EU SST Partnership welcomes four new Member States
With the signature of the Grant Agreement extension, the EU SST Partnership and DG DEFIS concluded the onboarding of Belgium, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Luxembourg into the EU SST Partnership which now counts a total of 19 Member States.
This is another major milestone for the EU SST subcomponent, an important initiative to keep space assets safe from in-orbit collisions in light of increasing space activities. It follows the adoption of the Commission Implementing Decision on the procedure for new members to join the EU SST Partnership in June last year, the submission of applications by four Member States last summer, and the greenlighting of all four applications by DG DEFIS in September confirmed by an Implementing Decision in December. In March this year, the four new and 15 existing Member States signed the EU SST Partnership Agreement, and now in October, the EU SST Partnership signed a Grant extension with DG DEFIS to co-finance EU SST Partnership activities until mid-2028.
The EU SST Partnership is a prime example of EU cooperation: 19 EU Member States network their space assets and work together to safeguard more than 700 satellites from collisions in space and inform numerous partners on in-orbit fragmentations and uncontrolled re-entries of space objects into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The now 19 EU Member States of the EU SST Partnership are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden. They have networked their national detection and processing capabilities into the EU SST system.
In cooperation with the SST Front Desk at the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), they provide three services:
- Collision Avoidance (CA) assesses risk of collision between satellites or between satellites and space debris and generates collision avoidance alerts.
- Re-entry Analysis (RE) assesses risk of uncontrolled re-entry of space objects into the Earth’s atmosphere and generates related information.
- Fragmentation Analysis (FG) detects and characterises in-orbit fragmentations, break-ups or collisions, and analyses all available information regarding the object(s) involved in the event.
Together, the EU SST Partnership of 19 EU Member States and the SST Front Desk at EUSPA help to foster EU non-dependence and autonomy in space surveillance and tracking capabilities, boost space safety and sustainability made in the EU, and promote the EU as a reliable and trustful partner in keeping space assets safe.
Background
EU SST is a subcomponent of the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) component of the EU Space Programme. It safeguards space assets, especially EU Space Programme satellites such as Galileo, EGNOS, Copernicus, GOVSATCOM and in the future IRIS², along with the space assets of EU Member States and other space operators.
EU SST uses a network of ground-based sensors capable of surveying and tracking space objects and processing capabilities aimed at improving, operating, and providing data, information and services on space objects orbiting the Earth. This helps to mitigate the risk of a collision between space assets and other spacecraft and debris, in-orbit fragmentations and uncontrolled re-entries of space objects into the Earth’s atmosphere.