Visualisation is the bridge between the quantitative information hidden in the data and the human intuition and understanding; it is a challenge of key importance in the present ?Big Data? era. In all three segments of the Space Safety Programme (S2P) large amounts of data are produced daily. Adequate visualisation can lead to more effective analysis of diverse aspects and increase knowledge about the unfolding of different phenomena. For example, the main current means of visualisation of Space Weather phenomena used by scientists and operators are 2D and in few cases 3D graphs.

Smallsat DTN is an OPS-SAT experiment awarded funding trough ESA’s OSIP, OPS-SAT campaign. The aim of the project is to investigate the benefits of CFDP and Bundle Protocol for satellite operations and their possible applications in the optical communications links, of the future ESA mission of OPS-SAT 2. The Flight Campaign of the project completed in a three-day span, successfully demonstrating the implementation of a LEO DTN network, spacecraft remote control and configuration over Bundle Protocol and CFDP imagery data distribution over multiple passes from the ground segment.

Efforts for anomaly root cause analysis (e.g. GAIA) show the urgent need of using discipline models with flight data for diagnostic purposes. Acquiring more feedback from (also nominal) flight operations is also urgent to improve spacecraft related processes of engineering, analysis and verification. A spacecraft is equipped with several monitoring sensors that measure different attributes of the spacecraft. This results in a huge raw stream of data that has to be analysed to produce information about spacecraft behaviour and health status.

SpaceWire has become a de facto standard for payload systems (including for Command & Control) and its Real-Time derivatives are now being considered for avionics. The capability provided by SpaceWire to develop data handling systems based on high-speed networks allows much greater performance but implies implementing communication bus management techniques specific to SpaceWire. As network management is not part of the basic SpaceWire protocol ECSS-E-ST-50-12C (Rev.1), it must be provided to industry in the form of an additional standard. 
 

The Data Compression as a Service (DCaaS) study aimed to bring the benefits of data compression to the experimenters on ESA's OPS-SAT platform. It focused on using the POCKET+ algorithm for the compression of housekeeping telemetry data. The project contained a space component, which performed the compression of provided user data, and a ground component, for the decompression of transmitted user data. Three use cases were selected within the scope of the project: file-to-file, packet-to-packet, and stream-to-stream lossless data transfers.

CubeSats have the potential to revolutionise Earth observation from space by exploring different operating points in terms of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution. However, physical limitations, mostly in terms of size, prevent them from obtaining high-quality images. OPS-SAT, while characteriaed by a small form factor, provides an impressively capable and flexible hardware/software platform for executing demanding machine learning algorithms (inference stage).

The continuously increasing amount of long-term and of historic data in EO facilities in the form of online datasets and archives makes it necessary to address technologies for the long-term management of these data sets, including their consolidation, preservation, and continuation across multiple missions. The management of long EO data time series of continuing or historic missions, with more than 20 years of data available already today, requires technical solutions and technologies which differ considerably from the ones exploited by existing systems.

During this Phase 0 maturation study, ASUK, with the support of Thales Alenia Space (TAS), Nammo, MDA and GMV, performed a programmatic, business and technical assessment of a future low-Earth orbit (LEO) refuelling mission. The mission concept proposes developing and demonstrating core technologies in a preliminary service offering to enable a commercial in-orbit refuelling service. Such a service will swiftly redefine how satellites are designed and operated, launching a dynamic and sustainable in-orbit ecosystem with significant potential.