Amphinicy cooperation with ESA

Tuesday, Sep 17, 2019
Credit: ESA/SMILE antenna, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Credit: ESA/SMILE antenna,  CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

After Croatia signed the Agreement with the European Space Agency (ESA) for cooperation in peaceful exploration and use of outer space in 2018 and ESA delegation visited Croatia in May this year, Amphinicy became a part of another step with ESA. This summer Amphinicy signed a Cooperation Agreement with ESA regarding its project SMILE.

The Special Mission Infrastructure Lab Environment („SMILE“) is open-to-use mission control and validation environment based at ESA's operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany. SMILE gives the opportunity to any ESA member state business, university and organization the possibility to use this environment for the purpose to test and validate new methods of operating small satellites and any other related activity. 

SMILE Lab is equipped with two antennas, ESOC-1 (a single parabolic reflector) and ESOC-1a (a radio amateur facility) which can run automatically, and its data can be stored and provided later or received in real time.

Amphinicy is one of the first participants to work with ESA on this project. „The purpose of the SMILE project is to extend support in performing communication experiments and validation of innovative technologies in the field of satellite operations and monitoring and control. The aim of this cooperation is to validate our Blink product – new software-based high-data-rate (Earth Observation) satellite data acquisition solution; which is co-financed by the H2020, the largest EU research and innovation program.“, said Irena Kos, Senior Engineer and Product Manager.

To find out more about Horizon 2020 and Blink visit the following link.


Blink project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 812471.

EU logo