team pulled shift through the night between 16 and 17 April, overseeing the successful reboot and recovery of ESA’s nearly 15-year-old Red Planet explorer following the installation of significant updates to the spacecraft’s operating system.
One online media channel, following the event via Twitter, reported: “The team behind the European Space Agency’s Mars Express were cock-a-hoop with delight last night after hitting the big red button to restart and install updates on the veteran orbiter.”
It’s true. We were!
Just like when your smartphone or tablet receives new software to improve its functionality and extend its life, Mars Express got an upgrade to enable it to keep flying despite the fact that several critical components (ring-laser gyros) are wearing out (see Mars Express V2.0 for details).
But unlike with your phone or tablet, this update was delivered across 144.6 million km of space.
There was a bit of tension in the Interplanetary Control Room at ESOC last night, especially between sending the reboot command at 19:15 CEST and waiting for the craft to restart and send a signal about an hour later.
Spacecraft operations engineers are naturally risk averse and prone to pessimism, and – rightly so – they hate just hanging around waiting for a possibly recalcitrant spacecraft to do what it’s been told.
But, if you followed @esaoperations via Twitter, you’ll know the expected signal came in around 20:15 CEST and the initial results were entirely good, which is to say, entirely as expected:
Receipt of the low-bitrate signal from #MarsExprsss is great news! This means the craft has rebooted. Now waiting for telemetry – onboard status info… #rday
That happy feeling when your phone restarts! Initial #MarsExpress status looks good! It is running on the new software & its systems appear to be operating as expected #Rday
The update from the team today confirms their initial reaction: the spacecraft is doing well and the newly updated software is working more or less as expected.
“Everything went according to plan with only minor issues,” says Spacecraft Operations Manager James Godfrey.
“Today, the team on shift is concentrating on reconfiguring the spacecraft into normal operating mode, testing functionalities and checking to see if anything fails to work with the new software.”
This testing and shakeout will continue for the next approximately 7 to 8 days, and the team expect to be able to switch the science instruments back on and return to routine observations by the end of April.
“Everyone at ESA did an excellent job in this entire upgrade effort,” says ESA Flight Director Michel Denis.
“It took a lot of work and coordination by the flight controllers, assisted by experts from flight dynamics, ground stations and software support as well as by our colleagues working on the Mars Express Science Operations team.”
“We have a spacecraft in excellent shape and promising many more years of exploration at Mars.”
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v
A tired but very happy Mars Express flight control team pulled shift through the night between 16 and 17 April, overseeing the successful reboot and recovery of ESA’s nearly 15-year-old Red Planet explorer following the installation of significant updates to the spacecraft’s operating system.
One online media channel, following the event via Twitter, reported: “The team behind the European Space Agency’s Mars Express were cock-a-hoop with delight last night after hitting the big red button to restart and install updates on the veteran orbiter.”
It’s true. We were!
Just like when your smartphone or tablet receives new software to improve its functionality and extend its life, Mars Express got an upgrade to enable it to keep flying despite the fact that several critical components (ring-laser gyros) are wearing out (see Mars Express V2.0 for details).
But unlike with your phone or tablet, this update was delivered across 144.6 million km of space.
There was a bit of tension in the Interplanetary Control Room at ESOC last night, especially between sending the reboot command at 19:15 CEST and waiting for the craft to restart and send a signal about an hour later.
Spacecraft operations engineers are naturally risk averse and prone to pessimism, and – rightly so – they hate just hanging around waiting for a possibly recalcitrant spacecraft to do what it’s been told.
But, if you followed @esaoperations via Twitter, you’ll know the expected signal came in around 20:15 CEST and the initial results were entirely good, which is to say, entirely as expected:
Receipt of the low-bitrate signal from #MarsExprsss is great news! This means the craft has rebooted. Now waiting for telemetry – onboard status info… #rday
That happy feeling when your phone restarts! Initial #MarsExpress status looks good! It is running on the new software & its systems appear to be operating as expected #Rday
The update from the team today confirms their initial reaction: the spacecraft is doing well and the newly updated software is working more or less as expected.
“Everything went according to plan with only minor issues,” says Spacecraft Operations Manager James Godfrey.
“Today, the team on shift is concentrating on reconfiguring the spacecraft into normal operating mode, testing functionalities and checking to see if anything fails to work with the new software.”
This testing and shakeout will continue for the next approximately 7 to 8 days, and the team expect to be able to switch the science instruments back on and return to routine observations by the end of April.
“Everyone at ESA did an excellent job in this entire upgrade effort,” says ESA Flight Director Michel Denis.
“It took a lot of work and coordination by the flight controllers, assisted by experts from flight dynamics, ground stations and software support as well as by our colleagues working on the Mars Express Science Operations team.”
“We have a spacecraft in excellent shape and promising many more years of exploration at Mars.”
Editor’s note: ESA’s Space Debris team have sent in a final update on the reentry of Tiangong-1.
As we posted earlier, around once a year, ESA takes part in a joint tracking campaign run by the Inter Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), which consists of experts from 13 space organisations such as NASA, Roscosmos, CNSA and European and other national agencies.
With the agreement of all members, Tiangong-1’s reentry was the mission selected for this year’s campaign.
During the now-completed campaign, participants pooled their predictions of the time window, as well as their respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources, with the aim of cross-verifying, cross-analysing and improving the prediction accuracy for all members.
Tiangong-1 seen at an altitude of about 161 km by the powerful TIRA research radar operated by the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR) near Bonn, Germany. Image acquired on the morning of 1 April 2018, during one of the craft’s final orbits. Credit: Fraunhofer FHR
Besides the IADC campaign, ESA also had an operational role: Throughout the past days it supplied its own predictions to national alert and civil protection centres of Member States.
Confirmation of this morning’s Tinagong-1 reentry was published by the US military, who issued a press release today at around 04:00 CEST.
They stated that reentry had occurred over the southern Pacific Ocean at approximately 5:16 p.m. (PST), which was 02:16 CEST – this was well within ESA’s earlier reentry forecast window, which ran from 23:00 UTC on 1 April to 03:00 UTC on 2 April (01:00 CEST to 05:00 CEST on 2 April).
“According to our experience, their assessment is very reliable,” says Holger Krag, Head of ESA’s Space Debris Office.
“This corresponds to a geographic latitude of 13.6 degrees South and 164.3 degrees West – near American Samoa in the Pacific, near the international date Line.
“Both time and location are well within ESA’s last prediction window.”
Holger notes that, afterwards, at 04:05 UTC (06:05 CEST), had Tiangong-1 still been in orbit, it would have become visible to the Fraunhofer FHR institute’s TIRA radar, located near Bonn. In fact, the team working at TIRA reported that the spacecraft was no longer visible, giving additional confirmation that it had reentered.
Indeed, data supplied by many a number of ESA partners were crucial to enable the space debris team to conduct their work. “We’d certainly like to thank all our partners who supported ESA throughout this campaign,” says Holger.
It’s interesting to note, from a European perspective, how limited our capabilities still are after all. Most of the data on space objects that ESA receives today comes from non-European sources.
Europe’s missing information
Commands for a debris avoidance manoeuvre being sent to ESA’s Swarm-B on 25 January 2017. Credit: ESA
“This illustrates again the dependence that Europe has on non-European sources of information to properly and accurately manage space traffic, detect reentries such as Tiangong-1 and track space debris that remains in orbit – which routinely threatens ESA, European and other national civil, meteorological, scientific, telecomm and navigation satellites,” says Holger.
The US military routinely warns ESA when one of the Agency’s satellites may be at risk for collision with a piece of space debris, an event that is happening with increasing frequency (see Anatomy of a debris incident).
Holger points out that Europe also lacks the means to independently confirm reentries the size of Tiangong-1, which occur almost weekly, by using, for example, an infrared tracking payload mounted on a geostationary satellite.
Space weather, too
He also mentions that, three days ago, solar-generated space weather gave us a surprise, when the Sun’s activity spontaneously dropped.
“This delayed the Tiangong-1 reentry by about half a day, and the orbit predictions initially assuming higher space-weather activity had to be recalculated.”
Concept for ESA’s future space weather monitoring mission at the Sun. Credit: ESA/A. Baker, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Earlier this year, ESA in cooperation with European industry began a multi-year study to examine a new mission (see “Where no mission has gone before“) that would continuously observe our Sun and provide crucial data that will help us improve our forecasts of solar activity and its effects on spacecraft, satellites in orbit and critical infrastructure on ground such as power grids and oil pipelines.
Concept for ESA’s future space debris surveillance system employing ground-based optical, radar and laser technology as well as in-orbit survey instruments. Credit: ESA/Alan Baker, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
“Today, everyone in Europe relies on the US military for space debris orbit data – we lack the radar network and other detectors needed to perform independent tracking and monitoring of objects in space,” says Holger.
“This is needed to allow meaningful European participation in the global efforts for space safety.”
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Editor’s note: ESA’s Space Debris team have sent in a final update on the reentry of Tiangong-1.
As we posted earlier, around once a year, ESA takes part in a joint tracking campaign run by the Inter Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), which consists of experts from 13 space organisations such as NASA, Roscosmos, CNSA and European and other national agencies.
With the agreement of all members, Tiangong-1’s reentry was the mission selected for this year’s campaign.
During the now-completed campaign, participants pooled their predictions of the time window, as well as their respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources, with the aim of cross-verifying, cross-analysing and improving the prediction accuracy for all members.
Tiangong-1 seen at an altitude of about 161 km by the powerful TIRA research radar operated by the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR) near Bonn, Germany. Image acquired on the morning of 1 April 2018, during one of the craft’s final orbits. Credit: Fraunhofer FHR
Besides the IADC campaign, ESA also had an operational role: Throughout the past days it supplied its own predictions to national alert and civil protection centres of Member States.
