First Place at ESA Challenge

Over a pe­riod of six months, the organ­izers of the chal­lenge grad­ually added vari­ous task types to a simu­lation envi­ron­ment, which then had to be man­aged au­tono­mous­ly. The tasks in­clud­ed map­ping re­gions on the Earth's sur­face, ob­serv­ing time-critical events, and locat­ing emer­gency bea­cons. At the same time, the chal­lenge in­volved man­aging lim­ited re­sources on the satel­lite, such as fuel, ener­gy, stor­age and com­puta­tional pow­er.

The last 72 hours of the chal­lenge marked the start of the final evalu­ation phase. For this phase, the entire simu­lation envi­ron­ment was reset and filled with a host of new, more de­manding tasks. Addi­tional­ly, access to the satel­lite was artifi­cially re­strict­ed: Simi­lar to real LEO satel­lites (LEO means Low Earth Orbit, these satel­lites orbit the Earth at a low alti­tude), com­muni­cation was now only possi­ble every 90 minutes for about 10 minutes – truly a stress test for the se­mi-au­tono­mous soft­ware on board.

With 14 out of 17 mis­sion tasks com­pleted dur­ing the evalu­ation phase, the team quali­fied for the 'CIARC Day' at the Euro­pean Space Oper­ations Cen­tre (ESOC) in Darmstadt. Dur­ing the final presentation and sub­se­quent dis­cussion, both the modular sys­tem archi­tec­ture and the effi­cient path plan­ner im­pressed the expert jury. Due to the high de­gree of flexi­bility, re­source effi­cien­cy, and au­tono­my, the team man­aged to stand out against strong com­peti­tion and was hon­ored as the win­ner of this year's chal­lenge. 

The price for the win­ning JMU stu­dents of the Elite Graduate Program “Sa­telli­te Techno­logy” was a one week ESA Academy train­ing course on space cyber­secu­rity in Bel­gium.

Text: Elite Graduate Program “Sa­telli­te Techno­logy”