On 18 June 2019, the developed COLDSUN demonstrator has been tested at the “Talsperre Bautzen”. We deployed the buoy and two sensor nodes, one at 1 meter depth and the second at 2 meters. The goal was to transmit data collected from the deployed sensors (temperature, pH value, and water pressure) and to deliver it via the buoy and the satellite system to the Internet. For the complete process, our own bundle protocol implementation µPCN has been used to transport the data.

After a succesful first meeting at the Ocean Business fair, two members of D3TN have been invited to visit Evologics GmbH at its office in Berlin. They got the chance to introduce the company and the COLDSUN project in more detail. In the course of the meeting, our team members got an introduction to Evologics emulation software, which allows users to test an underwater network virtually. In meetings and discussions about a further cooperation of Evologics with D3TN, the interest of Evologics to support the COLDSUN project has been underlined.

Today, two members of D3TN presented the planned OPS-SAT experiment at ESA’s Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. The mission of OPS-SAT is to launch a Cube Sat which gives ‘Experimenters’ the opportunity to perform live testing in the domain of mission control systems. OPS-SAT will be an in-orbit test-bed for: On-board software applications Advanced communication protocols Compression techniques Demonstration of advanced software-defined radio concepts Optical communication from ground to space Experiments using cameras, attitude control, scheduling and autonomy Experiments with ground-based applications can also be hosted.

Two members of the D3TN team visited the Ocean Business 2019 fair from 9 April to 11 April in Southampton. During the three days, they met with companies working in a wide range of maritime areas to spread the word of the COLDSUN project and to find partners interested in the technical solution. They have found an overly open and collaborative environment with lots of interest in cooperations to support the further development of the software that provides the basis of the COLDSUN project.

The signing of a “Memorandum of Understanding” is a big milestone for the collaboration of the D3TN GmbH with the Greek Libre Space Foundation. The aim of this partnership is to bundle the knowledge of open software in the space domain. Both partners are commited to develop, design, advance, and promote open source software, hardware, and tools required for space mission design and engineering. Up to now, there is a huge gap between the high quality open source software applied in the IT industry, on the one hand, and the space software domain on the other hand.