Seed funding sends European software into orbit
“You can read everything there is to know about driving a car, but you won’t really understand what it’s like to drive one until you get behind the wheel. That’s what it’s like to fly your software in orbit,” says David Evans, ESA’s OPS-SAT Space Lab manager.
Over the last year, 12 project teams have had the chance to experience this first hand thanks to a combination of seed funding from the Discovery element of ESA's Basic Activities and access to ESA’s experimental OPS-SAT CubeSat.
A match made in orbit
At companies, start-ups and universities across Europe, teams are working on ideas that could shape the future of spaceflight. They have poured over every technical document and report on the challenges of flying their project in space, but reading about the extremes of life in orbit will only get you so far.
Without demonstrating that their idea can really thrive in space, how can they be confident in it? How can they secure the funding they need to develop it further, and one day bring it to market?
Enter OPS-SAT: ESA’s 30-cm high experimental CubeSat is the ideal laboratory for testing new technologies in space. Project teams can take control of the satellite’s camera, radio or gyros or even modify it in ways that would be too risky to consider on big expensive satellites with dedicated scientific or navigational activities.
Equipped with cutting-edge satellite technology, OPS-SAT is powerful, resilient and robust. If something goes wrong, it can be easily recovered.
But running an experiment on OPS-SAT still takes time and money – resources that can be hard to find for the most experimental and ambitious ideas. So, ESA Discovery ran a campaign through the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) to find and fund 12 of the most interesting and promising ideas for new software that could expand the capabilities of future satellites.
Through the OPS-SAT Campaign, ESA offered a unique combination of expert support, funding and access to space, all in one place. As the Agency works to accelerate innovation in the European space sector and increase the participation of small and medium-sized enterprises, this combination of seed funding and the direct access to a powerful satellite in orbit is proving a successful method for building confidence in new ideas.
Welcome to space
The 12 teams selected to run experiments on OPS-SAT faced two main challenges: operating advanced software within the limitations of a real satellite; and operating software under the harsh conditions of space.
“If you want to develop software for satellites, it is important to understand the limitations imposed by being in space as early on in the development as possible,” says David.
“Often, the biggest challenges are not what you are expecting.”
A real satellite with real sensors has limitations to its onboard memory, CPU power and access to large software toolsets that a computer on Earth does not. Meanwhile, operating in space challenges teams to deal with the type of problems that ESA and other satellite operators face every day.
Every one of the teams had developed impressive and powerful software. But it was often the real-world challenges such as an inconsistent data rates, bad data, lost data and communication disruptions that caused the biggest issues.
Luckily, it is exactly these challenges that ESA has decades of experience dealing with. The OPS-SAT Space Lab team at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, offered assistance with specific issues, shared their lessons learned and helped the teams adapt on the fly once their projects were in orbit.
A model for innovation
As a result, all 12 teams have now successfully demonstrated that their ideas can handle life in orbit. What’s more, almost all of them will now continue to work with OPS-SAT Space Lab beyond the end of their Discovery-funded project as they aim to fully complete or enhance their initial goals.
“Everyone was impressed with the ease and effectiveness of OSIP,” says David. “The combination of Discovery funding through OSIP and access to OPS-SAT Space Lab is a great example of how to foster innovation in the European space sector.”
The projects
The 12 funded projects include a technique to improve the resolution of satellite images beyond the maximum resolution of the satellite’s camera by taking multiple images in rapid succession, processing them, and sending just one enhanced image down to Earth. This technique has now been demonstrated in orbit using OPS-SAT’s camera, rather than under perfect laboratory conditions.
Other projects feature artificial intelligence for identifying and tracking interesting features on Earth’s surface, new data compression algorithms to help satellites maximise the amount of valuable data they can send down to Earth and Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), a new communications protocol which is of particular interest to ESA.
Many of the projects also led to improvements in how OPS-SAT itself was operated, benefiting other users and helping keep ESA at the heart of satellite innovation. One creatively turned the problem of how to test a new satellite tracking module on its head by treating OPS-SAT as a ground station and the stations on the Earth’s surface as satellites. In the process the team had to had to expand the capabilities of OPS-SAT’s software-defined radio system and those improvements are now available to other current and future OPS-SAT projects.
