GMV leads a planetary defence consortium

GMV will lead an international consortium entrusted with designing the analysis of the HERA mission and developing its Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) System. The HERA mission is run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and coordinated by OHB-System AG.

Based on what was learned in the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) project, HERA´s main objective is to develop planetary defence technologies. But planetary defence is not the only purpose of the mission – scientific development and the research of the origins of the solar system is another of HERA’s key pillars.

Photo: ESA-ScienceOffice.org

The consortium is composed of four companies in the GMV group (Spain, Romania, Poland and Portugal), OHB-SWE and Spinworks. Within GMV alone, the HERA team is made up of 20 professionals who for 12 months will be entrusted with developing the technology required to handle the spaceship.

GMV, European leader in GNC systems, among others, is a pioneer at the global level in exploration missions including those involving asteroids. Of the European projects which GMV has led in this field, it is worth mentioning AIM, Marco POLO, Neoshield2, SYSNOVA-BEAST and Rosetta.

Navigation around asteroids is an extremely demanding task. Their small size and mass, as well as their irregular shape and the unknown environment of deep space, make it very difficult to control safely spaceships moving around one of these bodies. For this purpose, GMV is developing a highly innovative autonomous GNC system to provide this additional safety, thereby guaranteeing the mission’s success.

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