GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

The specific objective of this topic is to define the overall architecture of the constellation, with particular attention to miniaturization, responsiveness, affordability, and complementarity with on-going EU and national projects, and to develop the associated components (sensors, platforms, ground segments and other key sub-systems), providing global and reactive coverage to address Member States, associated countries and EU needs in terms of innovative ISR capabilities and near real time intelligence.

One of the challenges is to achieve high performance payloads compatible with small satellites, in order to procure an affordable constellation that can federate European Member States and Norway around a shared capability. In this context, industry will have to propose a development that leads to an affordable solution in terms of nonrecurring and recurring costs. Indeed, high revisit capability and need for variety of sensors inherently requires deploying a constellation(s) of assets: the proposed development must therefore particularly look into miniaturised, mutual and/or standard components for the satellite platforms and payloads in order to reduce the costs, and into solutions for high data rate transmission and processing.

The topic will also have to address the challenge of ensuring that the proposed solution can be adapted to various forms of cooperation (at transnational and/or multi-agency level) to build, following the EDF project, a full-fledge multi-user and multi-sensor constellation, be its components and/or the full constellation jointly or nationally procured.