NAOS

(National Advanced Optical System)

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.

The NAOS contract is an end-to-end agreement for the provision of the satellite and of 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

BIOMASS

Earth Explorer Mission of ESA for Biomass and Tropical Forest Observation (distribution, annual changes, links with Earth climate). Essential support to UN treaties on the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

It will carry the first P-band synthetic aperture radar, able to deliver accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest biomass. Five-year mission will monitor at least eight growth cycles in the world’s forests.

Under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency

HERA MISSION

Hera is the European contribution to an international double-spacecraft NASA / ESA collaboration for planetary defense. The target is a binary asteroid system, the Didymos pair of near-Earth asteroids. OHB Italia S.p.A. is responsible for System Engineering.

NASA has already performed (in October 2022) a kinetic impact on the smaller of the two bodies with DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). In 2024, the Hera spacecraft will then perform a high-resolution visual, laser and radio post-impact survey.

The data collected will allow to prepare a planetary defense to safeguard the future of our Planet.

Under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency

PRISMA

(PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa)

PRISMA is a satellite developed for the Italian Space Agency by a consortium with OHB Italia S.p.A. as Prime Contractor.

It is the first European Satellite with an hyperspectral instrument and a panchromatic camera on board. It was successfully launched atop a Vega launcher in March 2019 from Arianespace Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana.

Now PRISMA is in orbit and It is acquiring, downloading, processing, delivering fundamental images for monitoring our Planet.

Activity carried out under ASI contract.

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.

EUCLID

It is a mission of the European Space Agency to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.

OHB Italia S.p.A. 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.

Activity carried out under ASI contract.

Solar Orbiter – METIS CORONOGRAPH

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 S.p.A. 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.

Under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency

ASIM / ISS External Payload

The ESA-European Space Agency mission ASIM (Atmosphere Space Interactions Monitor) was successfully launched on 2nd April 2018 on board of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida (USA).

ASIM is an observatory mounted outside the International Space Station (ISS) on the European Columbus module. Its target is to study electrical discharges and transient luminous events above severe thunderstorms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and to monitor X-ray and gamma-ray flashes. OHB Italia responsibilities were system integration and validation, software development and data handling & power distribution.

 Originally designed for 2 years lifetime, ASIM has been a success, collecting data on storms for almost 4 years. On January 10th, 2022 ASIM was relocated to another spot outside the Space Station by a robotic arm.

 The new position provided new important data for ASIM scientists. Storms will now be studied from a new perspective, more towards the horizon.

Under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency

LISA PATHFINDER

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.

Activity carried out under ASI contract.

Under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency. The view expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency