Forty thousand lines of code for on board tools and thirty thousand plus for the on ground simulators.”
MICRO FOCUS UNIVERSE 2021 SOFTWARE
It was all modelled in the tool so at the end we pressed the button and automatically generated software that was compiled and linked with the on board software. “From the radiation or the orbit, to the magnetic field and the sun’s position.
“We modelled everything in a software, which people recognise as the ancestor of matlab,” explains Pierrik Vuilleumier, who was on the Proba-1 team. It’s a long loop, so if something doesn’t work or needs to change then it’s a long process.īut part of the reason the Proba-1 mission could be launched so quickly is that it circumvented this loop by developing a tool that automatically generated the software and allowed engineers to quickly change the functions and parts of a system without needing an entirely new code to be Then, once the engineers are happy with them, they are translated into software specifications and then finally someone writes the software for these functions specifically. First, the functions and actions of this system and each of the others onboard are detailed and cleared. Normally, the code to autonomously run parts of the mission, such as the altitude and orbit control system (AOCs), is written in a specific way. This meant it was designed to perform virtually unaided, running everyday tasks like navigation, payload and resource management with little involvement by staff at ESA's ground station in Redu, Belgium. The satellite fulfilled many firsts for ESA – from being the first to use a lithium-ion battery (now an ubiquitous technology) to being the first ESA spacecraft with fully autonomous capabilities. In twenty years, none of the primary units have actually failed and the spacecraft remains operational on all primary systems at this time.
“In terms of the technology, in terms of the development time, in terms of the low cost – it was all brand new.” “In its time, it was completely innovative,” reminisces Frederic Teston, the Project Manager for Proba.
MICRO FOCUS UNIVERSE 2021 SERIES
It also marked the beginning of a series of Proba satellites, including Proba-2, Pr oba-V and the currently-in-testing Proba-3, The mission was developed in just three years – an unheard of feat at the time when missions often took more than 10 years to launch. While CubeSats and are more and more common and available these days, Proba 1 was ESA’s first venture into small missions. Proba-1 marked a change towards small missions in European space industry.
The micro-satellite was developed by ESA's General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) and built by an industrial consortium led by the Belgian company Verhaert. The images have been vital for monitoring several environmental concerns, from assessing how different lad use strategies in Namibian savannah as affect the vegetation growth, to on vegetation types in Central Nambia’s savannahs, or helping to map and understand alpine snow cover in Swiss National Parks. Its two imaging instruments – the Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) and the panchromatic High Resolution Camera (HRC) – have provided more than 1000 images of more than 1000 sites. Measuring just 60 x 60 x 80 cm, Proba-1 autonomoulsy performs advanced guidance, navigation and control processing, as well as payload resources management. Today, twenty years on Proba-1, which was intended to survive just two years, is still going strong as an Earth Observation mission and its legacy is already future-proofed into the next decade. But, once in orbit, that same small satellite quickly proved to be not so little in its capabilities.
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