Beyond Gravity supplies high-power antenna for ESA mission

ESA’s Biomass satellite will deliver new information on forest height and forest biomass from space. (Photo: ESA/ATG Medialab)

On April 29, the European forest satellite “Biomass” was launched into space from Kourou aboard a European Vega-C rocket operated by Arianespace.

The company Beyond Gravity, based in Zurich, Switzerland, supplied several key products for this mission. Its high-power antenna and navigation receiver will provide the satellite’s precise position in orbit. Also, the satellite will be protected by the company’s thermal insulation.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) “Biomass” mission will measure forest biomass and will observe the state and development of forests and advance our knowledge of the carbon cycle. Knowing the amount of carbon bound up in forest biomass will sharpen our understanding of climate change and its likely effects on the global carbon cycle. The satellite will orbit Earth at an altitude of 666 kilometers. The mission’s expected lifetime is at least 5.5 years.

“Forests are the green lungs of our planet, providing us with oxygen and storing carbon dioxide,” said Oliver Grassmann, Executive Vice President Satellites at Beyond Gravity. “With the environmental satellite Biomass, we are learning more about the importance of forests to our climate system. Contributing to the functioning of such a groundbreaking climate satellite with key products, like various antennas, our navigation receiver and our multi-layer thermal insulation is a great honor and extremely inspiring for all our colleagues.”

The Biomass mission will feature a new high-power antenna from Beyond Gravity that serves the data downlink needs of new Earth-observing satellites as they gather ever larger quantities of environmental data. The antenna has the size and shape of a large ice cream cone. While more and more Earth observation data from satellites is gathered, the satellite itself becomes smaller. Thus, there was a clear need for a smaller, more powerful data downlink antenna.

The X-band helix antenna design was developed for ESA by Beyond Gravity’s site in Gothenburg, Sweden. Beyond Gravity also provided the S-Band TTC (telemetry, tracking and command) antenna, which acts as a communication and control antenna for the satellite.

Precise in-orbit position determination. The satellite’s position in space is determined to within centimeters using technology from Beyond Gravity’s site in Vienna, Austria. The more accurate the positioning, the more accurate the data provided by the satellite.

The receiver can process both GPS and Galileo signals. Beyond Gravity’s navigation receivers determine the position of approximately 25 satellites in space. The Beyond Gravity site in Tampere, Finland, produced the Reflector Deployment Interface Unit.

Multi-layer thermal insulation from Beyond Gravity made out of several layers of ultra-thin special polyimide foils will keep the satellite’s instruments at the required operating temperature despite the  harsh thermal environment in space. Nearly every European ESA satellite is protected by thermal insulation from Beyond Gravity, which is designed and produced at the company’s sites in Austria. Beyond Gravity also produced the Eddy Current Damper, which is part of the spacecraft’s solar array wing and is providing the damping to slow down the deployment and prevent shocks at deployment completion.