Leaf Space, an innovative Italian SME in the world of the New Space economy, has signed an important contract with the European Space Agency and in consortium with H&S for the provision of remote service of medical data monitoring, useful for the care and diagnosis in the homes of patients with COVID-19.

The CARES project is led by Leaf Space, which is providing the integration of the remote monitoring health platform with the satellite telecommunication infrastructure to guarantee the service everywhere, including areas not adequately reached by terrestrial radio coverage, while project partner H&S will offer the tele-diagnostic platform, HealthPlatform, for the COVID-19 patients. The beta test of this technological application is to be conducted with medical personnel and structures on Italian territory.

More in detail, the telemedicine platform allows the almost real-time monitoring of medical data of patients at home, enabling remote diagnosis directly from any equipped hospital infrastructure. A physical platform dedicated entirely to the patient will allow her to receive the attention necessary for the course of the disease directly from her home, the place now recognized as essential for quarantine and/or for the course of recovery, using HealthPlatform’s Mobile HealthGate. These platforms communicate with the central database of Leaf Space’s partner, H&S, which analyzes the data and makes it available to doctors dedicated to the remote monitoring of patients.

These activities require a satellite backed telecommunication structure to reach every corner of the territory. Here the space telecommunication knowledge of Leaf Space comes into play, enabling the capture and distribution of the signals between the telemedicine systems and patients themselves. This system can reach patients located in every corner of the planet, including points that traditional terrestrial systems cannot reach or only reach with poor quality (e.g. due to increased demand on infrastructure’s capacity during lockdown conditions).
For this system to help to control and manage quarantined patients, capturing and distributing the signals transmitted by the telemedicine systems to the satellite and back to earth at the hospital must be a reliable and fast process. Patients potentially located anywhere can now rely on 24/7 monitoring compliant with current GDPR.

With this ambitious project, the applications of the New Space Economy are increasingly approaching solutions that have a direct benefit for the private citizen and actively contribute to the improvement of the Italian health system, placing it at the forefront of telemedicine solutions adopted to combat pandemics such as that of the current Coronavirus or to treat other pathologies at home.

About H&S

H&S was founded in 1989 in Piacenza (Italy) and since January 2020 is part of the e-health multinational CompuGroup Medical. H&S creates software and services for home healthcare, monitoring and collecting patient vital parameters, with advanced, certified, Telemedicine and Smart Compliance solutions. It has national and international customers. www.hes.it

About ESA

The European Space Agency is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. ESA is an international organization with 22 Member States. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programs and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country.
ESA Space Solutions aims at reaching commercial exploitation of space assets, data and capabilities addressing incubation, proving technical feasibility and business development. This includes the development of operational services for a wide range of users through the combination of different systems, and support in creating viable companies as well as to existing companies.

OPS-SAT is an ESA cubesat and the world’s first free-for-use, in-orbit testbed for new software, applications and techniques in satellite control. It enables new software to be tested in orbit, bringing Europe forward to a new era of space flight innovation and commercial opportunity.

With short notice for the radio integration of OPS-SAT’s onboard transceiver, the communication procedure was carried out and proved successful with the first acquisition of beacons from the spacecraft on 18 December, at 17:33 UTC, from Leaf Space’s ground station in Ireland.

During the LEOP phase, telemetry data have been received and telecommand information sent so as to advance the process of spacecraft commissioning. This will be  followed by the start of its operational mission as an in-orbit testbed for innovative new European flight software, covering technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced autonomous planning, data compression, data and signal encryption, web services in space, laser communication, new communication protocols and flight dynamics.

Piermario Besso, Head of the Antenna and Infrastructure team at ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, confirmed that, “The mission is now in good operational condition in no small part thanks to Leaf Space’s critical support for UHF communication with the satellite.”

The LEOP support provided to ESA for the OPS-SAT mission is part of a larger commercial agreement between the two, which includes development of two ground station sites, one of which is to be located at the Kiruna teleport. The agreement will give Leaf Space the means to prove its capabilities for mission support on the ground segment side to a large, multi-mission organization, enhancing its value as a technologically advanced partner for ESA as the Agency starts to explore the constantly growing SmallSat market.

