LAUSANNE, Switzerland, 30th May 2018 – Under the aegis of the Swiss Space Center, a new working group focusing on software for satellite operations was created by four of its members: Astrocast SA, the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz FHNW, the Haute-Ecole Arc and Solenix Schweiz GmbH.
Last weekend the Solenix team travelled to Würzburg (Germany) for a weekend break away.
On Friday afternoon, we visited the winery "Weingut am Stein", where we were treated to a wine tasting session. We had the chance to learn some more about the region of Franconia, their grapes and their famous wines. After preparing our palates at the winery, we headed to the "Backöfele", a fine traditional restaurant, where we tasted the best of the local cuisine.
On the 20 April, the second experiment for MARVIN, the Multi-purpose Astronaut and Remote Vehicle INteraction, was successfully executed. MARVIN is an ESA project, a cooperation between EAC (the European Astronaut Centre) and ESOC. Two Solenix colleagues are involved in the activity: Toril Bye Rinnan, as the experiment manager, and Thorsten Graber, as a member of the in-scenario ground operations team and responsible for ICT.
Solenix is delighted to announce that it will be heavily involved in this year’s OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) innovation activities. In 2017, its maiden year of OGC membership, Solenix participated in OGC Testbed 13. This year, it will play a major role in OGC Testbed 14, where in fact it has been awarded deliverables in two different threads: the EOC (Earth Observation Clouds) one, sponsored by ESA, and the NextGen (Next Generation) one, in which it is a direct supplier of the OGC.
Our colleague Itziar Alonso was present at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly last week. This event is the largest European conference on this topic and it takes place every year in Vienna. This year over 15'000 attendants from 106 countries participated.
Since the end of February, a new installation is monitoring the air quality in the Solenix’s Software Engineering Team’s office. The USB-based sensor measures the volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the air, which are the major culprits of “stuffy air”. These are created, for example, by humans and computers, indispensable in a working environment, but also by carpets or cooking. The values measured by the sensor are displayed in an easy to read graph shown in a touchscreen.
Solenix will support the European Space Agency in a new contract covering various areas and activity domains, ranging from automation and optics, software and control systems to integrated applications.
BOSS is Solenix’s web-based real-time dashboard solution for intelligent monitoring. Based on the Elasticsearch technology stack, we have further enhanced the offered data analysis capabilities with the addition of a scripting engine, which allows the integration of data mining algorithms.
We are very pleased to announce that we have been awarded a new contract to continue the maintenance and evolution of the Mission Performance Monitoring Tools (MPMT) at EUMETSAT for an initial period of three years. This new contract, which officially started on 01 January 2018, is the continuation of the successful collaboration between Solenix and EUMETSAT to deliver sustained maintenance of this family of applications and to provide engineering and user support services.
The OGC Testbed 13 demonstration event took place in Reston (Virginia) on 12 and 13 of December at the USGS National Centre. Around 100 participants attended the demonstration of the outcomes of the latest annual testbed initiative. The initiative, which was partially sponsored by ESA, sought to research and rapidly develop prototype solutions to identified geospatial IT problems.