Ibadan, 10 March 2023. – The National Observatory of Athens (NOA), with support from the Greek Ministry of Digital Governance – General Secretariat of Telecommunications & Posts, awarded a contract to GMV to supply the core software as a complement to the existing national Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) capacity to run the Greek Space Surveillance and Tracking and Space Awareness (SST/SSA) Program.
The system comprises an operations center, the GR SST NOC, in Athens at the Operational Unit BEYOND/NOA and a network of optical telescopes throughout the country to support space tracking and survey operations. As a result, the system will leverage GMV’s state-of-the-art COTS software for SST to support the core processing infrastructure.
This includes SST capabilities and functionalities such as sensor tasking, orbit determination, collision avoidance, re-entry prediction (in the operations center), and optical data astrometric and photometric reduction in each of the network’s telescopes. As a result, both the Spanish and Romanian branches of GMV will work on the activity with teams in Madrid and Bucharest.
To foster the development of an SST capability in Europe, the EU established a Framework for Space Surveillance and Tracking Support. This Support Framework aims to develop an independent SSA/SST capability in Europe. Since then, the budding national SST capabilities in the countries within the EU SST consortium have been federated in a coordinated manner.
With this new project, GMV strengthens its position in Europe’s SST. Furthermore, more than 100 GMV engineers currently work at GMV on SSA/SST activities in seven European countries, making it one of the largest SSA/SST industries and teams in Europe.
