PM Network - August 2014

Tscientists don’t look at a globe. They turn to a map called the geoid, which shows a hypothetical global ocean without tides and currents, shaped only by gravity. Scientists use the geoid to determine how oceans circulate, how sea levels rise and fall, how ice caps recede—and how climate change affects them all. To map the geoid with unparalleled precision, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a multiyear project to build and launch a gravity-measuring satellite—the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE).

The planning and development alone would take more than a decade.

After an initial phase of feasibility testing and preliminary definition, which ran from July 1998 to July 1999, project sponsor ESA selected GOCE as the inaugural mission of its Earth Explorers program, a series of expeditions to better understand Earth’s systems and how human activity affects them. In September 2000, ESA appointed GOCE’s project manager: Danilo Muzi, an electronics engineer.

From the start, the project’s first-of-its-kind technology presented daunting complexity.

“GOCE was not a remake or, aside from a few minor exceptions, even a par-
tial reuse of existing designs and equipment,” says Mr. Muzi, Earth Explorers
program manager, ESA, Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
“It was all brand-new and state-of-the-art. Scientists
had been waiting for this for 15 or 20 years. So when
the mission was selected, we had strong interest and
expectations from a community of scientists.”
Those stakeholders would prove invaluable to the
project’s success.

A UNION IN EUROPE

As part of the ESA’s “fair return” principle, member
states across the European Union get back from the
ESA the equivalent worth of what they invest in its
programs. To achieve this, the ESA funnels jobs and
contracts to those countries. As a result, ESA’s proj-
ects become transnational collaborations—which
adds cultural hurdles to the technological and logistical ones. “GOCE really
was a European endeavor,” Mr. Muzi says.