Confirmation of this morning’s Tinagong-1 reentry was published by the US military, who issued a press release today at around 04:00 CEST.
They stated that reentry had occurred over the southern Pacific Ocean at approximately 5:16 p.m. (PST), which was 02:16 CEST – this was well within ESA’s earlier reentry forecast window, which ran from 23:00 UTC on 1 April to 03:00 UTC on 2 April (01:00 CEST to 05:00 CEST on 2 April).
“According to our experience, their assessment is very reliable,” says Holger Krag, Head of ESA’s Space Debris Office.
“This corresponds to a geographic latitude of 13.6 degrees South and 164.3 degrees West – near American Samoa in the Pacific, near the international date Line.
“Both time and location are well within ESA’s last prediction window.”
Holger notes that, afterwards, at 04:05 UTC (06:05 CEST), had Tiangong-1 still been in orbit, it would have become visible to the Fraunhofer FHR institute’s TIRA radar, located near Bonn. In fact, the team working at TIRA reported that the spacecraft was no longer visible, giving additional confirmation that it had reentered.
Indeed, data supplied by many a number of ESA partners were crucial to enable the space debris team to conduct their work. “We’d certainly like to thank all our partners who supported ESA throughout this campaign,” says Holger.
It’s interesting to note, from a European perspective, how limited our capabilities still are after all. Most of the data on space objects that ESA receives today comes from non-European sources.
Europe’s missing information
Commands for a debris avoidance manoeuvre being sent to ESA’s Swarm-B on 25 January 2017. Credit: ESA
“This illustrates again the dependence that Europe has on non-European sources of information to properly and accurately manage space traffic, detect reentries such as Tiangong-1 and track space debris that remains in orbit – which routinely threatens ESA, European and other national civil, meteorological, scientific, telecomm and navigation satellites,” says Holger.
The US military routinely warns ESA when one of the Agency’s satellites may be at risk for collision with a piece of space debris, an event that is happening with increasing frequency (see Anatomy of a debris incident).
Holger points out that Europe also lacks the means to independently confirm reentries the size of Tiangong-1, which occur almost weekly, by using, for example, an infrared tracking payload mounted on a geostationary satellite.
Space weather, too
He also mentions that, three days ago, solar-generated space weather gave us a surprise, when the Sun’s activity spontaneously dropped.
“This delayed the Tiangong-1 reentry by about half a day, and the orbit predictions initially assuming higher space-weather activity had to be recalculated.”
Concept for ESA’s future space weather monitoring mission at the Sun. Credit: ESA/A. Baker, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Earlier this year, ESA in cooperation with European industry began a multi-year study to examine a new mission (see “Where no mission has gone before“) that would continuously observe our Sun and provide crucial data that will help us improve our forecasts of solar activity and its effects on spacecraft, satellites in orbit and critical infrastructure on ground such as power grids and oil pipelines.
Concept for ESA’s future space debris surveillance system employing ground-based optical, radar and laser technology as well as in-orbit survey instruments. Credit: ESA/Alan Baker, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
“Today, everyone in Europe relies on the US military for space debris orbit data – we lack the radar network and other detectors needed to perform independent tracking and monitoring of objects in space,” says Holger.
“This is needed to allow meaningful European participation in the global efforts for space safety.”
The US air force has confirmed the reentry of the Tiangong-1 spacecraft at about 02:16 CEST this morning over the southern Pacific Ocean. The location of the reentry was, by chance, not too far from the so-called South Pacific Ocean Unpopulated Area. The SPOUA has long been used by many space agencies including ESA, to dispose of end-of-life spacecraft through controlled reentries.
The air force wrote:
The JFSCC used the Space Surveillance Network sensors and their orbital analysis system to confirm Tiangong-1’s reentry, and to refine its prediction and ultimately provide more fidelity as the reentry time approached. This information is publicly-available on USSTRATCOM’s website www.Space-Track.org. The JFSCC also confirmed reentry through coordination with counterparts in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — U.S. Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC), through the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), confirmed Tiangong-1 reentered the Earth’s atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean at approximately 5:16 p.m. (PST) April 1, 2018.
The US air force has confirmed the reentry of the Tiangong-1 spacecraft at about 02:16 CEST this morning over the southern Pacific Ocean. The location of the reentry was, by chance, not too far from the so-called South Pacific Ocean Unpopulated Area. The SPOUA has long been used by many space agencies including ESA, to dispose of end-of-life spacecraft through controlled reentries.
The air force wrote:
The JFSCC used the Space Surveillance Network sensors and their orbital analysis system to confirm Tiangong-1’s reentry, and to refine its prediction and ultimately provide more fidelity as the reentry time approached. This information is publicly-available on USSTRATCOM’s website www.Space-Track.org. The JFSCC also confirmed reentry through coordination with counterparts in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — U.S. Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC), through the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), confirmed Tiangong-1 reentered the Earth’s atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean at approximately 5:16 p.m. (PST) April 1, 2018.
Main Control Room at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany. Credit: ESA/P. Shlyaev
With the reentry of Tiangong-1 now forecast to happen within a few hours, ESA’s formal role in the tracking campaign is winding down.
To recall, here’s what’s been happening.
Each year, about 100 tonnes of defunct satellites, uncontrolled spacecraft, spent upper stages and discarded items like instrument covers are dragged down by Earth’s upper atmosphere, ending their lives in flaming arcs across the sky.
While still in orbit, these and many other objects are tracked by a US military radar network, which shares the data with ESA, since Europe has no such capability of its own.
IADC campaign
Around once a year, ESA takes part in a joint tracking campaign run by the Inter Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, which consists of experts from 13 space organisations such as NASA, Roscosmos, CNSA and European and other national agencies.
During the campaign, participants have been pooling their predictions of the time window, as well as their respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources, with the aim of cross-verifying, cross-analysing and improving the prediction accuracy for all members.
ESA has been acting as host and administrator for the campaign, as it has done for the twenty previous IADC test campaigns since 1998. A special case for ESA was the campaign in 2013 during the uncontrolled reentry of ESA’s own GOCE satellite.
In addition to IADC campaigns, it is the task of ESA’s Space Debris team to generate its own independent predictions to ESA Member States and partner civil authorities around the globe.
The team mix in additional tracking information gleaned from European sources, such as Germany’s Fraunhofer research radar near Bonn or telescopes and other detectors run by a mix of institutional and private researchers, to generate reentry forecasts – a challenging and imprecise art.
We’ve been posting ESA’s reentry forecasts regularly here in the blog, and sharing the link via social media.
Getting close
In just a few hours, we’ll be well within the uncertainty window associated with this reentry, and we don’t expect any more forecast updates with any higher accuracy. In other words, we’re at the limit of what we can forecast.
Just over an hour ago, ESA’s space debris team provided their final estimate for reentry, forecasting a window of about four hours and centred on 01:07 UTC (03:07 CEST) on 2 April.
Final Tiangong-1 reentry window forecast for 18:00 CEST 1 April Credit: ESA
Final Tiangong-1 altitude decay forecast as of 18:00 CEST, 1 April Credit: ESA
“With our current understanding of the dynamics of the upper atmosphere and Europe’s limited sensors, we are not able to make very precise predictions,” says Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office.
Holger says that there will always be an uncertainty of a few hours in all predictions, and that even just a day or so before any reentry, like now, the uncertainty window can be very large.
“The high speeds of returning satellites mean they can travel thousands of kilometres during that time window, and that makes it very hard to predict a precise location of reentry.”
Spotting reentry
It is likely that the pending reentry of Tiangong-1 will occur over water, probably unseen by anyone (although possibly detected by radar or other sensors).
Tiangong-1 seen at an altitude of about 161 km by the powerful TIRA research radar operated by the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR) near Bonn, Germany. Image acquired on the morning of 1 April 2018, during one of the craft’s final orbits. Credit: Fraunhofer FHR
Our planet is a big place, mostly covered by water, and if any pieces survive the fiery reentry, these are unlikely to be found by anyone, sinking instead to the bottom of some ocean, or landing far from human habitation.
If you do witness the event, we’d certainly like to see any images you get.
These will help ESA’s debris team conduct their post-reentry analysis, and improve models and forecasts for future.
We need the time, your location (GPS coordinates fine) and – ideally – the direction in which you were facing when you saw any arc across the sky.
In the unlikely case that you find a piece of debris on ground, leave it alone and inform your local authorities.
Our final word comes from last week’s web article, which closed with an observation worth repeating:
Since 2009, ESA has been developing software, technologies and precursor systems to test a fully European network that would provide independent data on the risks from spaceflight.
“Today, everyone in Europe relies on the US military for space debris orbit data – we lack the radar network and other detectors needed to perform independent tracking and monitoring of objects in space,” says Holger Krag.
“This is needed to allow meaningful European participation in the global efforts for space safety.”
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Main Control Room at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany. Credit: ESA/P. Shlyaev
With the reentry of Tiangong-1 now forecast to happen within a few hours, ESA’s formal role in the tracking campaign is winding down.
To recall, here’s what’s been happening.
Each year, about 100 tonnes of defunct satellites, uncontrolled spacecraft, spent upper stages and discarded items like instrument covers are dragged down by Earth’s upper atmosphere, ending their lives in flaming arcs across the sky.
While still in orbit, these and many other objects are tracked by a US military radar network, which shares the data with ESA, since Europe has no such capability of its own.
IADC campaign
Around once a year, ESA takes part in a joint tracking campaign run by the Inter Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, which consists of experts from 13 space organisations such as NASA, Roscosmos, CNSA and European and other national agencies.
During the campaign, participants have been pooling their predictions of the time window, as well as their respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources, with the aim of cross-verifying, cross-analysing and improving the prediction accuracy for all members.
