In September 2011, the European Commission issued Mandate M/496 "Mandate addressed to CEN, CENELEC and ETSI to develop standardisation regarding space industry (Phase 3 of the process)" as a follow up of Mandate M/415 "Programming mandate addressed to CEN, CENELEC and ETSI to establish space industry standards".

Mandate M/415 was allocated to CEN/BT/WG 202 "Space", were a feasibility study (Phase 1) was carried out and then a work programme (phase 2) was established with a number of areas were future standardization work should be foreseen. This work programme identified the following ten sectorial dossiers for which standardization is needed.

• Navigation and Positioning (NP) Receivers for Road Applications and Airport Services[sectorial dossier 1];

• Integration of Navigation and Positioning (NP) Applications with Telecommunications (TEL) [sectorial dossier 2];

• Information Exchange, including Data Format, in support of applications defined in a "System of Systems" environment (in particular inside and between Earth Observation (EO), Navigation and Positioning (NP), and Telecommunications (TEL)) [sectorial dossier 3];

• Interoperability and Integration of Mobile Satellite Systems (MMS) and Fixed Satellite Systems (FSS) with Terrestrial Systems in particular Next Generation Networks (NGN), and with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in particular Galileo [sectorial dossier 4];

• Planetary protection [sectorial dossier 5];

• Space Situational Awareness (SSA) monitoring [sectorial dossier 6];

• Dual use ground segment interfaces in Earth Observation (EO) [sectorial dossier 7];

• Interfaces towards Earth Observation (EO) Downstream Services; Persistent Testbed, Conformance Testing and Fast Take Up Measures for EO Standards [sectorial dossier 8];

• Disaster Management [sectorial dossier 9];

• Payload Interfaces for launchers [sectorial dossier 10].

The new Mandate M/496 was sent to and received by CCMC on 2011-09-07. It is in line with and part of the European Space Policy, which will pave the way to the integration of various space systems in Europe. For the implementation of Mandate M/496 CEN and CENELEC created the Technical Committee CEN-CENELEC/TC 5 "Space" and allocated the Secretariat to DIN.

The standardization work requested by mandate M/496 concentrates on the ten sectorial dossiers listed above and requests that the different standards linked to the ten dossiers shall be developed and delivered by CEN-CENELEC/TC 5 "Space". To fulfil the requested standardization work in this large area it is needed to include the widest possible range of interested European stakeholders in the standardization work.

If you are interested in participating in the work of CEN-CENELEC/TC 5 "Space" please do not hesitate to contact us. See contact details on the right hand side.