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.
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Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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Proba-3 satellites acquiring formation simulated in VTS. To perform the real-time 2D and 3D visualisations the Proba-3 team realised they required, they turned to the VTS (Visualization Tool for Space data) software which is licenced freeware owned by French space agency CNES and developed by the Spacebel company in Belgium. Regularly updated, VTS has been employed by numerous European space missions in the past, typically help plan complex manoeuvres and acquiring images for a given region of Earth or other planetary bodies. The Proba-3 team has developed a code in Python forging a real-time link between VTS and the incoming telemetry – for now from the simulator but eventually from the actual satellites – so the operator can really get an intuitive sense of the two satellites with a single glance.