The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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Traditionally, it has been very difficult to perform live, in-flight testing of newly developed software for satellites. No one wants to take any risk with an existing, valuable satellite, so it there are only limited opportunities to test new procedures, techniques or systems in orbit.
ESA’s new cubesat, dubbed ‘OPS-SAT,’ will help solve this.
It’s a small, low-cost and extremely robust platform that will enable a wide community of industry, research labs, academia and even individual developers to test their software and tools in orbit.
It consists of a satellite that is only 30cm high but that contains an experimental computer that is ten times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft.
This week, the engineering model of OPS-SAT, seen on a test bench in this photo, was connected to its control system at ESA’s ESOC mission control centre for the first time. Both spacecraft and the ground system are using innovative new protocols to inter-communicate and both will now undergo an extensive testing and validation campaign.
The flight model is expected to be ready for launch in 2018.
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