High Gain Antenna Gimbal (HGAG) for the rover Perseverance of the Mars 2020 mission
The European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) today hosted a presentation event for the mission in Spain, the country that leads Proba-3 through Sener, in close collaboration with a consortium of 40 companies from 16 countries. The event was attended by Diana Morant, Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities; Juan Carlos Cortés, Director of the AEE; and Carole Mundell, Director of Science at ESA and Director of ESAC; and Luis Manuel Partida, Mayor of Villanueva de la Cañada, among other authorities.
The mission will soon be launched from India and will achieve a historic milestone: it will demonstrate that high-precision formation flight between satellites in space is possible, while allowing important scientific work to be carried out by creating an artificial eclipse to study the solar corona.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-3 mission is ready for its next launch from India, as was announced today at an event at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) facilities in Villanueva de la Cañada (Madrid). The event served as a presentation of the mission in Spain, a country that leads Proba-3 through the industrial engineering and technology group Sener, in close collaboration with a consortium of 40 companies from 16 countries. The event was attended by Diana Morant, Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities; Juan Carlos Cortés, Director of the Spanish Space Agency (AEE); and Carole Mundell, Director of Science at ESA and Director of ESAC; and Luis Manuel Partida, Mayor of Villanueva de la Cañada, among other authorities.
During his speech, Morant highlighted: “Proba-3 is a triple milestone. It is a technological advance, and an advance for Sener and for our companies. But, in addition, it is a milestone for our country. It is a victory on the road to a more prosperous and therefore fairer and more equal model of a country. It is also a demonstration of our country’s ability to involve more generations in the challenge of achieving a better Spain. We have companies capable of involving our talent in this challenge, creating space and opportunities in new areas of action. The success of Proba-3 is the success of Spain.”
In the case of the ESA, Mundell stressed that “Spain is a key player in the aerospace industry and has made significant economic and political efforts to achieve this status. Today, Spain is highly competitive in the design, development and manufacture of technology, with the consequent positive effect on direct and indirect employment. The country and its industry are today indispensable agents in space exploration”. For her part, Noelia Peinado, coordinator of the GSTP programme at ESA TEC, said: “Proba-3 has great scientific value, which we will be able to access thanks to the development of a technology capable of guaranteeing thousandths of a degree of precision, autonomously and at a great distance from Earth”. Anik de Groof, Solar Orbiter Mission Manager at ESA, highlighted: “the solar corona is a region of great scientific value, an area that reaches millions of degrees Celsius and that has effects that affect us directly, in areas such as communications. Proba-3 will guarantee up to 1,000 hours of eclipses, which will allow us to study the interesting solar corona in unprecedented detail”.
Pulido also stressed “the satisfaction that this moment represents for all those involved in Proba-3, whose approval dates to the ESA Ministerial Council in 2012. Today, Spain is capable of leading space missions of great technological and scientific value. It has been a path, of course, with challenges, but public support has been decisive in achieving it; a support that will be reinforced in the Ministerial Council of 2025. Currently, Spain is investing 300 million through the ESA.”
Diego Rodríguez, Director of Space and Science at Sener, emphasized “the challenges that the mission must overcome. Two satellites, 150 meters apart, will maintain millimetre precision at a speed of kilometres per second, and will be autonomously aligned. This milestone requires a great effort in many areas, from mission analysis to guidance, navigation and control algorithms. Spain has played a fundamental role in the design, integration and testing of these systems. This mission has been led by Sener, but we could not have reached this point without the support of the participating industry and, very especially, the central team, made up of top-level Spanish companies.”
Finally, at the table dedicated to industry, Diego Rodríguez, Director of Space and Science at Sener; Francisco Javier Benito, Proba-3 Project Manager at Airbus Defence and Space; Mariella Graziano, Director of Business Development for Space at GMV; and Ignacio Tourné, Director of Business Development at Deimos participated.
Demonstrating the viability of formation flight between satellites: a technological milestone of great scientific value
The success of the mission will require perfect synchronization between two satellites, Coronagraph and Occulter, which will fly in an elliptical orbit, moving just over 60,000 km away from the Earth (approximately 10 times the distance from the surface to the Earth’s core). Another technical challenge posed by the mission is the autonomy of the satellites: each one will act independently, calculating its position and trajectory with respect to its counterpart, without the support of a human operator; to do so, it will use advanced guidance, navigation and control (GNC) systems, a branch of engineering that deals with the design of systems to control the movement of vehicles, both manned and autonomous.
Coronagraph will house the mission’s coronagraph, an instrument that will point directly at the Sun. The second satellite, Occulter, will eclipse the Sun, interposing itself between the star and Coronagraph. To do this, it will use a disc of about 140 centimetres in diameter and various devices (optical and laser) that will allow it to calculate the relative position and attitude between the two satellites and position both with extreme precision.
The perfect synchrony between both satellites will create an artificial eclipse in a way never achieved before: the coronagraph in space will be able to obtain images of the Sun that will not be affected by the disturbances of the Earth’s atmosphere, while the Occulter satellite, hundreds of metres from the focal point of the optical instrument, will significantly reduce diffraction effects.
The formation flight allows the satellites to act as a single optical instrument, composing a virtual structure in space with high reconfiguration capabilities. Proba-3 will demonstrate that future missions could be developed on a larger scale and at lower cost using multiple small modules that behave in flight like a single large satellite.
Sener is the prime contractor for the mission and is responsible for both the flight and ground segments, and the participation of the Spanish industry is completed by Airbus Defence and Space, which has carried out the design and manufacture of the two platforms; by GMV for the development of the formation flight subsystem, flight dynamics and relative GPS function; and by Deimos, responsible for orbit analysis and development of the rendezvous experiment.
Proba-3 is part of ESA’s General Support Technology Programme, and Spain’s participation has been possible thanks to the support of the Centre for Technological and Industrial Development, as well as close collaboration between companies at an international level.