ESA has been acting as host and administrator for the campaign, as it has done for the twenty previous IADC test campaigns since 1998. A special case for ESA was the campaign in 2013 during the uncontrolled reentry of ESA’s own GOCE satellite.
In addition to IADC campaigns, it is the task of ESA’s Space Debris team to generate its own independent predictions to ESA Member States and partner civil authorities around the globe.
The team mix in additional tracking information gleaned from European sources, such as Germany’s Fraunhofer research radar near Bonn or telescopes and other detectors run by a mix of institutional and private researchers, to generate reentry forecasts – a challenging and imprecise art.
We’ve been posting ESA’s reentry forecasts regularly here in the blog, and sharing the link via social media.
Getting close
In just a few hours, we’ll be well within the uncertainty window associated with this reentry, and we don’t expect any more forecast updates with any higher accuracy. In other words, we’re at the limit of what we can forecast.
Just over an hour ago, ESA’s space debris team provided their final estimate for reentry, forecasting a window of about four hours and centred on 01:07 UTC (03:07 CEST) on 2 April.
Final Tiangong-1 reentry window forecast for 18:00 CEST 1 April Credit: ESA
Final Tiangong-1 altitude decay forecast as of 18:00 CEST, 1 April Credit: ESA
“With our current understanding of the dynamics of the upper atmosphere and Europe’s limited sensors, we are not able to make very precise predictions,” says Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office.
Holger says that there will always be an uncertainty of a few hours in all predictions, and that even just a day or so before any reentry, like now, the uncertainty window can be very large.
“The high speeds of returning satellites mean they can travel thousands of kilometres during that time window, and that makes it very hard to predict a precise location of reentry.”
Spotting reentry
It is likely that the pending reentry of Tiangong-1 will occur over water, probably unseen by anyone (although possibly detected by radar or other sensors).
Tiangong-1 seen at an altitude of about 161 km by the powerful TIRA research radar operated by the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (FHR) near Bonn, Germany. Image acquired on the morning of 1 April 2018, during one of the craft’s final orbits. Credit: Fraunhofer FHR
Our planet is a big place, mostly covered by water, and if any pieces survive the fiery reentry, these are unlikely to be found by anyone, sinking instead to the bottom of some ocean, or landing far from human habitation.
If you do witness the event, we’d certainly like to see any images you get.
These will help ESA’s debris team conduct their post-reentry analysis, and improve models and forecasts for future.
We need the time, your location (GPS coordinates fine) and – ideally – the direction in which you were facing when you saw any arc across the sky.
In the unlikely case that you find a piece of debris on ground, leave it alone and inform your local authorities.
Our final word comes from last week’s web article, which closed with an observation worth repeating:
Since 2009, ESA has been developing software, technologies and precursor systems to test a fully European network that would provide independent data on the risks from spaceflight.
“Today, everyone in Europe relies on the US military for space debris orbit data – we lack the radar network and other detectors needed to perform independent tracking and monitoring of objects in space,” says Holger Krag.
“This is needed to allow meaningful European participation in the global efforts for space safety.”
Every week, on average, a substantial, inert satellite drops into our atmosphere and burns up. Monitoring these reentries and warning European civil authorities has become routine work for ESA’s space debris experts.
Each year, about 100 tonnes of defunct satellites, uncontrolled spacecraft, spent upper stages and discarded items like instrument covers are dragged down by Earth’s upper atmosphere, ending their lives in flaming arcs across the sky.
Some of these objects are big and chunky, and pieces of them survive the fiery reentry to reach the surface. Our planet, however, is a big place, mostly covered by water, and much of what falls down is never seen by anyone, sinking to the bottom of some ocean, or landing far from human habitation.
While still in orbit, these and many other objects are tracked by a US military radar network, which shares the data with ESA, since Europe has no such capability of its own.It’s the task of ESA’s Space Debris team to look at these data and issue updates to ESA Member States and partner civil authorities around the globe.
Every week, on average, a substantial, inert satellite drops into our atmosphere and burns up. Monitoring these reentries and warning European civil authorities has become routine work for ESA’s space debris experts.
Each year, about 100 tonnes of defunct satellites, uncontrolled spacecraft, spent upper stages and discarded items like instrument covers are dragged down by Earth’s upper atmosphere, ending their lives in flaming arcs across the sky.
Some of these objects are big and chunky, and pieces of them survive the fiery reentry to reach the surface. Our planet, however, is a big place, mostly covered by water, and much of what falls down is never seen by anyone, sinking to the bottom of some ocean, or landing far from human habitation.
While still in orbit, these and many other objects are tracked by a US military radar network, which shares the data with ESA, since Europe has no such capability of its own.It’s the task of ESA’s Space Debris team to look at these data and issue updates to ESA Member States and partner civil authorities around the globe.
A fireball as bright as the Moon occurred over Belgium and the Netherlands just after midnight on 23 February 2018. It was recorded by three cameras of the FRIPON network.
A meteoroid – a bolide – seen burning as bight as the Moon over Oostkapelle, Belgium, at 00:11 UTC 24 February 2018. Credit: Astronomy! Project Oostkapelle/Jobse
The colour photograph shows one of the camera stations (Oostkapelle) with the fireball in the background. It shows the fireball reflected in the protective dome of the camera.
Credits: FRIPON network/videos by F. Colas & colour still image by Astronomy! Project Oostkapelle/Jobse
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A fireball as bright as the Moon occurred over Belgium and the Netherlands just after midnight on 23 February 2018. It was recorded by three cameras of the FRIPON network.
A meteoroid – a bolide – seen burning as bight as the Moon over Oostkapelle, Belgium, at 00:11 UTC 24 February 2018. Credit: Astronomy! Project Oostkapelle/Jobse
The colour photograph shows one of the camera stations (Oostkapelle) with the fireball in the background. It shows the fireball reflected in the protective dome of the camera.
Editor’s note: Today’s blog post come courtesy of the team at the Deimos Sky Survey (DSS), who use a high-tech automated observatory located on top of Puerto de Niefla, in Valle de Alcudia and Sierra Madrona Natural Park, in central Spain, south of Madrid.
The location offers spectacularly clear skies and the observatory comprises three telescopes that are used for testing and development of software, systems and techniques for surveying asteroids and space debris, as well as actual detection and tracking of asteroids. The telescopes are operated remotely from a control room located at the Elecnor Deimos Castilla La Mancha facilities in Puertollano, about 35 km to the north. The Deimos Space Surveillance & Tracking team analysed the images, which were acquired in mid-January, when Tiangong-1 was at about 280 km altitude.
Noelia Sánchez Ortiz, Elecnor Deimos Director of Space Situational Awareness, wrote:
The images were obtained by our robotic telescopes commanded from the Deimos Sky Survey control centre, and were generated specifically by the ‘Antsy’ optical sensor, which is adapted for tracking objects in low-Earth orbits.
The imaging process is fully automated, both in the tasking of the sensor to point to the predicted position of Tiangong-1 and in the processing of the telescope images obtained. Due to the particular difficulties of observing an object at such low altitude, the imaging was monitored by an on-duty operator.
Images were acquired on 15 and 16 January 2018, during the approximately 1-minute satellite pass over our DSS location in south-central Spain. We used very short exposures, down to 10 miliseconds.
Operator’s screen at the DSS control facility Credit: 2018 Deimos Sky Survey
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Editor’s note: Today’s blog post come courtesy of the team at the Deimos Sky Survey (DSS), who use a high-tech automated observatory located on top of Puerto de Niefla, in Valle de Alcudia and Sierra Madrona Natural Park, in central Spain, south of Madrid.
The location offers spectacularly clear skies and the observatory comprises three telescopes that are used for testing and development of software, systems and techniques for surveying asteroids and space debris, as well as actual detection and tracking of asteroids. The telescopes are operated remotely from a control room located at the Elecnor Deimos Castilla La Mancha facilities in Puertollano, about 35 km to the north. The Deimos Space Surveillance & Tracking team analysed the images, which were acquired in mid-January, when Tiangong-1 was at about 280 km altitude.
Noelia Sánchez Ortiz, Elecnor Deimos Director of Space Situational Awareness, wrote:
The images were obtained by our robotic telescopes commanded from the Deimos Sky Survey control centre, and were generated specifically by the ‘Antsy’ optical sensor, which is adapted for tracking objects in low-Earth orbits.
The imaging process is fully automated, both in the tasking of the sensor to point to the predicted position of Tiangong-1 and in the processing of the telescope images obtained. Due to the particular difficulties of observing an object at such low altitude, the imaging was monitored by an on-duty operator.
Images were acquired on 15 and 16 January 2018, during the approximately 1-minute satellite pass over our DSS location in south-central Spain. We used very short exposures, down to 10 miliseconds.
There’s a nice update today from Spacecraft Operations Engineer Armelle Hubault, working on the ExoMars TGO flight control team at ESOC.
TGO aerobraking visualisation to March 2018. Credit: ESA
Armelle writes:
This graphic (above) gives a very concise visualisation of the fantastic progress we’ve made with aerobraking to date.
It was coded by my ExoMars TGO colleague Johannes Bauer; the bold grey lines show successive reductions in the ExoMars TGO orbital period by 1 hour; the thin lines by 30 mins.
We started on the biggest orbit with an apocentre (the furthest distance from Mars during each orbit) of 33 200 km and an orbit of 24 hr in March 2017, but had to pause last summer due to Mars being in conjunction.
We recommenced aerobraking in August 2017, and are on track to finish up in the final science orbit in mid-March 2018. As of today, 30 Jan 2018, we have slowed ExoMars TGO by 781.5 m/s
For comparison, this speed is more than twice as fast as the speed of a typical long-haul jet aircraft.
