ESA opens new Space Safety Centre
The new European Space Safety Centre is a reflection of Europe's ambition to protect its space missions but also its ground infrastructure from space weather events, asteroids or extinct satellites.
European space security has a new address: the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) new Space Safety Centre intends to lodge European missions, projects and activities for planetary protection from space weather events, asteroids or satellites that have reached the end of their lives.
The new ESA facilities demonstrate “the ambition of Europe to have its critical missions in orbit and civil infrastructure on the ground well protected against hazards from space”, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher pointed out, quoted in a statement from the European agency.
From Darmstadt, ESA wants to protect current and future space missions while ensuring that the Earth is shielded from possible solar storms or other space weather events.
As Rolf Densing, ESA’s Director of Operations, recalls, a major space weather event “could cause more than €15 billion worth of damage in Europe”. “We cannot prevent space weather, but costly ground infrastructure and satellites – and the critical services they provide – can be protected through forecasts, timely warnings, and real-time information.”
The new Space Safety Centre is to provide “space weather information and warnings for space missions” for ESA, aligning with the agency’s Space Weather Services Network. According to the statement, “the center’s teams will monitor the data received by ESA’s space weather sensors”, which already includes the “payloads on board Proba-2 and hosted on missions carried out by other agencies”. Data from the Vigil and Aurora missions will be added to these in the future.
This is the first time that ESA has a Space Safetty Centre. As a result, cutting-edge “space weather capabilities, tools and models” will be developed and “tested and evaluated in close cooperation” with European research centers and industry.
