Open-source model provides business opportunities
Under the open-source licensing scheme, ESA's SCOS-2000 software is available to European industry who can offer the product for free in combination with value-added installation, support and maintenance services.
"We hope that other SCOS-2000 users will have as much success as DLR. ESA's open-source licensing model provides strong business potential for European system integrators, which benefits everyone in the space community," says Nestor Peccia, Head of ESOC's Data Systems Infrastructure Division.
DLR previously used ESA's SCOS software for the center's CHAMP (CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload) mission, launched in 2000, which is still in operation.
"We started work on TerraSAR-X with SCOS-2000 in 2003. In 2005, we upgraded to the latest version, which is the version still in use. We are now testing the final upgrades and corrections," says Michael Schmidhuber, member of the DLR ground segment implementation team in Oberpfaffenhofen.
"A very positive aspect of SCOS-2000 is the possibility to provide feedback to the ESA development team. In this way, several improvements devised by DLR have found their way into the core product," says Schmidhuber.
For TerraSAR-X, Siemens AG Austria is providing comprehensive support to DLR as the industrial partner for SCOS-2000 maintenance and ongoing support. Under the open-source software model, the industrial partner provides key support for improving and validating software.
"Surprisingly, we found many bugs in the SCOS-2000 software. These were fixed mainly by Siemens Austria. It seems not all features are used - or are used differently - by ESA missions and so many bugs remain undetected. Now, we have a stable version for our mission," says Martin Wickler, the project implementation manager at DLR.
These improvements will be reflected in future
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Contact: Nestor Peccia
nestor.peccia@esa.int
49-615-190-2431
European Space Agency
28-Mar-2007