CHIPPENHAM company SciSys will continue its important role in Europe's space programme with a £0.5 million contract to create a spacecraft

simulator.

SciSys, based at Methuen Park, has been selected to build the high fidelity simulator for the European Space Agency's gravity field and steady state ocean circulation explorer mission (GOCE).

The company was also an active partner in the doomed Beagle project, designed to take a lander to the surface of Mars.

The GOCE spacecraft will be launched on a rocket launch vehicle from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia in 2006.

Its mission is to measure the Earth's gravity field and model the geoid, the hypothetical surface of the earth calculated at the mean sea level, with unprecedented accuracy and resolution.

Data from GOCE will advance areas such as oceanography, physics and climate change research. This advanced knowledge of the Earth's gravity field and its geoid will help to develop a more detailed understanding of how the Earth's interior system works and could reveal undiscovered minerals beneath the earth's crust.

The SciSys simulator is a software system designed to give the operators of the GOCE spacecraft plenty of practice in handling the mission.

Mission control staff will sit at their computers and the simulator will act the part of the spacecraft, sending out information and waiting for the correct response. The simulator will allow for full testing of the mission control system prior to launch, including contingency procedures.

After the launch it will support on-going training of the mission control team, investigate any failures and test potential solutions before applying them to the live system.

"The main purpose of the simulator is to reduce risk," said Alastair Pidgeon, business development manager at SciSys.

"Ground staff will be able to rehearse the process of sending commands, monitoring data from the spacecraft and reacting to simulated failures. A spacecraft such as GOCE is essentially a flying computer made up of a number of sub systems and a payload. Simulation will be used to clearly model the behaviour of the spacecraft equipment and payload to support running of complex operational scenarios."

SciSys is a leading global developer of ICT services, e-business and advanced technology solutions. The company operates in a broad spectrum of market sectors including space, utilities, defence, government, communication, business services and transport.