UPWr and European Space Agency to establish new ESA laboratory in Poland

The agreement signed on Friday (24 June) marks the UPWr's entry into the network of European space universities under the auspices of the European Space Agency.

ESA_Lab@UPWr will specialise in the development of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for precise positioning and navigation, determination of orbits of low and medium satellites, time transfer, exploration of the Earth's atmosphere, including the troposphere and ionosphere, or so-called space weather, the Earth's rotational motion, as well as geodynamic processes.

The laboratory will not only develop navigation systems, but also organise joint training sessions, seminars, technology transfer and exchanges for young scientists, doctoral students and students wishing to develop in the field of space and satellite research.

The UPWr has been training doctoral students for many years in the area of GNSS, satellite remote sensing, the development of techniques for determining the orbits of artificial Earth satellites and using them to explore changes occurring in the Earth system. Master's degree programmes in satellite geodesy and geoinformatics are also provided, with a specialisation in remote sensing, mainly satellite remote sensing, starting next year. The upcoming ESA laboratory will benefit students, including doctoral students, as well as scientists carrying out research using satellite technology.

Long-standing cooperation between the UPWr and ESA

The University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Wrocław has been cooperating with the ESA for many years. It is currently implementing an ESA-funded project to build technological solutions for a navigation system for the Moon, which will be operational in 2026 and used by future manned and unmanned missions to the Moon. The project is being carried out by an Italian-French-Polish consortium, led by the Space Research Centre at the University of Rome. The UPWr is responsible, among other things, for defining the structure of the signal that will be transmitted by artificial satellites orbiting the Moon, and the content of the information on orbit corrections and atomic clocks located on the satellites, containing data on gravitational and non-gravitational perturbations acting on the orbiters. Additionally, it is also responsible for analysing the possibility of using weak GPS and Galileo signals that reach the Moon to determine the position of satellites.

Receivers located on lunar landers and on the lunar surface will have their position determined in the Moon's geodetic system, i.e. one that has its origin at the Moon's centre of mass, with the Z-axis pointing towards the North Pole and the X-axis pointing in the mean direction to the Earth. The Moon has one side facing the Earth at all times, which makes longitude on the Moon easier to define than on Earth, where it is entirely arbitrary (Greenwich meridian). However, the Moon's rotation axes are constantly performing certain vibrations due to forces acting on the Earth's natural satellite, and these movements need to be thoroughly understood in order to determine the position of receivers in lunar reference systems very accurately. The UPWr team is responsible for defining the lunar array so as to enable very high-accuracy positioning on the Moon.

Previous projects carried out for the ESA at the UPWr involved determining the precise orbits of Galileo satellites, as well as GPS and GLONASS. Scientists from the UPWr and ESA have proven for the first time, based on observations of the motion trajectories of navigation satellites, that Albert Einstein correctly predicted changes in the shape of the orbits of objects orbiting the Earth. For this they used 3 years of continuous observations from more than 100 stations spread across all continents continuously tracking approx. 80 satellites of GPS, GLONASS and Galileo systems, managing to confirm effects based on the general theory of relativity with a relative error of 0.36% after analysing the 3 years of when the satellite data was most accurate. Thus, it can be concluded that Einstein was right with a probability of 99.64%, with the rest of the uncertainty due to limitations in the accuracy of the measurements.

In Europe there are already several ESA laboratories in scientific and didactic institutions, but the Wrocław centre is the only one specialising in satellite navigation in this part of Europe. Ultimately, the ESA intends to develop a scientific network that will promote and support young talents in the field of science and technology, foster cooperation between the different platforms within the ESA, and provide a link between universities, research institutions and the space industry, ensuring the transfer of technology.