Launched on 5 December 2024, the 2 satellites making up Proba-3 will manoeuvre in house in order that one eclipses the photo voltaic disk, permitting sustained observations of the encircling photo voltaic corona by the mission’s essential instrument: the Affiliation of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Solar, or ASPIICS for brief.

“Proba-3 is a comparatively small experimental mission, with involvement of newer ESA Member States, together with Romania, Czech Republic and Poland,” explains ESA’s Proba-3 mission supervisor Damian Galano. “Enabling firms to achieve house expertise and new capabilities is a part of our remit. So whereas a longtime prime contractor might need tailored an present set of software program for the ASPIICS instrument, we ended up with software program written from scratch by a brand new entrant into the house sector – and it labored out very properly for us.”

From smartphones to an area laptop

Poland’s N7 Cellular started as a software program firm specialising in functions for cellular units comparable to leisure, music streaming and fee programs, however arrange a small house division in the course of the final decade.

“We had an present curiosity within the area,” explains Michał Mosdorf of N7 Area. “Members of our group with some expertise of instructional CubeSat tasks, comparable to the primary Polish satellite tv for pc PW-Sat 1, in addition to ESA Training’s Rexus/Bexus, which provides college students the prospect to fly payloads in sounding rockets or high-altitude balloons. Our group additionally contributed to house missions comparable to SolarOrbiter and BritePL. Area was not solely new to us, and we wished to discover what we’d do commercially. So we joined the ASPIICS consortium led by Area Analysis Centre in Poland.”

That was the beginning of ten years sustained effort: the extraordinarily refined ASPIICS has its personal on-board laptop, and N7 Area’s software program was wanted to supervise its operations, receiving and processing telecommands, processing, storing and returning mission knowledge in addition to – crucially – serving to to maintain the 2 Proba-3 satellites aligned to maintain the Solar in eclipse and its corona in view for hours at a time.

Over 12 000 hours went into finalising the ASPIICS software program. As Michał explains: “It’s a far cry from software program engineering for cellular apps, a really completely different form of problem. That form of app is likely to be lively on 1,000,000 shoppers, throughout tons of of various units. If an issue happens, we will reply and repair it. For spaceflight now we have a single shopper the place we will’t instantly repair points throughout spaceflight, so the formalities are understandably fairly rigorous. We invested a whole lot of time in making a consultant simulator permitting us to work on the software program lengthy earlier than the entire instrument was built-in.”

Assembly house specs

Among the many challenges for N7 Area was adapting to the house sector’s methods of working. This consists of the usage of ESA’s specific {hardware} ecosystem, embodied within the space-optimised LEON-3 ‘system on a chip’ microprocessor, not present in different markets.

Michał provides: “We additionally needed to turn into compliant with European Coordination for Area Standardisation, ECSS processes, which is the commonly agreed rulebook on how all features of house engineering are carried out, together with software program design and testing. That is fairly a proper course of by way of verification, traceability and code high quality.”

Working with ESA held some distinct benefits too. N7 Area was in a position to make use of formal instruments obtainable within the TASTE atmosphere, which is a set of open supply, state-of-the-art software program growth instruments promoted by ESA, devoted to the event of embedded, real-time programs.

Constructing an area firm

“Wanting again, coding for ASPIICS has confirmed some of the difficult tasks that we’ve undertaken, however the expertise has been invaluable by way of kick-starting the N7 Area firm; we now have greater than 30 tasks on our books – thanks partially to our affiliation with ESA – and grown from three folks initially to 25 specialised software program engineers plus further assist employees,” says Michał.

“ESA stays our key accomplice however our expertise can be helpful in different domains. The N7 Area group at the moment works with the European Southern Observatory implementing the Extraordinarily Giant Telescope management system software program.

“N7 Area presents bespoke software program growth companies for the house market. We additionally present pre-qualified house merchandise that assist different firms speed up the event of flight software program. We made current contributions to ESA’s Hera and Comet Interceptor missions.

“The merchandise we provide have been supported by numerous ESA funding programmes, with its Common Assist Know-how Programme enjoying a number one function. Curiously, merchandise developed in collaboration with ESA have additionally attracted prospects from non-ESA and non-European tasks. Moreover, N7 Area has turn into a part of the SPACEBEL group, forming a three way partnership between Polish and Belgian capital. This partnership allows us to collaborate successfully with main trade gamers.

“Following the Proba-3 launch, our group is already engaged in actions for future missions, comparable to Ariel. We keep shut communication with ESA mission groups and are prepared to supply assist every time wanted.”