Mission Overview
The High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites (HERMES) is a
mission concept which aims to detect and locate bright high-energy
transients such as Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), that are candidate
electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves. According to
such a mission concept, the whole sky is monitored by means of a
constellation of nano-satellites (cubesats) hosting innovative
X-ray detectors sensitive in the keV-MeV energy range and with temporal
resolution lower than 1 μs, resulting in a large collecting area.
HERMES, having no imaging capabilities, will locate GRBs by measuring
the delays between the arrival times of their signals on at least
three nano-satellites. Furthermore, thanks to its temporal resolution, it
will allow the time structure of these cosmological objects to be
studied for the first time with unprecedented details, in order to
constrain their engine models, and the structure of the quantum
space-time to be investigated by measuring the delay of photons with
different energies, simultaneously emitted and crossing the same
space-time path.
The HERMES Pathfinder is a first mini-constellation of six 3U
cubesats (1U is a cube unit with a size of 10 cm) three funded
by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and three by the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program. To be launched in the
first half of 2025, it aims to demonstrate the mission feasibility
paving the way to constellations built with dozens of cubesats.
SSDC Contribution
As part of the HERMES Pathfinder project, the ASI Space Science Data
Center (SSDC) hosts the Science Operation Center (SOC) and is
therefore responsible for the processing, validation, archiving and
distribution of scientific and ancillary data, as well as for
quick-look analysis, mission planning, Gamma-Ray Burst trigger alerts,
calibration data and data-analysis software development.
Each of the tasks listed above is automatically managed by specific
pipelines developed at SSDC. Furthermore, the HERMESDAS (HERMES Data
Analysis Software) software package to generate calibrated and cleaned
scientific data from raw telemetry data has been also designed and
developed at SSDC as a collection of software modules, each dedicated
to a single function.
The SSDC Team engaged in the several SOC activities is made of staff personnel from ASI (Simonetta Puccetti, Valerio D'Elia), INAF (Matteo Perri, Milvia Capalbi, Giuseppe Dilillo, Alessandro Maselli) and Telespazio-Serco (Giorgio Fanari, Daniele Navarra, Pier Vincenzo Severo).
