VEGA wins Swarm Operational Simulator contract
20 April 2009 – VEGA, a Finmeccanica company, has reinforced its
position as Europe’s leading space simulations expert, by winning
the €800k Swarm Operational simulator development contract at the
European Space Operations Centre (ESOC).
Swarm is one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) latest
operational missions within the Earth Explorer programme, a
programme designed specifically to create small, cost-effective
missions for Earth observation scientific research. Swarm’s primary
objective, through its constellation of three satellites, is to
provide a survey of the Earth’s geomagnetic field and provide the
first global representation of the field’s variations over
time.
To ensure the ground segment systems and operations engineers
are well prepared for Swarm’s challenges, ESA has appointed VEGA to
develop the operational satellite simulator. VEGA will be utilising
enabling technologies which aim to reduce development time and
increase software re-use, which in turn will help reduce the cost
and technical risk. These enabling technologies include the
Spacecraft Simulator Reference Architecture (REFA) and the
Simulation Model Portability (SMP2) standard – both developed by
VEGA.
John Auburn, VEGA’s Aerospace Business Development Director,
said: “VEGA has been developing simulators for ESOC for over 20
years and we are delighted to win this significant contract. The
Swarm simulator development team brings a wealth of experience,
having worked in all the key areas of operational simulation of
Earth observation satellites, REFA and SMP2. Once again, VEGA has
proven its strong position in developing high fidelity software
simulators to support satellite operations.”
Further information
For further information,
please contact Karen Rogers via email on karen.rogers@vega.co.uk.