Facility for Operations Experimentation (FOX)
The Facility for Operations Experimentation (FOX), based at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, is an initiative designed to support operational experimentation, technology validation, in-orbit demonstration/validation (IOD/IOV), qualification activities, end-to-end operational assessment and experimentation support for both traditional and New Space missions.
At its core, FOX is a flexible environment for operational experimentation powered by Estrack, ESA’s global ground station network, which provides spacecraft tracking, telemetry and communications services across the world. Through Estrack, FOX experimentation activities can access the same global communications infrastructure that supports ESA missions in orbit and across the Solar System.
Originally established as the Special Mission Infrastructure Laboratory Environment (Smile), FOX builds on years of experience supporting mission experimentation, validation activities and operational innovation at ESOC.
FOX: A flexible environment for operational experimentation
FOX facilitates experimentation, qualification, interoperability and operational validation activities that may be difficult to perform within purely operational service environments. Experimental applications, services and concepts can be tested and progressively adopted by mainstream missions. Furthermore, FOX contributes to increased interoperability and operational readiness across the evolving New Space ecosystem.
The FOX environment provides a configurable environment where services can be used individually or combined to establish project-specific experimentation and qualification/validation campaigns. Depending on mission objectives, FOX can integrate these elements into a coherent experimentation framework:
- Ground segment resources
- Hosting infrastructure
- Telemetry and data handling
- Operational support
- External partner network integration
- Technical expertise
Rather than offering a single predefined service, FOX provides a flexible set of capabilities that can be tailored to the needs of each project.
FOX can also act as an operational experimentation hub for multiple partners to securely connect to, thereby enabling cooperation between industry, operators, station providers, agency-internal projects and others.
FOX infrastructure: control room and ground station at ESOC
FOX’s main control room is located at ESOC and can be used for operating experiments and systems.
The control room and all FOX equipment are deployed on a dedicated LAN, the FOX-LAN, which can be configured as an experimentation hub and reached from predefined external systems (e.g. industry, academia and operators) as well as from ESA networks.
The ESOC-1 ground station, located at ESOC, is equipped with S-band uplink and downlink as well as X-band downlink capability. This capability is complemented by experimental antennas (for UHF or ad hoc campaigns), software-defined radio (SDR) capabilities with digitisers and high-performance GPU-powered computing capabilities, IT hosting infrastructure and dedicated control room facilities.
FOX also hosts dedicated experimental terminals that can be tailored and reconfigured to meet specific project requirements. Among them is ESOC-2, an experimental ground station also located at ESOC. Equipped with a dual cross-Yagi antenna operating in the 70 cm amateur radio UHF band, ESOC-2 can track satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO). Additionally, FOX has access to portable terminals at various frequencies that can be transported, deployed and operated for specific campaign needs.
Where appropriate, FOX may leverage Estrack resources, external service providers or partner networks to augment available capabilities, enabling more scalable and diversified tracking support.
Services and technical support
The FOX service portfolio includes:
- Infrastructure access
- Antenna preparation, validation and tracking
- Hosting services for customer hardware (e.g. FlatSats)
- Flexible IT services
- Qualification, testing, validation and experimental campaigns
FOX also provides support for emergencies and spacecraft contingencies/recovery as well as technical support for space-to-ground-related aspects, such as the design and tailoring of operational interfaces, ground segment definition and preparation, dedicated workshops and more.
The facility can act as a bridge to other ESOC teams, enabling access to technical expertise and consultancy in areas such as ground station engineering, data systems, flight dynamics, flight control, space debris, frequency management and more.
FOX in action: supporting innovation across ESA and beyond
The FOX environment already supports a broad range of ESA activities, contributes to the definition of future ground operations for New Space projects and acts as an experimentation hub across ESA teams.
FOX activities are also evolving to provide support for extended operational phases of in-orbit demonstration and validation missions as well as qualification activities with industry.
Operational experimentation and innovation within ESA
Current and planned support for ESA activities includes the OPS-SAT Space Lab, a flying space laboratory service that helps accelerate innovation in OPS-related areas using powerful, reconfigurable space elements that can be used for in-flight experimentation.
FOX contributes by hosting the OPS-SAT-1 FlatSat, tracking OPS-SAT PRETTY, and supporting the future OPS-SAT ORIOLE and VOLT experimentation efforts.
Cybersecurity
FOX also provides the ground-segment environment for the CyberCUBE mission in partnership with ESA’s European Space Security and Education Centre (ESEC) in Redu, Belgium. Part of the Cyber Security Resilience Programme, CyberCUBE validates ground-based cybersecurity monitoring and analysis for space assets and demonstrates onboard cyber capabilities in orbit.
The facility provides S-band and X-band links for CyberCUBE using SDR-based solutions, with data processed by a dedicated Payload Ground Segment hosted in ESEC’s Security Cyber Centre of Excellence (SCCoE) synthetic environment that is interconnected with the FOX back-end and a FlatSat for reconfigurable hardware-in-the-loop testing.
Partnership and programme support
Additionally, FOX hosts the Mission Exploitation and Archiving Infrastructure, which provides telemetry archiving and analysis capabilities as well as planning and monitoring applications to partnership programmes (e.g. Alphasat, SmallGEO, QUANTUM). It is accessible to external commercial and institutional partners as well as internal partners such as the experimental activities on the Alphasat mission’s hosted payloads.
FOX also supports activities with international partners, such as next-generation Australian small spacecraft programme BINAR. Previously, the facility also supported some activities within the Meteron project, an international endeavour led by ESA with participation of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Russian Space Agency (ROSCOSMOS).
Training and outreach
FOX further contributes to training and outreach initiatives, including ESOC’s Mission Operations Academy, youngESA, YPSat, and public engagement activities.
Get in touch
Interested in experimenting with FOX? Contact us here: FOX@esa.int
