Enrico Chesta, Véronique Ferlet-Cavrois and Markus Brugger highlight seven ways CERN and ESA are working together to further fundamental exploration and innovation in space technologies.

Particle accelerators and spacecraft both operate in harsh radiation environments, extreme temperatures and high vacuum. Each must process large amounts of data quickly and autonomously. Much can be gained from cooperation between scientists and engineers in each field.
Ten years ago, the European Space Agency (ESA) and CERN signed a bilateral cooperation agreement to share expertise and facilities. The goal was to expand the limits of human knowledge and keep Europe at the leading edge of progress, innovation and growth. A decade on, CERN and ESA have collaborated on projects ranging from cosmology and planetary exploration to Earth observation and human spaceflight, supporting new space-tech ventures and developing electronic systems, radiation-monitoring instruments and irradiation facilities.
1. Mapping the universe
The Euclid space telescope is exploring the dark universe by mapping the large-scale structure of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years across more than a third of the sky. With tens of petabytes expected in its final data set – already a substantial reduction of the 850 billion bits of compressed images Euclid processes each day – it will generate more data than any other ESA mission by far.
With many CERN cosmologists involved in testing theories of beyond-the-Standard-Model physics, Euclid first became a CERN-recognised experiment in 2015. CERN also contributes to the development of Euclid’s “science ground segment” (SGS), which processes raw data received from the Euclid spacecraft into usable scientific products such as galaxy catalogues and dark-matter maps. CERN’s virtual-machine file system (CernVM-FS) has been integrated into the SGS to allow continuous software deployment across Euclid’s nine data centres and on developers’ laptops.
The telescope was launched in July 2023 and began observations in February 2024. The first piece of its great map of the universe was released in October 2024, showing millions of stars and galaxies from observations and covering 132 square degrees of the southern sky (see “Sky map” figure). Based on just two weeks of observations, it accounts for just 1% of project’s six-year survey, which will be the largest cosmic map ever made.
Future CERN–ESA collaborations on cosmology, astrophysics and multimessenger astronomy are likely to include the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and the NewAthena X-ray observatory. LISA will be the first space-based observatory to study gravitational waves. NewAthena will study the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Both projects are expected to be ready to launch about 10 years from now.
2. Planetary exploration
Though planetary exploration is conceptually far from fundamental physics, its technical demands require similar expertise. A good example is the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission, which will make detailed observations of the gas giant and its three large ocean-bearing moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
Jupiter’s magnetic field is a million times greater in volume than Earth’s magnetosphere, trapping large fluxes of highly energetic electrons and protons. Before JUICE, the direct and indirect impact of high-energy electrons on modern electronic devices, and in particular their ability to cause “single event effects”, had never been studied before. Two test campaigns took place in the VESPER facility, which is part of the CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR) project. Components were tested with tuneable beam energies between 60 and 200 MeV, and average fluxes of roughly 108 electrons per square centimetre per second, mirroring expected radiation levels in the Jovian system.

JUICE was successfully launched in April 2023, starting an epic eight-year journey to Jupiter including several flyby manoeuvres that will be used to commission the onboard instruments (see “Flyby” figure). JUICE should reach Jupiter in July 2031. It remains to be seen whether test results obtained at CERN have successfully de-risked the mission.
Another interesting example of cooperation on planetary exploration is the Mars Sample Return mission, which must operate in low temperatures during eclipse phases. CERN supported the main industrial partner, Thales Alenia Space, in qualifying the orbiter’s thermal-protection systems in cryogenic conditions.
3. Earth observation
Earth observation from orbit has applications ranging from environmental monitoring to weather forecasting. CERN and ESA collaborate both on developing the advanced technologies required by these applications and ensuring they can operate in the harsh radiation environment of space.
In 2017 and 2018, ESA teams came to CERN’s North Area with several partner companies to test the performance of radiation monitors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and electronics chips in ultra-high-energy ion beams at the Super Proton Synchrotron. The tests mimicked the ultra-high-energy part of the galactic cosmic-ray spectrum, whose effects had never previously been measured on the ground beyond 10 GeV/nucleon. In 2017, ESA’s standard radiation-environment monitor and several FPGAs and multiprocessor chips were tested with xenon ions. In 2018, the highlight of the campaign was the testing of Intel’s Myriad-2 artificial intelligence (AI) chip with lead ions (see “Space AI” figure). Following its radiation characterisation and qualification, in 2020 the chip embarked on the φ-sat-1 mission to autonomously detect clouds using images from a hyperspectral camera.