On Tuesday this week at 15:35 CET, the spacecraft was where the red dot is, coming out of pericentre passage (passing through the point of closest approach over the surface – where Mars’ thin, uppermost atmosphere drags on the craft the most to give the braking effect).
The blue line is the current orbit, which takes only 2 hrs and 48 min and with the apocentre reduced to 2700 km; the red shows the final aerobraking orbit we expect to achieve later in March. Then, we will use the thrusters to manoeuvre the spacecraft into the green orbit (roughly 400 km circular) – the final science and operational data relay orbit.
The image is pretty much to scale.
We have to adjust our pericentre height regularly, because on the one hand, the martian atmosphere varies in density (so sometimes we brake more and sometimes we brake less) and on the other hand, martian gravity is not the same everywhere (so sometimes the planet pulls us down and sometimes we drift out a bit). We try to stay at about 110 km altitude for optimum braking effect.
To keep the spacecraft on track, we upload a new set of commands every day – so for us, for flight dynamics and for the ground station teams, it’s a very demanding time!
When TGO skims through the atmosphere, it has to adopt a specific orientation to optimise the braking effect and to make sure it stays stable and does not start to spin madly, which would not be optimal.
We are basically using the solar panels as ‘wings’ to slow us down and circularise the orbit.
Tracking aerobraking progress. Credit: ESA
The main challenge at the moment is that, since we never know in advance how much the spacecraft is going to be slowed during each pericentre passage, we also never know exactly when it is going to reestablish contact with our ground stations after pointing back to Earth.
We are working with a 20-min ‘window’ for acquisition of signal (AOS), when the ground station first catches TGO’s signal during any given station visibility, whereas normally for interplanetary missions we have a firm AOS time programmed in advance.
With the current orbital period now just below 3 hrs, we go through this little exercise 8 times per day!
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There’s a nice update today from Spacecraft Operations Engineer Armelle Hubault, working on the ExoMars TGO flight control team at ESOC.
TGO aerobraking visualisation to March 2018. Credit: ESA
Armelle writes:
This graphic (above) gives a very concise visualisation of the fantastic progress we’ve made with aerobraking to date.
It was coded by my ExoMars TGO colleague Johannes Bauer; the bold grey lines show successive reductions in the ExoMars TGO orbital period by 1 hour; the thin lines by 30 mins.
We started on the biggest orbit with an apocentre (the furthest distance from Mars during each orbit) of 33 200 km and an orbit of 24 hr in March 2017, but had to pause last summer due to Mars being in conjunction.
We recommenced aerobraking in August 2017, and are on track to finish up in the final science orbit in mid-March 2018. As of today, 30 Jan 2018, we have slowed ExoMars TGO by 781.5 m/s
For comparison, this speed is more than twice as fast as the speed of a typical long-haul jet aircraft.
On Tuesday this week at 15:35 CET, the spacecraft was where the red dot is, coming out of pericentre passage (passing through the point of closest approach over the surface – where Mars’ thin, uppermost atmosphere drags on the craft the most to give the braking effect).
The blue line is the current orbit, which takes only 2 hrs and 48 min and with the apocentre reduced to 2700 km; the red shows the final aerobraking orbit we expect to achieve later in March. Then, we will use the thrusters to manoeuvre the spacecraft into the green orbit (roughly 400 km circular) – the final science and operational data relay orbit.
The image is pretty much to scale.
We have to adjust our pericentre height regularly, because on the one hand, the martian atmosphere varies in density (so sometimes we brake more and sometimes we brake less) and on the other hand, martian gravity is not the same everywhere (so sometimes the planet pulls us down and sometimes we drift out a bit). We try to stay at about 110 km altitude for optimum braking effect.
To keep the spacecraft on track, we upload a new set of commands every day – so for us, for flight dynamics and for the ground station teams, it’s a very demanding time!
When TGO skims through the atmosphere, it has to adopt a specific orientation to optimise the braking effect and to make sure it stays stable and does not start to spin madly, which would not be optimal.
We are basically using the solar panels as ‘wings’ to slow us down and circularise the orbit.
Tracking aerobraking progress. Credit: ESA
The main challenge at the moment is that, since we never know in advance how much the spacecraft is going to be slowed during each pericentre passage, we also never know exactly when it is going to reestablish contact with our ground stations after pointing back to Earth.
We are working with a 20-min ‘window’ for acquisition of signal (AOS), when the ground station first catches TGO’s signal during any given station visibility, whereas normally for interplanetary missions we have a firm AOS time programmed in advance.
With the current orbital period now just below 3 hrs, we go through this little exercise 8 times per day!
FAQ prepared and updated by the Space Debris Office, ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany.
Tiangong-1 (天宫一号, Heavenly Palace 1) is China’s first space station and an experimental space laboratory. Its major goal was to test and master technologies related to orbital rendezvous and docking. It is identified by its UN COSPAR ID 2011-053A. It was launched on 30 September 2011 at 03:16:03.507 UTC by a Long March 2F/G rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi desert, Inner Mongolia, China. One uncrewed and two crewed missions, executed by the Shenzhou (神舟, Devine Craft) spacecraft, took place during its operational lifetime.
The Tiangong-1 space station will reenter Earth’s atmosphere and substantially burn up in the March–April 2018 timeframe.
As of mid-January 2018, the spacecraft was at about 280 km altitude in an orbit that will inevitably decay; it will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere (some spacecraft, like Soyuz capsules, are designed to withstand reentry).
Following launch in 2011, the Tiangong-1 orbit began steadily decaying due to the faint, yet not-zero, atmospheric drag present even at 300 or 400 km altitude. This affects all satellites and spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, like the International Space Station (ISS), for example.
Tiangong-1 space station. Credit: CMSE/China Manned Space Engineering Office
As a result, such craft must conduct regular ‘reboost manoeuvres’ to maintain their orbit – typically, ground controllers command the craft’s engines or thrusters to fire for a certain amount of time, speeding it up so that it gains altitude.
During its operational life from launch through to December 2015, regular orbital maintenance manoeuvres were executed by Tiangong-1 in order to maintain an operational altitude of between 330 and 390 km above the Earth’s surface.
Q. What was the original disposal plan?
Initially, a ‘controlled reentry’ was planned for the spacecraft at the end of its life.
This means that ground controllers would have commanded the engines to fire, slowing the craft by a significant amount so that it would fall toward the surface. Firing the engines would have been done at a specific moment so that it would reenter the atmosphere and substantially burn up over a large, unpopulated region of the South Pacific ocean. Any surviving pieces would fall into the ocean, far from any populated areas. This is precisely what ESA did, for example, for the Agency’s series of five ATV cargo spacecraft between 2008 and 2015.
However, in March 2016 the Tiangong-1 space station ceased functioning but maintained its structural integrity. In so far as can be fully confirmed, ground teams lost control with the craft, and it can no longer be commanded to fire its engines. It is, therefore, expected to make an ‘uncontrolled reentry.’
Q: How big is Tiangong-1? What shape is it?
The spacecraft’s 10.4 m-long main body is made up of two cylinders of approximately equal length: a service module and an experiment module. The thinner service module provides power and orbit control capabilities for the station. It has two solar panels, each approximately 3 x 7 m in size. The thicker experimental module comprises an enclosed front conical section, which include a docking port, a cylindrical section, and a rear conical section. The experimental module is habitable.
This vivid image shows China’s space station Tiangong-1 – the name means ‘heavenly palace’ – and was captured by French astrophotographer Alain Figer on 27 November 2017. It was taken from a ski area in the Hautes-Alpes region of southeast France as the station passed overhead near dusk. The station is seen at lower right as a white streak, resulting from the exposure of several seconds, just above the summit of the snowy peak of Eyssina (2837 m altitude). Credit: A. Figer. Used by permission.
The overall mass of the spacecraft was reported to have been approximately 8.5 tonnes including fuel at launch. Given that the space station exceeded its originally planned operational lifetime of two years and continued operating successfully for two more years after that, a considerable amount of fuel must have been consumed to sustain the orbit and the habitable environment conditions inside.
This means that a significantly lower mass on reentry is likely, comparable to the mass of defunct satellites that make uncontrolled reentries typically a couple times per month.
Q. To date, who’s done or is doing what?
China notified the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) of the upcoming re-entry and committed to enhanced monitoring and forecasting of the orbital decay, including requesting an international joint monitoring and information dissemination campaign under the framework of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC).
IADC comprises space debris and other experts from 13 space agencies/organisations, including NASA, ESA, European national space agencies, JAXA, ISRO, KARI, Roscosmos and the China National Space Administration.
IADC members will use this event to conduct their annual reentry test campaign, during which participants will pool their predictions of the time window, as well as their respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources. The aim is to cross-verify, cross-analyse and improve the prediction accuracy for all members.
ESA is acting as host and administrator for the campaign, as it has done for the twenty previous IADC test campaigns since 1998. A special case for ESA was the campaign in 2013 during the uncontrolled reentry of ESA’s own GOCE satellite.
Regular updates are being provided via the website of the China Manned Space Agency in both Chinese and English.
As of January 2018, the mean altitude of the space station is 280 km. The further decay, and hence re-entry, is assumed to be uncontrolled in the sense of orbit maintenance. This has, however, not been unambiguously confirmed by the Chinese authorities. It has however been reported that the attitude, i.e. the orientation, of Tiangong-1 is stabilised.
Q. Over which parts of Earth will it burn up?
Due to the orbital inclination of the Tiangong-1, approximately 42.8 degrees, and the likely uncontrolled nature of the reentry, the final impact point can be anywhere on Earth between 42.8 degrees North and 42.8 degrees South in latitude.
