European Space Agency has awarded INTEGRASYS with the Payload Comsec/Transec Performance Testbed project. ESA is supporting the European Commission with the development of Govsatcom-driven technologies under the Connectivity Secure Communications (CSC) framework. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Electronic Warfare, Jamming, and Antijamming have been very warm topics, therefore governments, Ministries of Defense, and Agencies have prepared for Electronic Warfare in a more agile manner.

IRIS2 is the coming European Govsatcom multi-orbit network for European countries to obtain a sovereign network for government users, and the European Space Agency has a program to expedite the developments for IRIS2 within the CSC framework.

The project Phase1 Payload COMSC/TRANSEC Performance Testbed won by INTEGRASYS as prime, with the support of Inster-Grupo Oesía and UPM as subcontractors’ partners is to build a testbed to test current and future payloads to be secure for government use; these future payloads are envisioned to be developed in Europe and tested by European Space Agency with the acquired testbed under contract.

This project is focused on the development of a payload testbed to evaluate the performance of secure communication functions. This enables the study of the most critical interference scenarios and the identification of countermeasures to validate the payload performance prior to the launch of the full constellation.

Therefore, the testbed will be representative of the subsystems of the LEO payload with microwave equipment for signal reception/routing/processing, data converters, and On-Board Processor (OBP) functions.

Another critical role of the testbed of this form is to serve as a platform to execute interference monitoring, detection, mitigation, and geolocation techniques that INTEGRASYS has been an expert for over 34 years and help with the evaluation of the performance improvement with OMSEC/TRANSEC functions to support physical, data link, and network layers.

The objectives of the project are:

• To develop a testbed to evaluate payload COMSEC/TRANSEC performance for secure communication functions.
• To evaluate the robustness/resistance of the payload RF and digital chains to external interference/jamming.
• To evaluate payload operational reconfigurability options to respond to jamming threats.
• To provide inputs to reliability and availability assessments at a system level.

Alvaro Sanchez said “We are honored to be selected under open competition by ESA to provide tailor capabilities with the support of our engineers and our partners to fully comply with the requirements set by ESA for testing the future secure Govsatcom IRIS2 multiorbit payloads; over the years INTEGRASYS has become expert on protecting space and ground assets for governments, we are very proud to continue the support of Europe and specially IRIS2 Govsatcom programs, from birth to continuing in the first testbed, and hopefully to planning deployment and operation. We see how partnering with Inster and UPM makes the proposition stronger and brings more knowhow and expertise to outstandingly deliver the required capabilities for our governments and agencies”.

Miguel Diaz said “Inster-Grupo Oesía will contribute to the consortium with the expertise acquired over the last five years in hybrid Electronically Steerable Antennas (ESA), working on several European projects with relevant actors’ leaders in antenna beamforming techniques. The know-how that Inster-Grupo Oesía is acquiring in the design and manufacture of equipment for the Eutelsat-OneWeb network will be key to fulfilling the requirements of the IRIS2 program, starting with the design and implementation of the ESA antenna part integrated into the Payload Comsec Transec Performance & antijamming testbed”.

Click here to learn more about the IRIS2 Satellite Constellation.