More recently, CERN joined Edge SpAIce – an EU project to monitor ecosystems onboard the Balkan-1 satellite and track plastic pollution in the oceans. The project will use CERN’s high-level synthesis for machine learning (hls4ml) AI technology to run inference models on an FPGA that will be launched in 2025.
Looking further ahead, ESA’s φ-lab and CERN’s Quantum Technology Initiative are sponsoring two PhD programmes to study the potential of quantum machine learning, generative models and time-series processing to advance Earth observation. Applications may accelerate the task of extracting features from images to monitor natural disasters, deforestation and the impact of environmental effects on the lifecycle of crops.
4. Dosimetry for human spaceflight
In space, nothing is more important than astronauts’ safety and wellbeing. To this end, in August 2021 ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet activated the LUMINA experiment inside the International Space Station (ISS), as part of the ALPHA mission (see “Space dosimetry” figure). Developed under the coordination of the French Space Agency and the Laboratoire Hubert Curien at the Université Jean-Monnet-Saint-Étienne and iXblue, LUMINA uses two several-kilometre-long phosphorous-doped optical fibres as active dosimeters to measure ionising radiation aboard the ISS.

When exposed to radiation, optical fibres experience a partial loss of transmitted power. Using a reference control channel, radiation-induced attenuation can be accurately measured related to the total ionising dose, with the sensitivity of the device primarily governed by the length of the fibre. Having studied optical-fibre-based technologies for many years, CERN helped optimise the architecture of the dosimeters and performed irradiation tests to calibrate the instrument, which will operate on the ISS for a period of up to five years.
LUMINA complements dosimetry measurements performed on the ISS using CERN’s Timepix technology – an offshoot of the hybrid-pixel-detector technology developed for the LHC experiments (CERN Courier September/October 2024 p37). Timepix dosimeters have been integrated in multiple NASA payloads since 2012.
5. Radiation-hardness assurance
It’s no mean feat to ensure that CERN’s accelerator infrastructure functions in increasingly challenging radiation environments. Similar challenges are found in space. Damage can be caused by accumulating ionising doses, single-event effects (SEEs) or so-called displacement damage dose, which dislodges atoms within a material’s crystal lattice rather than ionising them. Radiation-hardness assurance (RHA) reduces radiation-induced failures in space through environment simulations, part selection and testing, radiation-tolerant design, worst-case analysis and shielding definition.
Since its creation in 2008, CERN’s Radiation to Electronics project has amplified the work of many equipment and service groups in modelling, mitigating and testing the effect of radiation on electronics. A decade later, joint test campaigns with ESA demonstrated the value of CERN’s facilities and expertise to RHA for spaceflight. This led to the signing of a joint protocol on radiation environments, technologies and facilities in 2019, which also included radiation detectors and radiation-tolerant systems, and components and simulation tools.

Among CERN’s facilities is CHARM: the CERN high-energy-accelerator mixed-field facility, which offers an innovative approach to low-cost RHA. CHARM’s radiation field is generated by the interaction between a 24 GeV/c beam from the Proton Synchrotron and a metallic target. CHARM offers a uniquely wide spectrum of radiation types and energies, the possibility to adjust the environment using mobile shielding, and enough space to test a medium-sized satellite in full operating conditions.
Radiation testing is particularly challenging for the new generation of rapidly developed and often privately funded “new space” projects, which frequently make use of commercial and off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Here, RHA relies on testing and mitigation rather than radiation hardening by design. For “flip chip” configurations, which have their active circuitry facing inward toward the substrate, and dense three-dimensional structures that cannot be directly exposed without compromising their performance, heavy-ion beams accelerated to between 10 and 100 MeV/nucleon are the only way to induce SEE in the sensitive semiconductor volumes of the devices.
To enable testing of highly integrated electronic components, ESA supported studies to develop the CHARM heavy ions for micro-electronics reliability-assurance facility – CHIMERA for short (see “CHIMERA” figure). ESA has sponsored key feasibility activities such as: tuning the ion flux in a large dynamic range; tuning the beam size for board-level testing; and reducing beam energy to maximise the frequency of SEE while maintaining a penetration depth of a few millimetres in silicon.
6. In-orbit demonstrators
Weighing 1 kg and measuring just 10 cm on each side – a nanosatellite standard – the CELESTA satellite was designed to study the effects of cosmic radiation on electronics (see “CubeSat” figure). Initiated in partnership with the University of Montpellier and ESA, and launched in July 2022, CELESTA was CERN’s first in-orbit technology demonstrator.

