Inside ESA's new Space Safety Centre
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher inside ESA's new Space Safety Centre
Living close to an active star, in a Solar System filled with ancient and fast-moving asteroids, on a planet that is becoming increasingly surrounded by discarded satellites and their debris, comes with a plethora of challenges. ESA’s Space Safety programme carries out the activities necessary to mitigate and prevent the effects of these hazards.
Inaugurated on 12 April, the new Space Safety Centre is a dedicated facility for the teams monitoring and responding to space weather. Electromagnetic radiation and charged particles hurled into space by the Sun can disrupt or damage active satellites, human space explorers and infrastructure on Earth such as power grids.
By monitoring the health of data arriving on Earth from our satellite instruments and from other space weather services, teams at ESA help keep spacecraft and astronauts safe from our star’s unpredictable outbursts, while contributing to the protection of civil infrastructure, like power grids, on ground.
The Space Safety Centre is a first for ESA and provides a dynamic environment where next-generation space-weather capabilities, tools and models will be developed, tested and evaluated in close cooperation with European institutes and industry.
The Centre also supports the provision of space weather information and warnings to ESA-operated space missions. It will work in close coordination with the Agency’s Space Weather Services Network, providing timely and reliable space weather information to European spacecraft operators, agencies, institutions, researchers and commercial sectors affected by solar activity including transportation, navigation and power grid operators.
Teams at the Centre will monitor data received from ESA’s space weather sensors, comprising, today, payloads onboard Proba-2 and hosted on missions flown by other agencies and, in future, additionally from the Vigil and Aurora missions and from new nanosatellite missions.
