The European Space Agency has awarded a €340 million contract to Airbus Defence and Space UK for the development of its Vigil weather satellite.
Vigil will be the first operational mission of ESA’s Space Safety Programme. Once launched, it will be tasked with continuously monitoring the Sun to observe rapidly changing solar activity and deliver early warnings of potentially harmful space weather.
“Vigil will be Europe’s first 24/7 operational space weather satellite, providing valuable time to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids or mobile communication networks on Earth as well as valuable satellites in Earth orbit, including the International Space Station ISS,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in a statement.
Vigil will be positioned at Lagrange point L5 on the same orbit as the Earth, which is 150 million kilometres from Earth and 150 million kilometres from the Sun. At this point in space, Vigil will be able to provide as much as four or five days’ notice of solar winds heading to Earth.
The spacecraft will be built in the United Kingdom by Airbus Defence and Space but will include instrument contributions from around the world. The US Naval Research Laboratory will provide a compact coronagraph, NASA an extreme ultraviolet imager, Italy’s Leonardo a heliographic imager, Germany’s Max Planck Institute a photo-magnetospheric field imager, and the United Kingdom’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory and Imperial College London will provide a plasma analyzer and a magnetometer.
Vigil is currently expected to be launched in 2031 and is designed to operate for more than seven and a half years.
Vigil: A Name From the People
ESA’s first space weather monitoring satellite was originally called Lagrange. In 2021, the agency launched an initiative to solicit name suggestions for the mission from the public, through which it received 5,422 submissions. Nine names were shortlisted. A panel of judges was then invited to whittle the selection down to three before Vigil was finally selected following a two-hour discussion.
