21. August 2026
(CONNECT) The software firm Ateleris from Brugg in the Swiss canton of Aargau has launched the RHEA research and development project in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), as detailed in a statement. RHEA, which stands for Resilient Housekeeping Encoding for Interplanetary Applications, aims to create and verify a prototype of an onboard telemetry compression system for housekeeping based on an algorithm patented by ESA.
In spaceflight, the term housekeeping refers to the continuous collection of technical telemetry data with the aim of monitoring system status, as well as the physical cleaning and waste disposal tasks that ensure safety in crewed environments. However, Ateleris explains that at present housekeeping data on interplanetary spacecraft is not compressed and this is the precise problem that the telemetry compression system developed as part of the RHEA project aims to solve. “With scarce downlink bandwidth and extreme communication delays, that's set to become essential technology for future deep-space missions”, Ateleris writes in the statement.
The project combines space systems engineering, software development, and formal verification. It is being led by Ateleris together with the Laboratory for Automated Reasoning and Analysis (LARA) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, while the ESA is responsible for implementation and financing of the project. The kick-off event has already been held at the ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt. ce/nta
