Redu plays a key role for the In Orbit Demonstration (IOD) with the Proba Mission Operation Centre (MOC) and two dedicated small dish antennas. Proba stands for PRoject for OnBoard Autonomy.
The Proba satellites are among the smallest ever to be flown by ESA, but they are making a big impact in space technology. Proba-2 is the second of the series, building on nearly ten years of successful Proba-1 experience.
The MOC is in charge of the operations planning and execution. Although the MOC is manned only with a small operations team during office hours, the satellites are operated 7 days a week.
The MOC operations are largely automated permitting unsupervised satellite passes with automatic processing of payload requests, uplink of telecommands, reception and processing of telemetry, extraction and distribution of payload products to a server or directly to the Principal Investigator (PI) site. The scheduling of the other ground stations like Kiruna and Svalbard stations is also performed by the MOC.
The operation team has accumulated a great deal of experience which is used to continuously improve the operations' conduct, to develop new ground and flight procedures and to give inputs to the Project when required.
Although originally designed for a two years of life, Proba-1 is now in its tenth year of operations. The satellite provides hyperspectral imaging to the scientific community. The on board CHRIS instrument is the Europe's only flying imaging spectrometer with a high resolution. The payload data acquired at Redu and Kiruna are transferred via internet to the Principal Investigator in charge of the processing and the distribution.
Proba-2 enters its second year in routine operations. It provides EUV Sun images every 100 seconds and solar irradiance measurements with a high temporal resolution. The Science Operation Center (SOC) is the Royal Observatory of Belgium. The data exchange between the Redu MOC and the SOC is done trough the internet. The SOC has the capability to command directly the Sun payloads by sending the appropriate request file to the Redu MOC where these commands are uplinked automatically to the satellite. This mechanism offers to the SOC a very high degree of flexibility to react in case of solar events. In this way, a satellite sun off-pointing of up to 3 degrees can even be directly commanded by the SOC in order to track a Corona Mass Ejection (CME) event for example.
The Redu MOC is also in charge of the operations planning and execution of the two plasma environment instruments and the numerous technology demonstrators. All the data are made automatically available to the different PIs on the MOC server.
The Svalbard station (Norway) is also used for 5 passes per day for data downlink and telecommands uplink. The prime connection between the MOC and Svalbard is via the internet.
The Redu role in IOD will be further consolidated with the future launch and operations of Proba-V which will fly a reduced-mass version of the Vegetation instrument to provide a earth vegetation global coverage. The Proba-V ground segment deployment is expected to start in the current of the year.