The European Space Agency has selected Airbus to lead an operational mission under the Space Situational Awareness Space Safety Programme involving the creation of Europe’s first 24/7 space weather satellite.
The spacecraft, called Vigil, is expected to operate for seven and a half years providing space weather forecasters with data to predict harmful solar weather events that could impact power grids and global positioning and communication services. It is slated for deployment in 2031 to Lagrange Point L5.
“Vigil is one of the most exciting and important space missions that will not only improve our understanding of the sun’s behavior but crucially provide us with earlier warning and greater precision about potentially damaging solar weather,” Patrick Wood, head of space systems U.K. at Airbus Defence and Space.
Vigil will be designed to augment the capabilities of other space weather satellites to inform power companies and authorities about such events at least four days in advance to prevent disrupting critical satellites and infrastructures. In 1989, a geomagnetic storm hit Earth and caused a nine-hour power outage in Quebec.
While Airbus will build Vigil in the United Kingdom, the satellite will carry instruments developed in the United States, including a compact coronagraph from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and an extreme ultraviolet imager from NASA.
Other payloads that will be integrated into the system are a heliographic imager from Florence-based Leonardo, a photo-magnetospheric field Imager from Germany’s Max Planck Institute, a plasma analyzer from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and a magnetometer from Imperial College London.