PROBA Satellite Control Centre & Small-Mission Ground Segment

Spacebel’s Ground Segment product line covers turnkey and building-block IT systems for both mission operations and user operations of small satellite missions. Spacebel has developed all satellite control centres for the ESA PROBA series, operated from the ESEC facility in Redu, Belgium, including PROBA-1 (Earth observation), PROBA-2 (sun observation), PROBA-3 (formation flying for solar corona observation) and the in-development PROBA-Altius (atmospheric ozone monitoring). These systems are largely automated to enable unsupervised satellite passes with automatic telecommand uplink, telemetry reception/processing and product distribution.

Beyond satellite control centres, the product line includes mission and payload planning and scheduling software, built on a generic in-house platform tailored to customer requirements and delivered to CNES and ESA mission operations centres for Earth observation and telecom missions; this can be complemented by satellite simulation, optimisation software and AI-based scheduling tools. The Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS) capability covers mission planning, acquisition, processing, calibration and archiving of payload data, product cataloguing and on-demand distribution of science/imaging data – delivered either as discrete functions or as a standalone PDGS facility, as with the ALTIUS PDGS distributing processed atmospheric ozone data within three hours of capture.

Spacebel also contributes to institutional core ground infrastructure, notably the European Ground Systems Common Core (EGS-CC) for ESA, and to the Hera Cubesat Mission Operations Centre (CMOC) in Redu, which manages mission requests, flight dynamics and telemetry/data exchange with the Milani and Juventas cubesats. Current R&D is migrating monolithic single-satellite control-centre software toward cloud-native, container-orchestrated micro-services architectures capable of handling whole constellations, including control-centre-as-a-service offerings.