RHEA is awarded the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Space Weather SN-I Contract
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 19 November 2010 – The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded RHEA System S.A. (RHEA) a €1.7M contract for “Space Weather Precursor Services” as a key element of the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme.
SSA has a long term aim to develop a coordinated system for giving information and forecasts about hazards coming from outside the Earth’s atmosphere. These include potential strikes by large objects such as asteroids or comets, threats to spacecraft from collision with debris in orbit and the effects of Space Weather.
“Space Weather” identifies the state of the environment in Space and comprises radiation, magnetic fields and other natural phenomena such as cosmic rays and space plasma. SSA is concerned with the adverse effects of these on modern infrastructure such as spacecraft, navigation systems, oil pipelines and communication networks. It also represents a risk to human health, especially for astronauts.
RHEA leads a highly prestigious team of internationally recognised expert institutes, university departments and companies including the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, SpaceBel, DLR, Etamax, DH Consulting, Tromsø Geophysical Observatory, Austrian Institute of Technology, Kanzelhöhe Observatory, GMV and Solenix.
The RHEA team will perform a comprehensive scientific, technical and programmatic analysis of European expertise, systems and services within the scientific and research community. A selection of available assets will be integrated as precursor services accessed via a newly developed Web Portal. RHEA will also define a “Development Roadmap”, showing the evolution to a fully federated, service oriented architecture that maximises utilisation of specialist space weather expertise across the whole of Europe.
“ESA’s SSA Programme signals a significant step forward for Space Weather in Europe and RHEA is proud to be taking a leading role” said Simon Reid, Chief Engineer of RHEA System S.A. “RHEA has been a principle provider of Space Weather expertise to ESA for over 12 years and also lead in the management, design and development of mission critical systems for satellite operations and earth observation data centres. SSA provides a unique opportunity to combine these relevant skills and contribute to the preparation of a fully operational space weather system. We look forward to working actively with the space weather scientific community, with interested users and with ESA to achieve this goal”
RHEA System S.A. is a Belgian based Space Engineering Consulting and Software company that offers knowledge-based services and innovative proven solutions to the global space industry. Our teams of system engineers and scientists provide support to clients across Europe, Canada and the USA. RHEA’s combined Space domain expertise and excellence in system and software engineering is both recognized and unique, resulting in highly reliable user-centric solutions.