Map showing the area between 42.8 degrees North and 42.8 degrees South latitude (in green), over which Tiangong-1 could reenter. Graph at left shows population density. Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
Due to the geometry of the craft’s circular orbit, the probability of a reentry at the maximum 42.8 degrees N) and minimum (42.8 degrees S) latitude are higher than at the equator (roughly speaking).
Q. Will anyone know the precise location and time of reentry in advance?
Only from one day before the actual reentry will it become possible to roughly predict which ground tracks, and hence which regions on Earth, might witness the reentry.
But even then, an impact location prediction on the order kilometres is, for an uncontrolled reentry, beyond current technical capabilities due to complexities of modelling the atmosphere, the dynamics of the reentering object and limitations in observing the spacecraft.
In general, the uncertainty associated with an uncontrolled reentry prediction is on the order of 20% of the remaining orbital lifetime. Practically, this means that even 7 hours before the actual reentry, the uncertainty on the break-up location is a full orbital revolution – meaning plus or minus thousands of km!
The current reentry uncertainty window is shown below (the latest version will be posted in the home page of this blog).
Predicted time window for reentry. Horizontal axis shows the chart was generated. Vertical axis shows the range of dates during which reentry is most likely to occur. Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
If the spacecraft does have a functioning attitude control system now, this could stop working under the higher dynamic pressure loads (due to falling lower into the atmosphere) closer to reentry and the uncertainty in the final reentry time window could rise (this was the case, for example, with ESA’s GOCE reentry).
Q. Once it reenters and breaks up, what is the risk that any pieces reach ground?
Tiangong-1 is a large spacecraft comparable in size and mass to other, frequently used space stations and cargo vessels such as ESA’s ATV, the Japanese HTV, Russian Progress and American Dragon or Cygnus.
From monitoring the controlled reentries of those types of spacecraft, it can be surmised that Tiangong-1 will break up during its atmospheric re-entry and that some parts will survive the process and reach the surface of Earth.
Video of ESA’s ATV 1 breaking up during its controlled reentry in September 2008
Given the uncontrolled nature of this reentry event, the zone over which fragments might fall stretches over a curved ellipsoid that is thousands of kilometres in length and tens of kilometres wide. While a wide area could be affected, it is important to point out that a large part of the Earth is covered by water or is uninhabited.
Hence the personal probability of being hit by a piece of debris from the Tiangong-1 is actually 10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning.
In the history of spaceflight, no casualties due to falling space debris have ever been confirmed.
Q. How does Tiangong-1 reentry compare to the reentries of similar-size craft in the past?
With its 8.5 metric tonnes of (initial) mass, Tiangong-1 is definitely not the largest uncontrolled reentry in spaceflight history. That would be Skylab with 74 metric tonnes.
Tiangong-1 falls within the category of modern space freighters (crewed and uncrewed) such as the already mentioned ATV (12 t), Japan’s HTV (10 t), Russia’s Progress (7 t) and Soyuz (7 t), the US Dragon (7 t) or Cygnus (5 t) and the Chinese Tianzhou (13 t). These masses are for the loaded craft; in the table below, they are shown at reentry.
Tiangong-1-class reentries Credit: ESA CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO Note: Shuttle Colombia (STS-107), with a mass of 82 t, unexpectedly broke up during a controlled reentry on 1 Feb 2003, leading to the loss of vehicle and crew.
More information
Media and press seeking more information can contact the ESA Communication team as follows:
esoc.communication@esa.int
ESA/ESOC Communication Office +49 6151 90 0
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FAQ on Tiangong-1 reentry
FAQ prepared and updated by the Space Debris Office, ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany.
Tiangong-1 (天宫一号, Heavenly Palace 1) is China’s first space station and an experimental space laboratory. Its major goal was to test and master technologies related to orbital rendezvous and docking. It is identified by its UN COSPAR ID 2011-053A. It was launched on 30 September 2011 at 03:16:03.507 UTC by a Long March 2F/G rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi desert, Inner Mongolia, China. One uncrewed and two crewed missions, executed by the Shenzhou (神舟, Devine Craft) spacecraft, took place during its operational lifetime.
The Tiangong-1 space station will reenter Earth’s atmosphere and substantially burn up in the March–April 2018 timeframe.
As of mid-January 2018, the spacecraft was at about 280 km altitude in an orbit that will inevitably decay; it will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere (some spacecraft, like Soyuz capsules, are designed to withstand reentry).
Following launch in 2011, the Tiangong-1 orbit began steadily decaying due to the faint, yet not-zero, atmospheric drag present even at 300 or 400 km altitude. This affects all satellites and spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, like the International Space Station (ISS), for example.
Tiangong-1 space station. Credit: CMSE/China Manned Space Engineering Office
As a result, such craft must conduct regular ‘reboost manoeuvres’ to maintain their orbit – typically, ground controllers command the craft’s engines or thrusters to fire for a certain amount of time, speeding it up so that it gains altitude.
During its operational life from launch through to December 2015, regular orbital maintenance manoeuvres were executed by Tiangong-1 in order to maintain an operational altitude of between 330 and 390 km above the Earth’s surface.
Q. What was the original disposal plan?
Initially, a ‘controlled reentry’ was planned for the spacecraft at the end of its life.
This means that ground controllers would have commanded the engines to fire, slowing the craft by a significant amount so that it would fall toward the surface. Firing the engines would have been done at a specific moment so that it would reenter the atmosphere and substantially burn up over a large, unpopulated region of the South Pacific ocean. Any surviving pieces would fall into the ocean, far from any populated areas. This is precisely what ESA did, for example, for the Agency’s series of five ATV cargo spacecraft between 2008 and 2015.
However, in March 2016 the Tiangong-1 space station ceased functioning but maintained its structural integrity. In so far as can be fully confirmed, ground teams lost control with the craft, and it can no longer be commanded to fire its engines. It is, therefore, expected to make an ‘uncontrolled reentry.’
Q: How big is Tiangong-1? What shape is it?
The spacecraft’s 10.4 m-long main body is made up of two cylinders of approximately equal length: a service module and an experiment module. The thinner service module provides power and orbit control capabilities for the station. It has two solar panels, each approximately 3 x 7 m in size. The thicker experimental module comprises an enclosed front conical section, which include a docking port, a cylindrical section, and a rear conical section. The experimental module is habitable.
This vivid image shows China’s space station Tiangong-1 – the name means ‘heavenly palace’ – and was captured by French astrophotographer Alain Figer on 27 November 2017. It was taken from a ski area in the Hautes-Alpes region of southeast France as the station passed overhead near dusk. The station is seen at lower right as a white streak, resulting from the exposure of several seconds, just above the summit of the snowy peak of Eyssina (2837 m altitude). Credit: A. Figer. Used by permission.
The overall mass of the spacecraft was reported to have been approximately 8.5 tonnes including fuel at launch. Given that the space station exceeded its originally planned operational lifetime of two years and continued operating successfully for two more years after that, a considerable amount of fuel must have been consumed to sustain the orbit and the habitable environment conditions inside.
This means that a significantly lower mass on reentry is likely, comparable to the mass of defunct satellites that make uncontrolled reentries typically a couple times per month.
Q. To date, who’s done or is doing what?
China notified the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) of the upcoming re-entry and committed to enhanced monitoring and forecasting of the orbital decay, including requesting an international joint monitoring and information dissemination campaign under the framework of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC).
IADC comprises space debris and other experts from 13 space agencies/organisations, including NASA, ESA, European national space agencies, JAXA, ISRO, KARI, Roscosmos and the China National Space Administration.
IADC members will use this event to conduct their annual reentry test campaign, during which participants will pool their predictions of the time window, as well as their respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources. The aim is to cross-verify, cross-analyse and improve the prediction accuracy for all members.
ESA is acting as host and administrator for the campaign, as it has done for the twenty previous IADC test campaigns since 1998. A special case for ESA was the campaign in 2013 during the uncontrolled reentry of ESA’s own GOCE satellite.
Regular updates are being provided via the website of the China Manned Space Agency in both Chinese and English.
As of January 2018, the mean altitude of the space station is 280 km. The further decay, and hence re-entry, is assumed to be uncontrolled in the sense of orbit maintenance. This has, however, not been unambiguously confirmed by the Chinese authorities. It has however been reported that the attitude, i.e. the orientation, of Tiangong-1 is stabilised.
Q. Over which parts of Earth will it burn up?
Due to the orbital inclination of the Tiangong-1, approximately 42.8 degrees, and the likely uncontrolled nature of the reentry, the final impact point can be anywhere on Earth between 42.8 degrees North and 42.8 degrees South in latitude.
Map showing the area between 42.8 degrees North and 42.8 degrees South latitude (in green), over which Tiangong-1 could reenter. Graph at left shows population density. Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
Due to the geometry of the craft’s circular orbit, the probability of a reentry at the maximum 42.8 degrees N) and minimum (42.8 degrees S) latitude are higher than at the equator (roughly speaking).
Q. Will anyone know the precise location and time of reentry in advance?
Only from one day before the actual reentry will it become possible to roughly predict which ground tracks, and hence which regions on Earth, might witness the reentry.
But even then, an impact location prediction on the order kilometres is, for an uncontrolled reentry, beyond current technical capabilities due to complexities of modelling the atmosphere, the dynamics of the reentering object and limitations in observing the spacecraft.
In general, the uncertainty associated with an uncontrolled reentry prediction is on the order of 20% of the remaining orbital lifetime. Practically, this means that even 7 hours before the actual reentry, the uncertainty on the break-up location is a full orbital revolution – meaning plus or minus thousands of km!
The current reentry uncertainty window is shown below (the latest version will be posted in the home page of this blog).