As well as providing the first opportunity for CHARM to test a full satellite, CELESTA offered the opportunity to flight-qualify SpaceRadMon, which counts single-event upsets (SEUs) and single-event latchups (SELs) in static random-access memory while using a field-effect transistor for dose monitoring. (SEUs are temporary errors caused by a high-energy particle flipping a bit and SELs are short circuits induced by high-energy particles.) More than 30 students contributed to the mission development, partially in the frame of ESA’s Fly Your Satellite Programme. Built from COTS components calibrated in CHARM, SpaceRadMon has since been adopted by other ESA missions such as Trisat and GENA-OT, and could be used in the future as a low-cost predictive maintenance tool to reduce space debris and improve space sustainability.
The maiden flight of the Vega-C launcher placed CELESTA on an atypical quasi-circular medium-Earth orbit in the middle of the inner Van Allen proton belt at roughly 6000 km. Two months of flight data sufficed to validate the performance of the payload and the ground-testing procedure in CHARM, though CELESTA will fly for thousands of years in a region of space where debris is not a problem due to the harsh radiation environment.
The CELESTA approach has since been adopted by industrial partners to develop radiation-tolerant cameras, radios and on-board computers.
7. Stimulating the space economy
Space technology is a fast-growing industry replete with opportunities for public–private cooperation. The global space economy will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035, according to the World Economic Forum – up from $630 billion in 2023 and growing at double the projected rate for global GDP.
Whether spun off from space exploration or particle physics, ESA and CERN look to support start-up companies and high-tech ventures in bringing to market technologies with positive societal and economic impacts (see “Spin offs” figure). The use of CERN’s Timepix technology in space missions is a prime example. Private company Advacam collaborated with the Czech Technical University to provide a Timepix-based radiation-monitoring payload called SATRAM to ESA’s Proba-V mission to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days.

Advacam is now testing a pixel-detector instrument on JoeySat – an ESA-sponsored technology demonstrator for OneWeb’s next-generation constellation of satellites designed to expand global connectivity. Advacam is also working with ESA on radiation monitors for Space Rider and NASA’s Lunar Gateway. Space Rider is a reusable spacecraft whose maiden voyage is scheduled for the coming years, and Lunar Gateway is a planned space station in lunar orbit that could act as a staging post for Mars exploration.
Another promising example is SigmaLabs – a Polish startup founded by CERN alumni specialising in radiation detectors and predictive-maintenance R&D for space applications. SigmaLabs was recently selected by ESA and the Polish Space Agency to provide one of the experiments expected to fly on Axiom Mission 4 – a private spaceflight to the ISS in 2025 that will include Polish astronaut and CERN engineer Sławosz Uznański (CERN Courier May/June 2024 p55). The experiment will assess the scalability and versatility of the SpaceRadMon radiation-monitoring technology initially developed at CERN for the LHC and flight tested on the CELESTA CubeSat.
In radiation-hardness assurance, the CHIMERA facility is associated with the High-Energy Accelerators for Radiation Testing and Shielding (HEARTS) programme sponsored by the European Commission. Its 2024 pilot user run is already stimulating private innovation, with high-energy heavy ions used to perform business-critical research on electronic components for a dozen aerospace companies.
Further reading
A Coronetti et al. 2024 IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 71 1623.
K Bilko et al. 2024 IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 71 1549.
D Di Francesca et al. 2023 Appl. Opt. E 62 E43.
R Secondo et al. 2018 IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 65 1694.