Skip to content

GMV to provide flight dynamics system for NASA JPL mission

focusLEO, the GMV´s low-Earth orbit (LEO) flight dynamics product, has been selected by Orbital Sciences Corporation (NYSE:ORB) to support the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a mission to measure carbon dioxide in the Earth´s atmosphere managed by NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Orbital will provide the OCO project´s spacecraft and real-time mission operations.This is the first opportunity for GMV, a global satellite ground segment software company with a US subsidiary located in Rockville, Md., to support a NASA JPL mission. It is also GMV’s first sale of its operational Flight Dynamics software in support of a NASA mission.
focusLEO has also been sold by GMV to operate European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Meteorological Satellite Organization (EUMETSAT) missions. focusLEO provides full support to constellation flying which is important for OCO because it will fly in the NASA A-Train constellation. It provides full lifetime support of LEO and MEO satellite flight dynamics operations with attitude and orbit propagation and determination (including precise orbit determination), maneuver planning and calibration, flight dynamics events generation, and satellite end-of-life planning.
After its 2008 launch, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) mission will collect precise global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth‘s atmosphere. Scientists will analyze OCO data to improve the understanding of natural processes and human activities that regulate the abundance and distribution of this important greenhouse gas. This research will enable more reliable forecasts of future changes in the abundance and distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect that these changes may have on the Earth‘s climate.
(Source GMV)