S3NET H2020 EO2015 EU Project

Satellite Swarm Sensor Network (S3NET) is a 2.5-year H2020 project coordinated by iTUBS that started 1st May 2016. Its consortium gathers 8 partners from 4 countries for a global budget of 2.5M€.In the field of earth observation from space modern approaches show a trend of moving away from the classical single satellite missions, towards fractionated and distributed sensor missions, where multiple satellites possibly carrying different types of sensors act in a formation or “swarm”. Such missions promise an increase of imaging and service quality and in many cases a decrease of deployment costs for satellites that can become smaller and less complex due to mission requirements.

Objectives:

S3NET will work in parallel on key enablers required to develop the full potential of “swarms” of satellites through the optimised and enhance use of their on-board resources (sensors, computing power and fuel). The project objectives include satellite costs reduction, mission scalability and incremental deployment, as well as improvements in the performance of the quality of service and payload processions performance. The combined results of the S3NET called collectively the ‘S3NET concept’ aim at allowing a major step forward in the understanding of future technologies, their requirements and limitations and suitability for a variety of Earth observation applications of swarm missions.