Enhanced Personal Locator Beacon (PLB), embedded EGNSS receiver, and MEOLUT, implementing innovative technologies complying with the Cospas-Sarsat standards yet significantly improving the localization of slow-moving beacons and on-land activated beacons with restricted sky visibility, paving the way to effective mass market terrestrial Search and Rescue services based on SAR/Galileo.

The ATOS project will develop and qualify a new generation of X band T/R modules, based on GaN HEMT and SiGe BiCMOS technology, with innovative packaging techniques that minimize the footprint, and will integrate a set of T/R modules in a demonstrator of a high-efficiency densely populated AESA tile to be verified in radiated tests. Such development will enable future space-borne AESA radars at X band with at least a 3x leap in bandwidth, power density and/or azimuth steering capability with respect to current SAR AESAs developed in Europe, and will also enable or drastically improve compact solutions based on array-fed large unfurlable reflectors on small platforms. The ATOS project will build or consolidate a fully European supply chain including semiconductor technology providers, SMEs and academia as design centers and test houses, and a large enterprise as integrator of space-grade equipment up to turnkey space systems. The components of such team will broaden the scope of their competences through the project, enabling them to be candidates for future developments in related projects and applications in commercial space as well as institutional programs. The ATOS advancements achieved will be disseminated to foster initiatives of new mission concepts and business opportunities, specifically but not limited to Earth Observation, for which results of the project may represent a key technology enabler.

The main objective of the GIMS project is to build and commercialize an advanced low-cost system based on EGNSS, Copernicus SAR and other in-situ sensors, like inertial measurement units, for the purpose of monitoring ground deformations with a focus on landslides and subsidence. The system will recover deformations with millimetric level accuracies and daily acquisition rate. Moreover the integration of in-situ accelerometers will give real-time alerts in case of sudden movements. Finally the low-cost infrastructure deployed for the landslide monitoring can be used as collector of environmental data for smart grids purposes. The observations of these three different monitoring techniques, namely EGNSS, SAR and accelerometers, are complementary in time and space and can be integrated to obtain a better understanding of the monitored processes and a more complete knowledge of the deformation phenomenon. The project involves researchers and industrial developers from different fields: radiofrequency analysis and related hardware design, telecommunications, SAR and GNSS data analysis, accelerometers signal processing, geostatistics, geology. Significant effort will be put in the cooperation between different areas and in the interface between different products and technologies. The overall purpose of the GIMS project is to have detailed and timely knowledge of the geophysical behaviour of parts of the Earth surface, and its hindrances on structures, in order to mitigate casualties and injuries to the population, and better plan maintenance intervention.