About OPS-SAT

OPS-SAT is an ESA cubesat and the world’s first free-for-use, in-orbit testbed for new software, applications and techniques in satellite control. It enables new software to be tested in orbit, bringing Europe forward to a new era of space flight innovation and commercial opportunity. As of launch, experiments will be hosted from experimenters in the UK, Spain, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Greece. Experiments are also expected from across ESA and from other European space agencies. The spacecraft’s development and launch were covered by ESA’s General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) and it is operated by ESA. For more information access http://www.esa.int/opssat

Through this partnership, Leaf Space will provide the support service up to one pass per orbit to the satellite in SSO (sun-synchronous orbit), demonstrating the capabilities of its mid-latitude distributed ground station network. Uplink and downlink service for the mission will be provided using VHF, UHF and S-Band frequencies. The satellite is set to be launched on a Soyuz rocket in July 2020, thanks to a contract inked in August this year.

The agreement also facilitates future mission support for Pixxel’s planned constellation thanks to the integration of the communication systems and interfaces, nonetheless, familiarizing the satellite operations team with Leaf Space services.

Commenting on the agreement, Awais Ahmed, CEO, Pixxel said “We are very excited to partner with Leaf Space for the ground segment support to our first satellite. We strongly believe that our combined expertise will result in smooth and timely delivery of highly accurate geospatial imagery to people all across the globe. This is an exciting step forward for our team as we ready for our first launch next year. Also, in our quest to be a partner in India’s progress through space technology, this partnership will be marked as the first milestone”

“We are eager to start supporting Pixxel’s ambitious remote sensing mission, as we see this program as potentially generating very valuable data for the new space market. It is very satisfying for us at Leaf Space to be the primary player for the ground segment of Pixxel’s mission and are looking forward to delivering our ground-breaking service to our customer, laying out the most favourable environment for future mission and constellation support,” said Jonata Puglia, CEO of Leaf Space.

Pixxel is aiming to build a constellation of earth imaging small satellites that will provide global coverage every 24 hours once it’s fully deployed. The satellites will collect data that will be accurately analyzed using artificial intelligence in order to predict effective solutions for existing environmental problems.

About Pixxel

Pixxel is an Indian space startup based in Bengaluru, India. The company is building constellations of high-resolution earth imaging satellites to provide global imagery at a daily frequency to customers in a wide range of industries worldwide. Recently, Pixxel was the only Asian participant selected to be a part of the Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator, a first of its kind space focused accelerator where the company worked with space industry stalwarts such as NASA JPL, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin and Maxar among others. Pixxel’s first satellite is booked to launch in June 2020. For more information visit www.pixxel.space

Leaf Space has been collaborating with D-Orbit in several service provisions since early 2018, building a close relationship between the two companies.

Consultancy for on-board TMTC systems, communications testing, hardware and subsystem provision are some of the projects in development with D-Orbit.

In addition, the LEOP service will be provided to D-Orbit for the first launch of its CubeSat deployer, In Orbit Now (ION), during the launched scheduled for fall 2019. 

About D-Orbit

D-Orbit is a New Space company with solutions covering the entire life cycle of a space mission, including mission analysis and design, engineering, manufacturing, integration, testing, launch, and end-of-life decommissioning. Headquartered in Como, Italy, D-Orbit has subsidiaries in Lisbon, Portugal, and Washington DC, USA.

Leaf Space has provided a complete set of ground segment services to IoT start-up Fleet Space Technologies since October 2017, resulting in a fruitful collaboration focused on the development of their satellite constellation.

We successfully developed, built and deployed a ground station for Fleet’s operations center in Australia in 2018, with a 6 month lead time. Once operational, we also provided the LEOP service for their two test satellites launched (Falcon 9 SSO-A and PSLV-C43), and completed the service cycle by increasing communications coverage, activating the Leaf Line in Europe to track Fleet’s Centauri CubeSats. 

Leaf Space continues to provide operations assistance for the Australian ground station and coverage over Europe for the Centauri satellites.

