Abstract
Within the European Space Agency’s (ESA) General Support and Technology Programme (GSTP), the Project for On-Board Autonomy (PROBA) missions provide a platform for in-orbit technology demonstration. Besides the technology demonstration goal, the satellites allow to provide services to, e.g., scientific communities. PROBA1 has been providing multi-spectral imaging data to the Earth observation community for a decade, and PROBA2 provides imaging and irradiance data from our Sun to the solar community. This article gives an overview of the PROBA2 mission history and provides an introduction to the flight segment, the ground segment, and the payload operated onboard. Important aspects of the satellite’s design, including onboard software autonomy and the functionality of the navigation and guidance, are discussed. PROBA2 successfully proved again within the GSTP concept that it is possible to provide a fast and cost-efficient satellite design and to combine advanced technology objectives from industry with focussed objectives from the science community.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the entire PROBA2 Teams at ESTEC, Redu, QinetiQ Space, all the subcontractors and suppliers, the universities and research institutes providing units or instruments to the PROBA2 mission, for their invaluable contribution to the mission and spacecraft design, development, verification, and testing and day-to-day operations.
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PROBA2 – First Two Years of Solar Observation
Guest Editors: David Berghmans, Anik De Groof, Marie Dominique, and Jean-François Hochedez
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Santandrea, S., Gantois, K., Strauch, K. et al. PROBA2: Mission and Spacecraft Overview. Sol Phys 286, 5–19 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-013-0289-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-013-0289-5