Predicted time window for reentry. Horizontal axis shows the chart was generated. Vertical axis shows the range of dates during which reentry is most likely to occur. Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
If the spacecraft does have a functioning attitude control system now, this could stop working under the higher dynamic pressure loads (due to falling lower into the atmosphere) closer to reentry and the uncertainty in the final reentry time window could rise (this was the case, for example, with ESA’s GOCE reentry).
Q. Once it reenters and breaks up, what is the risk that any pieces reach ground?
Tiangong-1 is a large spacecraft comparable in size and mass to other, frequently used space stations and cargo vessels such as ESA’s ATV, the Japanese HTV, Russian Progress and American Dragon or Cygnus.
From monitoring the controlled reentries of those types of spacecraft, it can be surmised that Tiangong-1 will break up during its atmospheric re-entry and that some parts will survive the process and reach the surface of Earth.
Video of ESA’s ATV 1 breaking up during its controlled reentry in September 2008
Given the uncontrolled nature of this reentry event, the zone over which fragments might fall stretches over a curved ellipsoid that is thousands of kilometres in length and tens of kilometres wide. While a wide area could be affected, it is important to point out that a large part of the Earth is covered by water or is uninhabited.
Hence the personal probability of being hit by a piece of debris from the Tiangong-1 is actually 10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning.
In the history of spaceflight, no casualties due to falling space debris have ever been confirmed.
Q. How does Tiangong-1 reentry compare to the reentries of similar-size craft in the past?
With its 8.5 metric tonnes of (initial) mass, Tiangong-1 is definitely not the largest uncontrolled reentry in spaceflight history. That would be Skylab with 74 metric tonnes.
Tiangong-1 falls within the category of modern space freighters (crewed and uncrewed) such as the already mentioned ATV (12 t), Japan’s HTV (10 t), Russia’s Progress (7 t) and Soyuz (7 t), the US Dragon (7 t) or Cygnus (5 t) and the Chinese Tianzhou (13 t). These masses are for the loaded craft; in the table below, they are shown at reentry.
Tiangong-1-class reentries Credit: ESA CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO Note: Shuttle Colombia (STS-107), with a mass of 82 t, unexpectedly broke up during a controlled reentry on 1 Feb 2003, leading to the loss of vehicle and crew.
More information
Media and press seeking more information can contact the ESA Communication team as follows:
The current estimated window is ~17 March to ~21 April; this is highly variable.
Reentry will take place anywhere between 43ºN and 43ºS (e.g. Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, etc.). Areas outside of these latitudes can be excluded. At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible.
Predicted time window for reentry. Horizontal axis shows the chart was generated. Vertical axis shows the range of dates during which reentry is most likely to occur. Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
Current forecast altitude decay for Tiangong-1 Credit: ESA CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The current estimated window is ~17 March to ~21 April; this is highly variable.
Reentry will take place anywhere between 43ºN and 43ºS (e.g. Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, etc.). Areas outside of these latitudes can be excluded. At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible.
Predicted time window for reentry. Horizontal axis shows the chart was generated. Vertical axis shows the range of dates during which reentry is most likely to occur. Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
Current forecast altitude decay for Tiangong-1 Credit: ESA CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Editor’s note: This week’s blog update comes courtesy of TGO Spacecraft Operations Manager Peter Schmitz at ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has been conducting a complex and challenging aerobraking campaign since March 2017, using the faint drag of Mars’ upper atmosphere to slow it and lower it into its final science orbit, eliminating the need to have carried along hundreds of kilogrammes of fuel on its journey to the Red Planet. Aerobraking is expected to end around March 2018, after which TGO will perform some additional manoeuvres to achieve its final, near-circular, science orbit of about 400 km altitude.
Visualisation of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter aerobraking at Mars. With aerobraking, the spacecraft’s solar arrays experience tiny amounts of drag owing to the wisps of martian atmosphere at very high altitudes, which slows the craft and lowers its orbit. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
On Friday, 17 November, the flight controllers at ESOC began operations to bring the spacecraft into a new phase of the on-going aerobraking campaign, marking the start of ‘shorter’ orbits. ‘Short’ is considered, somewhat arbitrarily, as when the orbital period (i.e. time needed to complete one orbit) falls below 6 hrs.
Here’s a brief summary of progress to date.
TGO resumed its aerobraking campaign in August after a short break during summer due to conjunction with the Sun (that is, the Sun blocked the line-of-sight signal path between Earth and Mars), which makes for difficulties in communicating with the Red Planet.
Almost a month later, on 19 September, TGO’s operators faced, for the first time, a situation that violated the peak acceleration limits on the spacecraft, which then triggered an autonomous ‘flux reduction manoeuvre.’
During this operation, the propulsion system operated to raise the pericentre height (the point in the orbit where the spacecraft is closest to the planet) by 3 km, so that the next time the spacecraft passed through the atmosphere, the aerodynamic drag was reduced.
This event was quickly ‘recovered’ – which is engineer-speak meaning ‘everything got back to normal’ – so no delay in the overall aerobraking campaign was incurred.
“As of now, TGO aerobraking is on track with respect to our long-term predictions,” says Peter.
“On 8 November, our orbital period was seven hours and eight minutes, while now it is closer to six hours and twenty minutes.”
Solving problems
Another spacecraft anomaly occurred in the Data Handling System in October.
This time, the problem was caused by a corrupted ‘on-board control procedure’ (OBCP), which is a small program responsible for resetting the star tracker after any blinding condition (star trackers are cameras used to help determine the orientation of a spacecraft).
The operations team at ESOC noticed the problem when the autonomous execution of this procedure resulted in a checksum error – basically, an error indicating that a stored bit of data was not the value expected.
The situation was quickly recovered by re-uploading a fresh copy of the small OBCP programme.
However, mission controllers are, by nature, driven to fully understand the complex spacecraft for which they are responsible, and the event kicked off an intense investigation to determine why this anomaly occurred.
After a great deal of sleuthing work, the team found that this particular OBCP had been mistakenly overwritten by another command file, and that this problem could re-occur.
Although it was not a critical issue at the time it was discovered, the same malfunction could potentially overwrite more important command files or on-board control procedures that are required by the spacecraft’s computer for daily flight operations or contingency recovery situations.
“At first, we hypothesised that the failure could have been due to radiation effects on the spacecraft’s mass memory, or due to an on-board feature that corrects memory ‘bitflips’ automatically,” says Johannes Bauer, TGO’s data handling engineer.
Flipping bits
A ‘bitflip’ occurs when a single stored data bit – a 1 or a 0 – randomly flips to the opposite value due to the passage of solar or cosmic radiation through the solid-state memory.
An investigation was launched and Johannes and the TGO team at ESOC worked together with the spacecraft manufacturer, Thales Alenia Space, to define and implement a fix.
“Initially, the problem was mitigated by uploading files in a certain order,” said Spacecraft Operations Engineer Chris White.
However, TAS rapidly coded a new software patch that was successfully tested and validated on the TGO simulator at ESOC and on the avionics test bench – basically, an engineering copy of the spacecraft’s flight control systems and computer – located at a TAS factory in Italy.
“The team is planning to upload the central software RAM patch to the spacecraft in the coming days, which should solve this problem,” says Chris.
Final phase of aerobraking
Despite these and a number of other smaller issues, TGO’s final aerobraking operations have already started and this involves both the space segment (i.e. the spacecraft) and the ground segment (i.e. the systems used on Earth to fly TGO).
This month, the flight control team will set the mission control system into a ‘hot redundant’ configuration – with two identical ground control systems working at the same time providing immediate back-up in case one control system becomes unavailable.
The team will also use an automated system configuration to open and close telemetry and telecommand links1, saving time during ‘live’ operations (when the team are in contact with the spacecraft via a ground station like ESA’s New Norcia station in Australia or Malargüe station in Argentina, or via a NASA deep-space network station) and reducing the chances of human error during delicate manoeuvres.
Time gets tight
From now on, the aerobraking campaign will gradually evolve.
TGO Aerobreaking schedule. Credit: ESA
The spacecraft will slow, increasing the height of its pericentre and, consequently, reducing the effect of the atmosphere’s drag on TGO. During this phase, it will orbit around Mars multiple times a day and operations will intensify.
This means that the flight control team and the flight dynamics specialists at ESOC will have to estimate the spacecraft’s orbits and upload new commands daily, instead of every two days as is the case now.
Until the end of aerobraking in March 2018, the daily commanding volume will steadily increase because more and more orbits will be flown per day while the available time to compose and transmit commands to the spacecraft will become tighter – primarily because the ground station contacts, or passes, will be increasingly interrupted whenever the spacecraft passes through the Red Planet’s atmosphere.
Aerobraking on track
As of now, the flight control team expect that the aerobraking campaign will conclude in March 2018, as planned.
However, there are still a few months to go, and unforeseen issues – or another flux reduction manoeuvre – could yet delay aerobraking progress.
“If aerobraking were to be delayed by a week, for example, that would surely affect our routine operations planning, but not so much the overall mission timeline,” says Peter.
The situation, would be different, however if any delay were to last longer.
“The implications are more severe, for example, if we had a delay of a month,” says Peter.
“Then, there would be knock-on effects in ground station scheduling with regard to other missions and flight control team engineer scheduling and assignments, and the start of the routine science and data-relay mission could be noticeably delayed.”
Aerobraking operations require 24-hour/day, 7 days/week ground station coverage, and at the moment TGO are using the two ESA stations mentioned earlier as well as NASA Deep Space Network stations.
“The ground-station booking schedule is agreed with other ESA and NASA missions. If TGO needed to extend its usage of ground stations for the final aerobraking phase, it would have effects on other missions, too, as their science return would be affected and operations need to be re-planned.”
“For now though, we are in good shape and everything is on track, and we’re looking forward to achieving our final science orbit and the start of data gathering and relay at Mars.”
