AIAD - Federazione Aziende Italiane per L'Aereospazio, la Difesa e la Sicurezza

PRODUCTS – SERVICES – APPLICATIONS – TECHNOLOGIES

Satellites & Missions
NAOS
it is an Earth Observation mission for Luxembourg Government. NAOS is a very-high-resolution optical satellite system developed by OHB Italia S.p.A. as Prime Contractor under an end-to-end contract including the realization of the satellite and its ground segment. NAOS Space Segment: Composed of one satellite, placed in Low Earth Orbit; Equipped with a very high-resolution optical camera. NAOS Ground Segment: Characterized by a distributed architecture; all the relevant Centers are connected through a Ground Communication Network in order to allow system management.

CONTRIBUTION TO IRIDE CONTELLATION

The European Space Agency and OHB Italia have signed an important contract for the development of 24 satellites (Batch one and batch two) as part of the IRIDE constellation in the frame of PNRR (Piano Nazionale Ripresa e Resilienza).

IRIDE stands as one of the most prominent European space programs in the field of Earth observation. Its realization is set to occur in Italy through the Government’s initiative, leveraging resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) supplemented by the funds of the National Supplementary Plan (PNC). IRIDE is a satellite system which is expected to be operational by June 2026, under the coordination of the ESA-European Space Agency, with the involvement of the ASI-Italian Space Agency.

OHB Italia will deliver a constellation of Eaglet II satellites and the related Flight Operation System (FOS).

OHB Italia is responsible for the following activities: satellite development, launch, in-orbit management and dual-use space asset, which provides an unprecedent persistent surveillance capability. Services generated by the constellation will be destined to marine/terrestrial surveillance; climate change; atmospheric monitoring; security; emergency management.

COMET INTERCEPTOR

ESA’s new fast-class mission, the first to visit a pristine comet or other interstellar object that has just begun its journey into the inner solar system. It will offer a new insight into the evolution of comets as they migrate inwards from the periphery of the Solar System. OHB Italia SpA, as Prime Contractor, is responsible for the mission analysis, system engineering, procurement, integration testing, scientific instrument interface and the communication subsystem.

SATURN
OHB Italia signed with ASI-Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, a “Phase A/B” contract for a technology demonstration mission called SATURN (Synthetic AperTure radar cUbesat formation flyiNg). It consists of a preliminary system study with definition of technical requirements and assessment of critical technologies for a train of 3, 16U-MicroSats equipped with miniaturized SAR instruments. The main target of the SATURN mission is to demonstrate the key technology “Cooperative Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) Swarms of SAR MicroSats” for innovative, low cost and versatile Earth Observation applications. SATURN will become the first ever Space SAR MIMO mission. The distribution of the key resources, normally concentrated in a single, large and complex satellite, can be distributed among small-sized and simpler systems, thanks to the proper combination of the signals from each single node of the swarm. Such constellation of swarms deployed on different orbital planes allows high revisit time and high performance independently from the available daylight and cloud cover. The industrial team is led from OHB Italia as the prime contractor, the subcontractors are ARESYS,  POLITECNICO DI MILANO, AIRBUS ITALIA.

RAMSES

This revolutionary ESA’s space safety program, following the HERA mission, will monitor and accompany asteroid 99942 Apophis during its close flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029, providing critical data for the protection of our Planet from potential future impacts.

OHB Italia, as Prime Contractor, is leading a core team including OHB System and GMV. The target is to develop an innovative probe to conduct detailed scientific analyses on the changes the asteroid undergoes due to Earth’s gravitational influence.

RAMSES will be equipped with an advanced suite of scientific instruments, including two CubeSats that will be deployed to collect close-up data, providing a comprehensive “before and after” perspective and contributing to the scientific understanding of asteroid dynamics.

GENESIS

Genesis is a unique observatory that will measure the Earth from space with millimetric detail. The satellite will use for the first time in space history the main geodetic technologies simultaneously to map our Planet.

Genesis will orbit at an altitude of 6.000 km combining the major geodetic technologies on the same platform aboard a satellite: Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI); Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Receiver; Satellite Laser Ranging (SRL); all synchronized by an Ultra-Stable Oscillator (USO), a high-precision compact instrument used to provide a stable frequency.

The Genesis mission is part of the FutureNav programme approved by the ESA Council at ministerial level in November 2022 in Paris.

The objective of the mission is to contribute to an updated global Earth model, the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF), with an accuracy of 1 mm and a long-term stability of 0.1 mm/year. This state-of-the-art spatial geodetic observatory, will allow the distortions in each method to be identified and overcome. This improvement will have a major impact on multiple navigation and Earth science applications, including the Galileo navigation system and the ‘precise orbit determination’ of all other space missions.

