OHB Sweden and a pan-European consortium are working with the European Space Agency (ESA) to create a prototype for a small satellite constellation that will help solve a pressing 21st century transportation issue: Arctic weather prediction.
Speaking at the 2021 Small Satellite conference last week, OHB’s Bastiaan Lagaune said that climate change has melted the polar ice enough that navigation through Arctic waters has become a viable means of shipping. Ships are already starting to use these new Northern passages. Their crews and owners are discovering, however, that it’s more hazardous than they’d expected. A big reason? Unpredictable weather.
He went on to explain that weather prediction is vitally important for shipping, and that shipping companies depend on accurate weather prediction to protect their cargo and crews from potentially dangerous storms. Normally, they rely on geosynchronous weather satellites. These satellites have difficulty seeing very high or low latitudes due to their fixed positions over the equator. As there had been little human activity in the Arctic, however, it hadn’t been seen as a big problem.
Times have changed, ice has melted, and more frequent Arctic navigation has arrived. The problem is real, and needs to be solved. While ESA’s existing MetOP polar-orbiting satellites and upcoming MetOP-SG polar-orbiting satellites provide some data, as does the American Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), OHB has determined that there is a need for more constant monitoring that MetOP’s once-a-day polar imaging will provide, providing meteorologists more constant weather data than MetOP allows for.
OHB’s solution is the Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS) project. Instead of relying on a few large geosynchronous satellites, AWS will use a smallsat constellation that works in conjunction with ESA’s MetOP satellites. The 16-20 satellites will be set in a 600km sun-synchronous orbit to provide weather coverage at least once every half hour. That will provide frequent enough information for ships and their crews that they can anticipate and avoid inclement weather.
The prototype satellite is based on OHB Sweden’s Innosat platform. It weighs around 125 kg, and has a single 25 kg payload consisting of “a 19 channel cross-track scanning passive microwave radiometer from Omnisys Instruments, with 4 frequency bands to provide atmospheric sounding information complementary to the microwave radiometers on MetOp-SG”, according to OHB’s conference materials. Thales Alenia Space will be building the ground element at KSAT’s Svalbard Ground Station in Norway, which will include a L Band digital beam forming network to gather data from the satellites simultaneously.
Lagaune said that ESA’s Arctic Task Force started exploring potential user needs in the Arctic region back in 2016. OHB conducted a study in 2018 for ESA to discover and rank users’ priorities, and identified weather prediction as a critical issue for these users. OHB designed the proposed AWS constellation to resolve these users’ needs, and a number of Nordic meteorological institutes quickly “expressed very very strong interest in the project.”
ESA responded to this interest by awarding OHB and its partners with a contract for €32 million to build a prototype flight model and demonstrate AWS’s feasibility. The prototype is set to be built and launched sometime in 2024. It will be evaluated by EUMETSAT, and if approved, Lagaune said that he believes that the actual AWS mission would start a year later.
Lagaune closed his presentation during the conference’s Q&A session by discussing the size and nature of the AWS consortium. He said that ESA policy encourages contractors to draw on the resources of as many ESA members as possible. So while AWS’ industrial team includes companies from both the Nordic Arctic countries and from Canada — nations with a direct stake in Arctic weather forecasting — it’s grown to a consortium of 31 different companies and organizations from 12 ESA member states that are all working together on AWS. Lagaune* told SpaceQ that the Canadian company involved in the project can not be revealed as yet as their contract has not been finalized as yet.
Some of these members include France’s Thales Alenia Space and Sweden’s Omnisys, and also Switzerland’s RUAG Space, which announced that they will be providing the radiometer’s power system.
If all goes well, ESA said in their earlier contract announcement that “ESA would develop the envisaged constellation in cooperation with EUMETSAT, along the same agreement that led to the implementation of the generations of Meteosat and MetOp satellites.” Lagaune said in the Q&A that it would be OHB, however, that would be actually building the constellation.
* Updated at 1:31 p.m. EST to include update on the Canadian company in the project.