Operational space surveillance and tracking in Europe. Issue 3 (September 2020) - Faucher, Pascal
Abstract: This paper describes the creation and current functioning of EU SST, based on the 'Decision of the European Parliament and the European Council Establishing a Space Surveillance and Tracking Support Framework' adopted in April 2014. Following this Decision, the EU SST Consortium was created in 2015 by eight Members States of the European Union (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK), who were recently joined by three additional partners (Poland, Portugal and Romania). This collaboration of member states is based upon a unique model of governance in the European Union, taking into account the civil-military nature of the SSA domain. This paper also describes the key functions composing the EU SST system, including its sensor network, the data processing function, and the three EU SST services provided to a growing community of European Users. Finally, the paper provides some results on the system design studies of different SST architectures for the future.