Bright Ascension Nominated Second Largest Partner in OS2- VOLT Mission for European Space Agency
Bright Ascension Ltd., a Scottish industry-leading space software technology provider, is pleased to announce that the company has been selected to head onboard and ground software development for the 3-year OS2-VOLT mission. Led by Craft Prospect Ltd. (CPL) for the Telecom Directorate of ESA under the ScyLight programme, the project is designed to evaluate and test radical new real-time techniques and technologies in low Earth orbit.
OS2-VOLT is a circa €12 Mn project, aiming to demonstrate products and services within a Versatile Optical Laboratory for Telecommunications. Several capability demonstrations are planned both as a quantum key delivery and optical communications platform, and for assured, taskable hyperspectral imagery capture for climate resilience applications. Payload experimentation will be accessible through a secure reconfigurable high-performance computing system.
Bright Ascension is currently preparing to launch its highly anticipated end-to-end suite of software products called HELIX, that will form the foundation for its OS2-VOLT partnership. The ESA/CPL project will include an extensible and customisable downstream software platform to provide high-level tasking and monitoring of the space system at the level of delivering data and services to a number of anchor customers. The largest of these is expected to be Resilience Constellation, that provides data and insights on effective climate mitigation for conclusive decision-making by governments, financial institutions, businesses and civil society. Bright Ascension will also be leading software development for the upstream side of the mission, leveraging products for flight, test and operations software.
“The OS2-VOLT partnership is an exciting opportunity for us to demonstrate the capabilities and effectiveness our new end-to-end HELIX products that we are launching later in the year,” said Peter Mendham, CEO at Bright Ascension. “Over the past 11 years we have successfully validated our innovative engineering in the context of over 40 missions and we are now expanding our expertise and understanding of the upstream software technologies to downstream services to provide high-level tasking and software-defined flexibility to the complete space system, from onboard payloads to in-cloud data processing. This ability to connect and optimise integration between building/operating a spacecraft and actually delivering data in an easy to use and accessible way will open up new innovative opportunities for a large and very diverse number of customers.”
Bright Ascension made a number of new product suite announcements as part of the Small Satellites Conference, held in Logan, Utah, on August, 5-10. More information on the upcoming HELIX suite, the full list of products and benefits can be found on the company’s website: www.brightascension.com
About Bright Ascension
Bright Ascension Ltd. is a Scotland-based industry-leading space software technology provider, offering unique off-the- shelf software products and solutions for the delivery of space-based services, both on spacecraft and on the ground.
Its innovative modular approach allows space software developers to significantly speed up mission development, simplify and automate operations, and results in lower total mission cost. Easily adaptable, and tailored to the exact requirements of your unique mission, Bright Ascension’s innovative software technology has been tried and tested in flight with over 40 satellites in orbit. More information: www.brightascension.com