Note: (1) ‘Telemetry’ is the on-board status information that the spacecraft transmits to ground, informing engineers of its current status and conditions, while telecommands are the instructions prepared on ground that are sent up by the flight controllers to tell the spacecraft what it should do.
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Editor’s note: This week’s blog update comes courtesy of TGO Spacecraft Operations Manager Peter Schmitz at ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has been conducting a complex and challenging aerobraking campaign since March 2017, using the faint drag of Mars’ upper atmosphere to slow it and lower it into its final science orbit, eliminating the need to have carried along hundreds of kilogrammes of fuel on its journey to the Red Planet. Aerobraking is expected to end around March 2018, after which TGO will perform some additional manoeuvres to achieve its final, near-circular, science orbit of about 400 km altitude.
Visualisation of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter aerobraking at Mars. With aerobraking, the spacecraft’s solar arrays experience tiny amounts of drag owing to the wisps of martian atmosphere at very high altitudes, which slows the craft and lowers its orbit. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
On Friday, 17 November, the flight controllers at ESOC began operations to bring the spacecraft into a new phase of the on-going aerobraking campaign, marking the start of ‘shorter’ orbits. ‘Short’ is considered, somewhat arbitrarily, as when the orbital period (i.e. time needed to complete one orbit) falls below 6 hrs.
Here’s a brief summary of progress to date.
TGO resumed its aerobraking campaign in August after a short break during summer due to conjunction with the Sun (that is, the Sun blocked the line-of-sight signal path between Earth and Mars), which makes for difficulties in communicating with the Red Planet.
Almost a month later, on 19 September, TGO’s operators faced, for the first time, a situation that violated the peak acceleration limits on the spacecraft, which then triggered an autonomous ‘flux reduction manoeuvre.’
During this operation, the propulsion system operated to raise the pericentre height (the point in the orbit where the spacecraft is closest to the planet) by 3 km, so that the next time the spacecraft passed through the atmosphere, the aerodynamic drag was reduced.
This event was quickly ‘recovered’ – which is engineer-speak meaning ‘everything got back to normal’ – so no delay in the overall aerobraking campaign was incurred.
“As of now, TGO aerobraking is on track with respect to our long-term predictions,” says Peter.
“On 8 November, our orbital period was seven hours and eight minutes, while now it is closer to six hours and twenty minutes.”
Solving problems
Another spacecraft anomaly occurred in the Data Handling System in October.
This time, the problem was caused by a corrupted ‘on-board control procedure’ (OBCP), which is a small program responsible for resetting the star tracker after any blinding condition (star trackers are cameras used to help determine the orientation of a spacecraft).
The operations team at ESOC noticed the problem when the autonomous execution of this procedure resulted in a checksum error – basically, an error indicating that a stored bit of data was not the value expected.
The situation was quickly recovered by re-uploading a fresh copy of the small OBCP programme.
However, mission controllers are, by nature, driven to fully understand the complex spacecraft for which they are responsible, and the event kicked off an intense investigation to determine why this anomaly occurred.
After a great deal of sleuthing work, the team found that this particular OBCP had been mistakenly overwritten by another command file, and that this problem could re-occur.
Although it was not a critical issue at the time it was discovered, the same malfunction could potentially overwrite more important command files or on-board control procedures that are required by the spacecraft’s computer for daily flight operations or contingency recovery situations.
“At first, we hypothesised that the failure could have been due to radiation effects on the spacecraft’s mass memory, or due to an on-board feature that corrects memory ‘bitflips’ automatically,” says Johannes Bauer, TGO’s data handling engineer.
Flipping bits
A ‘bitflip’ occurs when a single stored data bit – a 1 or a 0 – randomly flips to the opposite value due to the passage of solar or cosmic radiation through the solid-state memory.
An investigation was launched and Johannes and the TGO team at ESOC worked together with the spacecraft manufacturer, Thales Alenia Space, to define and implement a fix.
“Initially, the problem was mitigated by uploading files in a certain order,” said Spacecraft Operations Engineer Chris White.
However, TAS rapidly coded a new software patch that was successfully tested and validated on the TGO simulator at ESOC and on the avionics test bench – basically, an engineering copy of the spacecraft’s flight control systems and computer – located at a TAS factory in Italy.
“The team is planning to upload the central software RAM patch to the spacecraft in the coming days, which should solve this problem,” says Chris.
Final phase of aerobraking
Despite these and a number of other smaller issues, TGO’s final aerobraking operations have already started and this involves both the space segment (i.e. the spacecraft) and the ground segment (i.e. the systems used on Earth to fly TGO).
This month, the flight control team will set the mission control system into a ‘hot redundant’ configuration – with two identical ground control systems working at the same time providing immediate back-up in case one control system becomes unavailable.
The team will also use an automated system configuration to open and close telemetry and telecommand links1, saving time during ‘live’ operations (when the team are in contact with the spacecraft via a ground station like ESA’s New Norcia station in Australia or Malargüe station in Argentina, or via a NASA deep-space network station) and reducing the chances of human error during delicate manoeuvres.
Time gets tight
From now on, the aerobraking campaign will gradually evolve.
TGO Aerobreaking schedule. Credit: ESA
The spacecraft will slow, increasing the height of its pericentre and, consequently, reducing the effect of the atmosphere’s drag on TGO. During this phase, it will orbit around Mars multiple times a day and operations will intensify.
This means that the flight control team and the flight dynamics specialists at ESOC will have to estimate the spacecraft’s orbits and upload new commands daily, instead of every two days as is the case now.
Until the end of aerobraking in March 2018, the daily commanding volume will steadily increase because more and more orbits will be flown per day while the available time to compose and transmit commands to the spacecraft will become tighter – primarily because the ground station contacts, or passes, will be increasingly interrupted whenever the spacecraft passes through the Red Planet’s atmosphere.
Aerobraking on track
As of now, the flight control team expect that the aerobraking campaign will conclude in March 2018, as planned.
However, there are still a few months to go, and unforeseen issues – or another flux reduction manoeuvre – could yet delay aerobraking progress.
“If aerobraking were to be delayed by a week, for example, that would surely affect our routine operations planning, but not so much the overall mission timeline,” says Peter.
The situation, would be different, however if any delay were to last longer.
“The implications are more severe, for example, if we had a delay of a month,” says Peter.
“Then, there would be knock-on effects in ground station scheduling with regard to other missions and flight control team engineer scheduling and assignments, and the start of the routine science and data-relay mission could be noticeably delayed.”
Aerobraking operations require 24-hour/day, 7 days/week ground station coverage, and at the moment TGO are using the two ESA stations mentioned earlier as well as NASA Deep Space Network stations.
“The ground-station booking schedule is agreed with other ESA and NASA missions. If TGO needed to extend its usage of ground stations for the final aerobraking phase, it would have effects on other missions, too, as their science return would be affected and operations need to be re-planned.”
“For now though, we are in good shape and everything is on track, and we’re looking forward to achieving our final science orbit and the start of data gathering and relay at Mars.”
Note: (1) ‘Telemetry’ is the on-board status information that the spacecraft transmits to ground, informing engineers of its current status and conditions, while telecommands are the instructions prepared on ground that are sent up by the flight controllers to tell the spacecraft what it should do.
We received an update from Robert Guilanya, flight dynamics lead for ExoMars/TGO, earlier today. He provided a short explanation of the Phobos orbit crossing that happened, for the first times, at 14:30 UTC and 20:00 UTC.
The crossing of the TGO orbit by the other Mars satellites is a normal situation that we monitor. During the last two weeks, we have been controlling the progress of the aerobraking campaign such that at the time Phobos crosses the TGO orbit, TGO is as far away as possible.
For today’s orbit, see below a series of plot that shows the Phobos orbit (blue line) and the TGO orbit (black line). The red dot shows Phobos’ position, and the black dot, TGO’s position.
To give you some numbers with the orbit of today:
Today at 06:44 UTC Phobos crossed the TGO orbit
Phobos orbit & TGO trajectory 06:44 UTC 16 Nov 2017 Credit: ESA/R. Guilanya
259 min later, TGO crossed Phobos orbit, at 11:03Z
Phobos orbit & TGO trajectory 11:03 UTC 16 Nov 2017 Credit: ESA/R. Guilanya
200 min later, Phobos crossed again the TGO orbit, at 14:23Z
Phobos orbit & TGO trajectory 14:23 UTC 16 Nov 2017 Credit: ESA/R. Guilanya
As you can see, both satellites (Phobos, too, is a ‘satellite’) had a large phase difference at the time they were crossing the orbits.
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We received an update from Robert Guilanya, flight dynamics lead for ExoMars/TGO, earlier today. He provided a short explanation of the Phobos orbit crossing that happened, for the first times, at 14:30 UTC and 20:00 UTC.
The crossing of the TGO orbit by the other Mars satellites is a normal situation that we monitor. During the last two weeks, we have been controlling the progress of the aerobraking campaign such that at the time Phobos crosses the TGO orbit, TGO is as far away as possible.
For today’s orbit, see below a series of plot that shows the Phobos orbit (blue line) and the TGO orbit (black line). The red dot shows Phobos’ position, and the black dot, TGO’s position.
To give you some numbers with the orbit of today:
Today at 06:44 UTC Phobos crossed the TGO orbit
Phobos orbit & TGO trajectory 06:44 UTC 16 Nov 2017 Credit: ESA/R. Guilanya
259 min later, TGO crossed Phobos orbit, at 11:03Z
Phobos orbit & TGO trajectory 11:03 UTC 16 Nov 2017 Credit: ESA/R. Guilanya
200 min later, Phobos crossed again the TGO orbit, at 14:23Z
Phobos orbit & TGO trajectory 14:23 UTC 16 Nov 2017 Credit: ESA/R. Guilanya
As you can see, both satellites (Phobos, too, is a ‘satellite’) had a large phase difference at the time they were crossing the orbits.