Earth Observation Instruments

MWI (MicroWave Imager)

MicroWave Imager (MWI) for MetOp SG. It is a joint project of ESA and Eumetsat (EPS) that will make available in few years the most accurate weather forecasts ever had before. OHB Italia is responsible for the MWI instrument that will be on board of three satellites. MWI is a conically-scanning microwave radiometer that provides measurements of precipitation, observations of clouds, snow, sea ice coverage, water vapor, temperature and surface images.

CIMR (Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer)
It Is an Earth Observation programme co-funded by ESA and EU member states in the frame of the ‘High Priority Copernicus Missions’. ASI – Italian Space Agency – played a key role in financing the CIMR mission. OHB Italia is responsible, as subcontractor of Thales Alenia Space Italy, for the development and production of the CIMR instrument in relation to the two satellites. The CIMR instrument is a conical scan multi-frequency microwave radiometer featuring multi-beam architecture, the largest antenna of its kind, state-of-the-art advanced radio-frequency interference detection and blanking techniques. It will ensure global daily coverage with 6 hourly-revisit in Arctic areas, for high-spatial resolution observations of sea-surface temperature, sea-ice concentration, sea-surface salinity and a wide range of other sea-ice parameters, providing a fundamental contribution to climatology and environmental sustainability.

Space Situational Awareness / Space Surveillance & Tracking

FLYEYE
It is a telescope, developed for ESA-European Space Agency and funded by ASI-Agenzia Spaziale Italiana with a state-of-the-art optical sensor designed for Space Situational Awareness (SSA), combining a very wide Field of View (FoV), very high astronomical resolution and fast repositioning capabilities. It will be able to implement a NEO wide survey strategy, observing unknown dangerous asteroids rushing towards the Earth a week in advance. For Space Surveillance Tracking (SST), its survey observations allow to catalogue objects with a diameter of about 15 cm placed in orbit at an altitude of 1000 km (High LEO), with an accuracy of tens of meters on the orbit track. The first Flyeye has been fully assembled and tested in the factory and it will be shortly transferred to its observation site.

FLYEYE SST NETWORK

Four Flyeyes, financed through PNRR funds thanks to the ASI, will be the new space sentinels for the protection of the Space environment.

OHB Italia SpA will deliver the ground-based Telescopes dedicated to Space Surveillance & Tracking (SST) for space monitoring and security purposes. They will be installed in different geographical locations around the globe, in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, allowing the reduction of collision risks among space assets and other operational spacecrafts or space debris. Each Flyeye telescope has a field of view of 45 square degrees and is equipped with 16 separate optical chambers mimicking the complex structure of a fly’s compound eye. They are capable of tracking space debris in HLEO (High “Low Earth Orbit” between 1,000 and 2,000 km) and in the MEO (“Medium Earth Orbit” between 2,000 and about 34,000 km) by providing the basic data and trajectories to identify potential hazards to orbital infrastructure and to manage any anti-collision maneuvers.

The Network of Flyeye Telescopes will be supplied with sophisticated software that will allow them to operate in synergy and will enable the creation of a catalogue of all orbiting objects, above a certain size threshold, in the HLEO/MEO orbital belt.

Equipment 

LLD for MWI Models
OHB Italia developed several Launch Locking Devices for MetOp-SG, MWI Inst., ICI Inst and also for the Separation Subsystem of Lares I and II, both developed for Italian Space Agency (ASI). They are four not standard Launch Locking Devices, the main structural load path for the Instrument Rotating Part (IRP) in locked configuration. The instrument mass to be locked weights at launch 160 kg, LLDs will release the IRP on orbit when each of them receives an electrical signal.

SMU – EnMAP SATELLITE
The Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) is a German hyperspectral satellite mission whose objective is to provide detailed monitoring of characterization and parameter extraction of rock/soil targets, vegetation, inland and coastal waters on a global scale. The satellite, successfully launched on April 2021, was developed by OHB System AG on behalf of DLR – German Space Agency with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection.
In the frame of the EnMAP mission, OHB Italia S.p.A. designed, developed and tested the Satellite Management System (SMS), made of two identical Satellite Management Units  (SMU), which compose the “BRAIN” of the satellite. These units are indeed responsible for the satellite commanding/monitoring over the whole operational lifetime and designed to interface/control all the electronic subsystems. EnMAP SMU design was already successfully adopted by OHB Italia on the PRISMA satellite, launched in 2019.

