Earlier this month, ESA announced that the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), a multinational forum for the development and sharing of data standards and best practices, is about to adopt POCKET+ as a data compression standard.

Invention of an ESA spacecraft operations engineer, the POCKET technique no longer holds any secrets for SPACEBEL.

Seven years ago, SPACEBEL was awarded a “POCKET” contract  as part of ESA’s ARTES (Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems) programme, which is supported by BELSPO, the Belgian Science Policy Office.

A year later, SPACEBEL had gained both the on-board and on-ground POCKET experience, which was demonstrated using a Proba on-board software and ground segment software.

In 2015, a new software for ESA’s Proba-2 was produced by SPACEBEL, verified and uploaded on the spacecraft, in such a way that the software environment at SPACEBEL and the test environment were “up-to-date”. All this enabled the actual implementation of POCKET on PROBA-2 with significant benefits for all mission participants.

This step has proved beneficial to the POCKET experience at ESA.

POCKET is also the standard baseline for Proba-3, ESA’s future Sun watcher, another groundbreaking Space mission to which SPACEBEL has been bringing for many years our expertise with the software design, development, production, integration and validation of the on-board software for both platforms, the satellite simulators, the control centre and mission centre. Another opportunity to demonstrate our skills in combination with the benefits of the new POCKET technology.