METASAT project successfully completed

Bremen, February 26, 2025. High-quality data from space is in demand and the market is expected to continue growing in the future. At the same time, the satellites that provide this data are becoming increasingly complex – not only in terms of the hardware installed, but also in terms of software. This means that new approaches to satellite design are needed.

In light of this, a consortium of five companies joined forces to launch the METASAT project (Modular Model-Based Design and Testing for Applications in Satellites) under the umbrella of the European Commission's Horizon Europe program. After a duration of two years, the project was recently successfully completed.

The project results include various new hardware and software components as well as design methods that can be used to develop highly complex satellite missions without exploding the required time and costs.

Virtual replicas of physical systems enable new design methodologies

One fundamental innovation is the use of virtual replicas of physical systems. This makes it possible to test and optimize mission-critical functions of new hardware and software modules in a risk-free virtual environment before they are integrated into the physical satellite hardware. In addition, critical and less critical software applications can be executed on the same platform but in separate compartments. A hypervisor ensures efficient management of the available hardware resources. This is a special software that creates a virtual environment and allocates resources such as computing power, storage space and network capacities separately to the various compartments. This allows them to function as if they had their own hardware.

European partnership

The following partners were involved in the project: the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Ikerlan S. Coop and Fent Innovative Software Solutions (FentISS) from Spain, Collins Aerospace from Italy and OHB System AG from Germany.

This combination of innovation centers (BSC, Ikerlan, Collins), a medium-sized technology integrator (FentISS) and an end user (OHB System AG) made it possible to develop and test the new design methodology in a realistic scenario. OHB provided use cases based on real projects (e.g. EnMAP) and successfully demonstrated the parallel execution of various applications (e.g. interlockings to avoid critical instrument states, data processing, image recognition using AI) that will potentially be used in future satellites.

For more details about the METASAT project and its achievements, visit www.metasat-project.eu.

Watch the METASAT video here.