OPS-SAT: A ESA nanosatellite for accelerating innovation in satellite control

This paper describes the current status of the ESA OPS-SAT project. OPS-SAT is a nanosatellite mission designed exclusively to demonstrate ground-breaking satellite and ground control software under real flight conditions. Critical mission software is generally selected for its proven, rock-solid reliability as no one wants to use new and possibly problematic software on a multi-million-euro mission. The project is being led by the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Germany which has recognised the need to break out of the “has never flown, will never fly” cycle in its domain. OPS-SAT has an innovative design which benefits from the many years’ experience ESOC engineers have accumulated operating large ESA missions and applies them to this single string nanosatellite. The primary focus has been to make the satellite recoverable from the effects of ‘buggy’ software. Therefore much more risk can be taken when performing experiments. Changes in critical on-board and ground software are envisaged on a daily basis. This philosophy helps mitigate the problem of single event radiation effects that are a consequence of using commercial off-the-shelf processors On the other hand those same processors are exploited to provide increased computing power compared to normal ESA spacecraft, allowing OPS-SAT to fly modern software like Linux and Java. This will allow more access to experimenters who want to reconfigure the control chain both on the ground and on-board. Thanks to the deployment of reprogrammable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) experimenters will be able to reconfigure anything from the coding layer upwards in order to try out new techniques, protocols and skills. OPS-SAT also has very high uplink and downlink data rates compared to university Cubesats (Mbps compared to kbps) meaning that software can be changed quickly and often. It will effectively look like a normal ESA mission to the ground. The response from European industry and academia to a recent call for ideas for OPS-SAT experiments has been overwhelming. Over 100 experiments have already been shortlisted. In order to extract maximum value a minimalist approach has been taken by the project as regards experiment intervention. This means that the experimenters have to self-organise in order to create working configurations of ground and on-board software that can control OPS-SAT. They have already formed a selfhelp community aimed at exploiting the mission to the maximum. Following a successful ESA Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) study early in 2012, the project kicked off with two parallel Phase AB1 studies in July 2013. These are led by GOMSpace of Denmark and TU Graz of Austria each with German partners. It is expected to start Phase B2CE in 2014 and to launch in 2016.