On October 22, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Project for On-Board Autonomy (PROBA) 1 small satellite celebrates 25 years of success on orbit. Redwire’s team in Belgium developed and manufactured PROBA-1 as prime contractor for this trailblazing ESA mission. This marked the first time Redwire’s Belgium team was mission prime, and 20 employees from the original PROBA-1 team are still working at Redwire’s state-of-the-art Belgium facility today.

Originally intended to be a two-year mission, the PROBA-1 satellite provided data from October 2001 until December 2022. Despite no longer providing imagery, the PROBA-1 satellite is still active and is used to test algorithms and telecommands.

How PROBA-1 was Made for the Mission

The PROBA-1 satellite has provided more than 1,000 images of more than 1,000 sites across the Earth’s surface. These images have been used for monitoring several environmental concerns, including land use strategies and their effect on vegetation growth, as well as understanding alpine snow cover.

The PROBA-1 program began in 1998, funded within the frame of ESA’s General Support Technology Programme. The objectives of the mission were to conduct:

• In-orbit demonstration and evaluation of new hardware and software spacecraft technologies
• In-orbit demonstration and evaluation of onboard operational autonomy
• In-orbit trial and demonstration of Earth observation and space environment instruments.

More Than Two Decades of Successful PROBA Missions

PROBA-1 marked the beginning of ESA’s PROBA series of satellites: It also marked the beginning of a series of PROBA satellites, including Proba-2, Proba-V and Proba-3. Redwire is a proud supporter of ESA’s PROBA program. Every spacecraft used for ESA’s Proba-1, Proba-2, Proba-V, and Proba-3 missions have been designed, developed and/or integrated at Redwire’s Belgium facility.

PROBA-1 set the stage for Redwire Belgium’s status of trusted prime contractor for major ESA missions. Redwire has more than 50 years of heritage successfully developing spacecraft platforms and delivering innovative technology for game-changing European programs.

Redwire has a proven track record as a prime contractor for multinational missions such as ALTIUS, an ESA mission to study the ozone layer; Skimsat, an ESA technology demonstrator that will operate in VLEO; Belgian Defence’s MATTEO mission, Belgium’s first security satellite; and the European Commission’s Σyndeo‑3 mission, which will deploy payloads supporting a wide range of applications, from space debris monitoring to deorbiting of LEO spacecraft and advanced thermal control.

Read about Redwire’s recent work on PROBA-3 here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency