AdaCore has announced that Astrium in the U.K., a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS, has selected the Ada programming language and AdaCore’s GNAT Pro development environment for use on the new Sentinel-1 environmental monitoring satellite.

Sentinel-1 is the first of five families of satellites being developed for the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) program. GMES, a joint initiative of the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA), is designed to support a sustainable European information network by monitoring, recording and analyzing environmental data and events around the globe. The Sentinel-1 project is scheduled to be completed in October 2011. This instrument provides high-resolution satellite images by extending radar capabilities to penetrate forests and scrub to reach the ground and registering any movements or changes on the Earth’s surface within a resolution down to 5 meters. Astrium in the U.K. will use GNAT Pro to implement the Application Software for the SAR Electronics Sub-system, which is used to control Sentinel-1’s C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). As part of the project, AdaCore will also port the GNAT Pro for LEON development environment to the Sensor Electronics Sub-system (SES) on-board computer, enabling compliance with the ESA’s stringent ECSS-E-40B and ECSS-Q-80B space engineering and product assurance standards. The LEON2 processor was commissioned by ESA and designed specifically for use in satellite systems.