By the end of 2017, ESA will have transferred three stations to national organisations in Spain and Portugal, who will take over the provision of satellite tracking services to a wide variety of commercial customers.
The three stations involved in the transfer are all equipped with 15 m-diameter dish antennas, suitable for supporting near-Earth missions, and are located in Spain, at Maspalomas and at ESA’s space astronomy centre near Madrid, and in Perth, Western Australia.
The new operators will be able to use the stations to offer tracking services on a commercial basis to customers worldwide, which also includes ESA, leaving the Agency free to focus on meeting the demanding technical requirements of its deep-space stations, in Spain, Argentina and Australia, and on operation of a select group of four other stations.
ESA’s Lionel Hernandez, current Cebreros station manager and former manager for the ESAC antenna, provided some background on the station’s history.
On 1 September 2017, ESA’s VIL-2 antenna and its supporting facilities was formally retired after 36 years’ service supporting some of Europe’s most ambitious and successful missions.
Villafranca tracking station 1977 Credit: ESA
ESAC was inaugurated in May 1975 as the Vilspa station and has been responsible for providing telemetry, tracking and command support to not only ESA satellites but also to several agencies like NOAA, NASA, DLR (The German Aerospace Centre), the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) and to intergovernmental organisations such as Eumetsat.
It also supported missions flown by entities that later became private companies including Eutelsat, a French-based satellite communications provider and the UK’s Inmarsat plc (formerly INMARSAT), both leaders in global mobile satellite communications.
The station, now an ESA Establishment, continues to host the Science Operation Centres of almost all of ESA’s scientific missions.
From the early days of the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) mission, the work now performed at ESAC continues to reach into the depths of space and across the electromagnetic spectrum; providing scientific data to the world.
What began as one of Europe’s first links to the stars has become the heart of European space science.
Satellites/missions supported by the Vilspa ground station
IUE, OTS-2, GOES-1, Marecs-A, Exosat, ECS-1, Marecs-B2, ECS-2, ECS-4,ECS-5, Olympus, Hipparcos, Giotto, Italsat-F1, ERS-1, Meteosat-4 (MOP-1), Meteosat-5 (MOP-2), Meteosat-6 (MOP-3), Meteosat-7(MOP-4), ISO, ERS-2, Italsat-F2, SOHO, XMM-Newton, Cluster ESA’s four-satellites flotilla, Envisat, Eutelsat-W3, MSG-1, Integral, SMART-1, Double Star Programme (TC-1 and TC-2 satellites) belonging to China National Space Administration, Bird, Meteosat-9 (MSG-2), ASTRA´s four Atlantic satellites fleet, MetOp-A and MetOp-B.
It has also supported Jules Verne (ATV-1), Johannes Kepler (ATV-2), Edoardo Amaldi (ATV-3), Albert Einstein (ATV-4), Georges Lemaitre (ATV-5) and the International Space Station (ISS).
By the end of 2017, ESA will have transferred three stations to national organisations in Spain and Portugal, who will take over the provision of satellite tracking services to a wide variety of commercial customers.
The three stations involved in the transfer are all equipped with 15 m-diameter dish antennas, suitable for supporting near-Earth missions, and are located in Spain, at Maspalomas and at ESA’s space astronomy centre near Madrid, and in Perth, Western Australia.
The new operators will be able to use the stations to offer tracking services on a commercial basis to customers worldwide, which also includes ESA, leaving the Agency free to focus on meeting the demanding technical requirements of its deep-space stations, in Spain, Argentina and Australia, and on operation of a select group of four other stations.
ESA’s Lionel Hernandez, current Cebreros station manager and former manager for the ESAC antenna, provided some background on the station’s history.
On 1 September 2017, ESA’s VIL-2 antenna and its supporting facilities was formally retired after 36 years’ service supporting some of Europe’s most ambitious and successful missions.
Villafranca tracking station 1977 Credit: ESA
ESAC was inaugurated in May 1975 as the Vilspa station and has been responsible for providing telemetry, tracking and command support to not only ESA satellites but also to several agencies like NOAA, NASA, DLR (The German Aerospace Centre), the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) and to intergovernmental organisations such as Eumetsat.
It also supported missions flown by entities that later became private companies including Eutelsat, a French-based satellite communications provider and the UK’s Inmarsat plc (formerly INMARSAT), both leaders in global mobile satellite communications.
The station, now an ESA Establishment, continues to host the Science Operation Centres of almost all of ESA’s scientific missions.
From the early days of the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) mission, the work now performed at ESAC continues to reach into the depths of space and across the electromagnetic spectrum; providing scientific data to the world.
What began as one of Europe’s first links to the stars has become the heart of European space science.
Satellites/missions supported by the Vilspa ground station
IUE, OTS-2, GOES-1, Marecs-A, Exosat, ECS-1, Marecs-B2, ECS-2, ECS-4,ECS-5, Olympus, Hipparcos, Giotto, Italsat-F1, ERS-1, Meteosat-4 (MOP-1), Meteosat-5 (MOP-2), Meteosat-6 (MOP-3), Meteosat-7(MOP-4), ISO, ERS-2, Italsat-F2, SOHO, XMM-Newton, Cluster ESA’s four-satellites flotilla, Envisat, Eutelsat-W3, MSG-1, Integral, SMART-1, Double Star Programme (TC-1 and TC-2 satellites) belonging to China National Space Administration, Bird, Meteosat-9 (MSG-2), ASTRA´s four Atlantic satellites fleet, MetOp-A and MetOp-B.
It has also supported Jules Verne (ATV-1), Johannes Kepler (ATV-2), Edoardo Amaldi (ATV-3), Albert Einstein (ATV-4), Georges Lemaitre (ATV-5) and the International Space Station (ISS).
Editor’s note: Today’s update comes from ESA’s Armelle Hubault, a spacecraft operations engineer working on the ExoMars/TGO team at ESOC. The news? ESA’s ExoMars/TGO orbiter – now conducting a year-long aerobraking campaign at Mars – crossed the orbit of Phobos today (spoiler alert: we avoided a collision!), marking a notable milestone in progress toward attaining its final, ca. 400-km altitude circular science orbit.
Phobos seen by Hubble: While photographing Mars, The ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet (click on image for full details). Credit: NASA/ESA/Z. Levay (STScI) – Acknowledgment: J. Bell (ASU) & M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)
Armelle wrote:
Here are the facts about the Phobos orbit crossing today.
The orbit crossing is not a Phobos flyby. In fact, we did our best to ensure that Phobos would be at the farthest possible point away from TGO when we cross the moon’s orbit. The moon will basically be on the other side of Mars when our spacecraft crosses its orbit [Editor: Phobos will be 9320 km from the centre of Mars for the first crossing].
This results in two crossings today: one around 14:30 UT and a second at 20:00 UT (15:30 and 21:00 CET, respectively). On each crossing of Phobos’ orbit, TGO will ‘miss’ the Phobos orbit by 23 km (and 120 minutes) and 10 km (and 200 minutes), respectively.
Visualisation of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter aerobraking at Mars. With aerobraking, the spacecraft’s solar array experiences tiny amounts of drag owing to the wisps of martian atmosphere at very high altitudes, which slows the craft and lowers its orbit. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
Note that the diameter of Phobos is about 20 km, so these passes by the orbit are very, very close!
Over the last few days, we adapted the phase of our orbit to ensure maximum ‘outphasing’ of Phobos and TGO, so today there is actually nothing for the flight control team to do but watch and monitor.
The crossing is taking place around apocentre (point of farthest approach to Mars); remember that our pericentre (point of closest approach) remains on the order of 100 km from the martian surface, actually in the atmosphere, which is how we are obtaining the aerobraking effect.
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Editor’s note: Today’s update comes from ESA’s Armelle Hubault, a spacecraft operations engineer working on the ExoMars/TGO team at ESOC. The news? ESA’s ExoMars/TGO orbiter – now conducting a year-long aerobraking campaign at Mars – crossed the orbit of Phobos today (spoiler alert: we avoided a collision!), marking a notable milestone in progress toward attaining its final, ca. 400-km altitude circular science orbit.
Phobos seen by Hubble: While photographing Mars, The ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet (click on image for full details). Credit: NASA/ESA/Z. Levay (STScI) – Acknowledgment: J. Bell (ASU) & M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)
Armelle wrote:
Here are the facts about the Phobos orbit crossing today.
The orbit crossing is not a Phobos flyby. In fact, we did our best to ensure that Phobos would be at the farthest possible point away from TGO when we cross the moon’s orbit. The moon will basically be on the other side of Mars when our spacecraft crosses its orbit [Editor: Phobos will be 9320 km from the centre of Mars for the first crossing].
This results in two crossings today: one around 14:30 UT and a second at 20:00 UT (15:30 and 21:00 CET, respectively). On each crossing of Phobos’ orbit, TGO will ‘miss’ the Phobos orbit by 23 km (and 120 minutes) and 10 km (and 200 minutes), respectively.
Visualisation of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter aerobraking at Mars. With aerobraking, the spacecraft’s solar array experiences tiny amounts of drag owing to the wisps of martian atmosphere at very high altitudes, which slows the craft and lowers its orbit. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
Note that the diameter of Phobos is about 20 km, so these passes by the orbit are very, very close!
Over the last few days, we adapted the phase of our orbit to ensure maximum ‘outphasing’ of Phobos and TGO, so today there is actually nothing for the flight control team to do but watch and monitor.
The crossing is taking place around apocentre (point of farthest approach to Mars); remember that our pericentre (point of closest approach) remains on the order of 100 km from the martian surface, actually in the atmosphere, which is how we are obtaining the aerobraking effect.