GMT COVERS SYSTEM 
The Giant Magellan Telescope is one of the most advanced ground-based telescopes ever engineered, with a resolving power ten times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be located at Las Campanas Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Once operational, the GMT will explore new frontiers in nearly all areas of astronomy — from understanding the fundamental nature of the universe to the search for life on distant exoplanets. The telescope uses seven primary mirrors, each 8.4 meters in diameter, to form an effective aperture of 25 meters that will be able to gather faint light from the farthest reaches of the known universe.  OHB Italia is developing complex mechanical covers to protect the giant mirrors from damage, minimize their exposure from dust and particles, ensure a stable thermal environment and provide access to the telescope’s subsystems that cannot be safely accessed with the mirrors expose.

Scientific and Planetary Instruments

ISRU 
ISRU Demonstrator Payload is aimed for the extraction of oxygen from lunar regolith on lunar surface. The experiments were conducted by OHB Italia as Prime Contractor and the Politecnico di Milano in the frame of the In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) Demonstration Mission, a program of and funded by ESA, the European Space Agency, with the strong support of ASI, the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana. The system powered with sand simulating polar lunar soil, produced the expected amount of water, extracting oxygen from the oxides present in the minerals of lunar surface. The thin layer of dusty sand that covers the Moon contains minerals that are also found on Earth, allowing the use of chemical transformation processes known from terrestrial industrial applications. The ability to produce water in-situ and therefore oxygen and hydrogen, is a key step for future Moon’s human missions, as these are fundamental elements for sustaining the life for extended periods. This production capability also frees future lunar bases from the use of open-loop systems that require continuous refuelling from Earth, simplifying logistics and reducing the costs of transporting materials.

LARES II
The LARES II System, the massive “sphere” to verify Einstein’s Relativity Theory, was developed by OHB Italia under the ASI flag and it was launched as the main payload of VEGA C maiden flight (as LARES I in 2012 with VEGA) on July 2022.
LARES II (LAser RElativity Satellite), is a passive satellite, composed of a high-density nickel alloy sphere of 424mm (diameter) and weighing about 300kg, on which 303 retroreflectors are installed. A key element of the LARES II System is the non-conventional retaining mechanism assembly that kept the spheric satellite locked during launch (without damaging the perfect spherical shape) and released it once in orbit. The LARES II mission is now operational and is allowing a very precise measurement of the gravitomagnetic field (Lense-Thirring effect), predicted by the general relativity theory.

METIS CORONOGPRAH 
Solar Orbiter, the ESA/NASA Sun Explorer, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral (Florida, USA) on February 2020. Solar Orbiter is the first mission to operate in extreme environment up to 500C°, providing images of the poles of the Sun at high latitude and to study magnetic fields, solar wind and space weather, combining in-situ together with remote sensing observations. The spacecraft has taken two years to reach the Sun: 42 Million kilometers at its closest approach. Solar Orbiter is equipped with ten cutting edge technological instruments. One of these is the multi-wavelength coronagraph METIS (Multi Element Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy) developed by OHB Italia along with other partners. It is observing the structure and the dynamics of the full corona with unprecedented temporal coverage and spatial resolution. METIS employs broad-band, polarized and narrow-band imaging technology for screening the solar corona: a unique capability combining two different wavelength bands by means of a single telescope.

LISA MISSION

LISA is one of the large-class missions under ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025. It will be the first space-based observatory dedicated to studying gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time emitted during the most powerful events in the Universe, such as pairs of black holes coming together and merging, just to investigate the entire history of the Universe using similar waves.

OHB Italia, on behalf of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), will be the industrial architect responsible of the so-called GRS, Gravitational Reference System, which is the “golden heart” of the mission. Th GRS purpose is to ensure that a 2kg Gold-Platinum cubical mass can be released as a free-falling object in Space, undisturbed by any possible external influence, and very precisely controlled in its behaviour, in order to identify the influence of gravitational waves down to sub-Hertz frequencies, a bandwidth previously impossible to study using any ground interferometric experiment.

EUCLID

It is an ESA Mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, succesfully launched from Cape Canaveral on 1st July 2023.

OHB Italia SpA gave a strong contribution by designing and manufacturing the electronic units of two main instruments that represent the “brain” of the system, the VIS (visual imager, a visible-wavelength camera) and the NISP (near-infrared spectrometer and photometer) to scan the deep space through a 1.2m diameter telescope and moreover the grism wheel assembly of the NISP instrument.

IXPE

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer is a NASA mission. The challenging target of IXPE is observing the universe at high energies and measuring the polarisation in X-rays emitted by large cosmic sources such as supernovas, black holes and pulsars. OHB Italia realized fundamental parts of the satellite: the Detector Unit Electronics (BEE), the so-called Filter and Calibration Wheel Mechanism and the Detector Service Unit (DSU). The satellite, successfully launched in December 2021,  is analyzing celestial objects presenting extreme magnetic-gravitational fields with a detail never seen before to determine the angles and degrees of polarization of point sources.