Six² wins a 1 million Euro contract with the European Space Agency

The Swiss start-up Six² Sàrl has won a competitive bid for a contract with the European Space Agency to provide the Geneva Observatory with highly-skilled software engineers to the Gaia mission for four years.

From June 2008, two Six² engineers will join the Gaia team. “We're thrilled to have won this competitive bid with such a prestigious customer on an exciting mission [Gaia]. This contract also shows ESA's willingness to work with start-ups, which is a good news for young companies like us” said Louise Merifield, Six²'s CFO.

Six² brings to the Gaia team expertise in Java technology with a focus on data intensive and distributed systems. “Through this contract we confirm our ability to deliver and extend our expertise in distributed and complex software development" said Charles Loomis Six²'s CTO.  This contract is inline with Six² main business thrust to provide support and services in the field of distributed software with a focus on automation of software build and test.

In the course of Gaia's 5-year astronomical survey, the equivalent of around 20 000 DVDs of raw information on our Galaxy will be harvested and transmitted to Earth. Sophisticated processing is needed to distill this flood of complex data into the final Gaia Catalogue of about 1000 million celestial objects. [source Gaia web site].  Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the Gaia team at the Geneva Observatory is responsible for the Gaia Coordination Unit for Variability Processing (CU7) in charge of characterising the photometric and spectral variability of the large data produced by the spacecraft.

Note to editors:

1. Gaia Mission: Here's a high-level summary of the Gaia mission (extract from ESA Gaia page) "Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population."
2. Geneva Observatory: You will find here a presentation in English of the Geneva Observatory.
3. ESA is, as extracted from their about page: "The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world".
4. Six²: as extracted from its home page: "Six² provides IT services related to the integration and testing of complex and distributed services. Six² also provides support to system integrators, high-tech companies and institutions in the field of SOA, Grids and data demanding systems.".