Video Link of the GS Deployment

About Fleet Space Technologies

Fleet is an agile space company connecting the Internet of Things around the world using a massive fleet of small low-cost satellites, making it faster, simpler and cheaper to connect the world’s devices. The company provides direct, global access to a secure low-cost low-bandwidth connectivity platform ideal for machine to machine data exchange and deploying IoT sensor networks at scale, with simple device setup and management through a web interface and powerful cognitive analytics built in.

In early 2017, Leaf Space supported the Indian Space Research Organization for the INS-1C mission, providing a successful LEOP service. The mission was focused on demonstrating a miniature multispectral technology payload from the Space Applications Center.

Due to the short notice time for the service provision request, the challenging project was developed and executed in a total time of 3 days:

• Integration of the provided ISRO equipment on our IT-01 ground station.
• Establishment of a highly reliable connection between ISTRAC and IT-01.
• Service Readiness Test with ground station in-the-loop, testing real-time communication between ISTRAC and a INS-1C qualification model.

On the third day, communication was successfully established with the orbiting satellite on the first pass over IT-01, thus being the first to successfully uplink a command to the satellite.

The LEOP operations were conducted with ease by collaborating with a member of of ISRO who visited our headquarters during the operations phase.

About ISRO

The Indian Space Research Organization has become one of the six largest space agencies in the world. ISRO maintains one of the largest fleet of communication satellites (INSAT) and remote sensing (IRS) satellites, that cater to the ever growing demand for fast and reliable communication and earth observation respectively. ISRO develops and delivers application specific satellite products and tools to India: broadcasts, communications, weather forecasts, disaster management tools, Geographic Information Systems, cartography, navigation, telemedicine, dedicated distance education satellites being some of them.

Leaf Space and Astrocast announced an agreement for Astrocast’s use of Leaf Space ground stations. The agreement calls for up to 12 antennas to support the Astrocast IoT network, a 64-unit nanosatellite constellation, which is scheduled to be launched in phases. The antennas included in the agreement will be built and operated by Leaf Space and will be strategically located across six locations, providing dedicated service solely to Astrocast and its worldwide customers.
This new ground segment solution, named Leaf Key, has been developed by Leaf Space to address high capacity and high efficiency missions, as Astrocast’s constellation. The Leaf Space agreement provides Astrocast with the use of additional antennas each time the Swiss-based IoT provider launches a new plane of satellites. The roll-out of Leaf Space antennas will align with the constellation deployment phases.

The Astrocast IoT and machine-to-machine communications network will provide cost effective services to customers spanning key global industries worldwide. Coverage will span 90 percent of the globe not currently serviced by existing cellular systems. The constellation will consist of eight orbital planes, each encompassing eight operational spacecrafts along with two spare satellites. Astrocast is going to launch the first two demonstration satellites in Q4 2018 and has already booked the launch for the first two orbital planes for Q3 and Q4 2019, each encompassing eight operational spacecrafts along with two spare satellites. Leaf Space will provide the ground segment service for the entire constellation, through a multi- year agreement.

“We worked really close with the Astrocast team to develop a service able to reduce the ground segment to a predictable recurring cost even for such a big constellation,” said Giovanni Pandolfi Bortoletto, co- founder and CTO of Leaf Space. “Leaf Key is a flexible and scalable system that follows step by step the constellation deployment, providing the right performance at the right time.”

“We are pleased to engage Leaf Space for ground communication services,” said Fabien Jordan, co- founder and CEO of Astrocast. “With the ability to develop and operate dedicated antennas, and to scale alongside our network, Leaf Space is the right partner for us.”

“There are numerous businesses operating remotely which simply don’t have access to key IoT capabilities because those services don’t currently exist in those regions,” added Jordan. “The Astrocast network will be a game changer for these enterprises and Leaf Space’s ground station capabilities will be a key component of our solution.”

“This is the first time a single ground segment provider has been awarded to support a full-deployment nanosat constellation,” said Jonata Puglia, co-founder and CEO of Leaf Space. “It’s exciting to see space
startups like ours working closely together to achieve their goals. This is a clear sign that the smallsat market is consolidating and entering its mature stage.”