This grant is expected to contribute to the enhancement of the operations and the services provided by EU SST Partnership. The characterization of the space environment will allow EUSST to have a broader vision on this concept, when assessing the rapidly increase of number of spacecrafts and space debris and so the risk of collision in space.
Regarding this situation, the impact of this project will be:
• Improving knowledge and methods used to provide CA, RE and FG services.
• Improving the EUSST catalogue accuracy.
• Ensuring the scalability of the EUSST regarding the space environment.
These improvements will contribute to mitigate the risk of a collision between space assets. Moreover, EU SST constitutes the operational pillar for the EU STM approach. In a context of an increasingly contested space environment, Space Traffic Management (STM) will contribute to the security and defense dimensions of the EU in space. Building autonomous EU Space Surveillance and Tracking capacities to support STM is therefore of paramount importance.
For more details about it visit the EU SST official web (www.eusst.eu).
To reach this, several activities have been carried out in the frame of New & improved EU SST Missions and Services to maximize the impact and contribution of EU SST towards ensuring a sustainable and guaranteed access to and use of space as well as global burden-sharing in the domain of Space Situational Awareness, accomplishing the safety and security of European economies, societies and citizens
The New & improved EU SST Missions and Services project has been implemented in the form of a Specific Grant Agreement (SGA) addressing the objectives identified in the Space Regulation and the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2021-2022. The HE_EUSST_MS_TOP1 action has been defined considering the specific objectives defined in the Work Programme 2021-2022:
• Keep the knowledge and capabilities of Europe on the Space Surveillance and Tracking domain at the leading edge.
• Adapt, improve and evolve the current EUSST initial services (Collision Avoidance; Fragmentation; Re-entry) portfolio to future user needs and space environment.
• Improve the overall performance of the EUSST services and ensure, in the long-term, a high level of performance and appropriate autonomy at Union level.
• Identify and define new missions and services (e.g. debris mitigation; debris remediation).
• Explore the implementation of new services, in complement of the three existing ones.
• Support the pre-developments and end-to-end early demonstration of new SST services.
