Since the start of ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Programme in 2009 the number of European activities has been growing significantly. Beside today's dominant national and multi-national efforts to build-up and maintain object...
moreSince the start of ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Programme in 2009 the number of European activities has been growing significantly. Beside today's dominant national and multi-national efforts to build-up and maintain object catalogues and to derive services, commercial endeavours are also starting. In support of the European partners ESA introduced the concept of a community approach towards a Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) Core Software in 2017 [2] as a key objective of ESA's SSA Programme, which from 2020 has evolved into ESA's Space Safety Programme. This community approach established the SST User Forum as the community's technical advisory body for the SST Core Software, which is composed by several ESA Member States participating with their national representatives to support the community needs. Several activities are being conducted in the development of the SST Core Software. The initial software baseline (v0a) was created from previous developments under the SSA Programme, and has been approved for licensing to the SST-UF members under ESA Community License in 2020. The upcoming version of the software will be automatically built, tested and deployed using Gitlab Continuous Integration and Continuous Development pipelines and Docker, under a Collaboration and Software Development Framework. We here provide an overview of the community approach and the current status of the SST Core Software, outline the collaboration framework supporting the community through the SST User Forum in the software development, maintenance and evolution, and report on the related work-plan activities in ESA programmes.
