Funded by European Space Agency under contract N. 4000117930/16/NL/FF/gp

The study “Cold Atom Inertial Sensors: Mission Application (CAI)” was performed by Thales Alenia Space Italia under ESA contract with the support of Marwan Technology, POLIMI and Technical University of Delft.

The proposed concept consisted of a single satellite flying along a sun-synchronous near-polar orbit at about 250 km altitude and carrying a single-arm gradiometer based on a cold atom interferometer. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible implementation of a future generation of gravity missions exploiting such an innovative quantum technology. The final goal was to identify the potential reference missions and understand the technological development needed for cold atom interferometry to achieve better performance than previous gravity missions.

Within the project, the task of the SATGEO team was to carry out the gravity field performance assessment from data by a CAI mission.