As a part of European Space Agency’s (ESA) cornerstone initiative “Collision Risk Estimation and Automated Mitigation (CREAM)” that explores and develops technologies for automating collision avoidance in space, Guardtime will carry out the space traffic coordination monitoring (STCM) demonstration project in collaboration with GMV and AdviceGeo. The main mission of STCM is to build a safe and unalterable monitoring solution that is protected by data integrity verification and immutability and traceability of coordination actions. 

The problem of monitoring and managing the ever-increasing space traffic data is becoming acute. Considering that there are reportedly already over 8000 satellites orbiting around the Earth and thousands will be added in the upcoming decade, ensuring that satellite locations are coordinated and that collision warnings, which will increase significantly per satellite, are handled efficiently, is a major space traffic management challenge.  

Mike Gault, CEO of Guardtime:

"Leading the STCM project provides Guardtime with an excellent opportunity to advance our space capabilities and design a monitoring system for space traffic that will visualize space activity and events, while identifying conflicts and inconsistencies in the coordination network. Space is the exciting frontier for Guardtime and tackling the issue of trustworthy and safe space traffic data exchange helps solve the worldwide coordination needs between space actors."

Guardtime will leverage its prior experience in the space sector with designing and developing space data security solutions, e.g. we have designed Earth observation data provenance solutions and used our core technology in ground station and mission control to enhance security and trust. This will serve as a strong primer for the aspirational work that Guardtime is planning to carry out in the framework of the STCM project.


This project is funded by the European Space Agency and will run until July 2024.