The Arctic Mission System Study involved two parallel studies conducted by consortia led by OHB Sweden and Thales Alenia Space. The scope of the studies were to identify needs in the Arctic region that could be met with mission architecture containing space elements, to propose such mission architectures, to define the elements of one of the architectures in some detail and to propose a plan to implement it.

78 needs, mainly in five domains, were identified by the consortia working closely with stakeholders. The needs were scored, prioritised and ranked based on criteria such as number of users affected, societal impact, economic value to the region, current and future gap in fulfilment and matching to industrial capabilities in the Nordic countries. The final downselection produced the recommendation for implementing an Arctic Weather Monitoring Satellite Constellation, AWeSat.