march 2012
the digital society The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center
Building the NordicBaltic ICT Lighthouse The Nordic-Baltic region is showing interest in regional cooperation that could propel cross-border services to another level. This is backed up by private-public partnership initiatives and joint security interests. In this article, we drill down through some of the latest developments in the area. » Read PAGE 3
Measuring the Impact of E-services A study commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and the ICT Demo Center sought to study the impact of e-services. » Read PAGE 4
Top 5 e-Estonian Technology Transfers Are you a fan of charts and rankings? We’ll list the five components of Estonian e-society that have managed to cross borders successfully. » Read PAGE 6
foreword Andrus Ansip, Prime Minister of Estonia
EU's IT Agency Sets Up In Estonia
What Can You Find Inside a Space Cube?
People and companies move between countries freely. Yet, their data and the e-services they enjoy at home do not move along as seamlessly.
The European IT Agency (eu-LISA) has been called the biggest IT challenge for the entire European Union.
Around 100 students and scientists have contributed to the creation of the roughly one-kilogram satellite called ESTCube-1.
» Read PAGE 2
» Read PAGE 7
» Read PAGE 10
The Digital Society is the quarterly newsletter created on the initiative of the Estonian ICT Export Cluster. Subscribe to our e-newsletter at e-estonia.com
ICT Demo Center Lõõtsa 8 Tallinn 11415 Estonia info@demoestonia.com
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
Foreword Dear readers, There exist very clear digital borders between countries in our otherwise borderless world. This is so even in Europe, where we aim for a digital single market. People and companies move between countries freely. Yet, their data and the e-services they enjoy at home do not move along as seamlessly. For example, people have to take each year 20,000 paper documents in-person across the bay from the Estonian social insurance agency to the Finnish one. At the same time, plenty of technology exists to make this process electronic and automatic which would make the service much better for citizens of both countries.
In this way we can get data flowing across borders. Then common services can follow and not just public sector ones. Administration-to-administration linkages will lead the way to breaking down digital borders in private services as well. It takes just one pilot project between any countries to lay the technical framework, which can be reused and scaled across the board. In Estonia, we have initiated discussions with our immediate neighbours to get the first pilots underway in areas such as population registries, business registries, social insurance, health or tax data. Cross-border services are part of e-governance of the future. I invite you to join Estonia in this effort.
Estonia has relied on a system called X-Road for over 10 years to link together our governmental information systems, meaning data and services. Based on the good experience, we propose the use of similar data exchange environment across national borders. Even our X-Road technology itself can be used internationally, and we are ready to give it to partner countries for use. In other words, it’s time to start creating actual cross-border services. The first step should be to link up administrations by linking their information systems.
andrus ansip, Prime Minister of Estonia
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
Building the Nordic-Baltic ICT Lighthouse
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However, even with two-state collaboration, the scale is often quite large. It’s best if you can zoom in even more. Luckily, the twin towns Valga and Valka – in fact a single town divided by the Estonian-Latvian border – are suitable subjects for e-service integration experiments. “In the case of Valga and Valka, you have a compact service space that serves ideally as a subject for a pilot program,” explains Siim Sikkut, National ICT Policy Adviser of the Government Office of Estonia. The residents of the two towns have many areas of common interest and everyday cases of needing to use an e-service in both of the countries. E-health project chosen as proof-of-concept The example that has been proposed for the pilot is in the field of e-health. Estonia is employing a digital prescription system that allows people to visit the pharmacist without having to carry around a paper prescription from the doctor — they are able to simply present their e-ID to the pharmacist who will look them up in the online system and confirm their digital prescription.
The Nordic-Baltic region is showing interest in regional cooperation that could propel cross-border services to another level. This is backed up by private-public partnership initiatives and joint security interests. In this article, we drill down through the latest developments in this area. The value of cooperation projects hinges on the number of participants in the project — bigger is better, right? The panEuropean ICT platform has long been in the making and is certainly a worthwhile aspiration. On the other hand, smaller scale projects – such as the Nordic and Baltic cooperation under discussion – have the virtue of giving valuable experience to implement in the bigger projects. As Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves explained during the conference “Challenging the Nordic and Baltic ICT Powerhouse” on January 23rd in Brussels, Nordic and Baltic countries have to work together and show Europe the positive effects of the ICT. “The rest of Europe will see the benefits, but first of all we need to be the example,” he stated. Experimenting with Estonian-Latvian joint services It’s quite natural that countries close to each other tend to have more common interests, thus a common platform for collaboration. Estonia and Latvia are discussing cooperation initiatives in all things ICT; Finland and Estonia are also partnering in areas that interest both countries’ citizens.
When a person visits a doctor in Valga, her nearest pharmacy may actually be in Valka. Therefore there may be a situation where you step out of the doctor’s office in Valga, but a hundred meters to the right in Valka your digital prescription is useless. “The benefit of implementing a cross-border e-service in a situation like Valga-Valka is in the fact that after it is done, it can easily be stretched out to a larger region and then to the national level.” notes Sikkut. He adds that similar pilots with the focus on specific services are under discussion with Finland. “Between any two countries we need only one such small scale project done, and then we have the technical basis laid to ramp up and scale collaborations,” Sikkut says. Estonia offers X-Road as the mediating solution for cross-border services Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip recently spoke at the Northern Future Forum, an annual non-formal cooperation format that brings together the heads of government of the Nordic countries, Baltic states and the United Kingdom. He proposed using the international version of X-Road – the main backbone of Estonia’s e-services – as the solution, allowing countries and their government institutions to exchange data and develop joint services. He stressed that using common e-services would bring situations where data flows over the borders in a non-automated fashion to an end.
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
Private sector also interested in cross-border services It is not only the public sector that should be interested and involved in joining the Nordics and Baltics into a single e-service area. Companies with cross-border ambitions would clearly benefit from unified regulations for e-commerce or public services that allow for less overhead in doing international business. The other group of companies are the ones interested in exporting their public e-service solutions to other countries. The Estonian ICT Demo Center is the organization that brings together such companies and creates networking opportunities between the companies and foreign officials. “Since 2009, the Demo Center has assisted in exporting Estonia’s e-solutions to many countries, including Russia, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Azerbaijan and Oman,” lists Indrek Vimberg, COO of ICT Demo Center. Introducing the ICT Lighthouse ICT Demo Center has also claimed the name “ICT Lighthouse” to describe their plans for expanding. “With the help of workshops and discussions, we have developed a new concept which we have called the ICT Lighthouse,” Vimberg explains. As the reincarnation of the Demo Center, the ICT Lighthouse would be dealing with facilitating cooperation, sales and export as well as service development, mediating between the ICT sector and other branches of the Estonian economy. This kind of public-private partnership is vital for a flourishing ICT sector. The more companies see the benefits of collaborating inside the region, the more export power this ICT alliance will have.
case study
Measuring the impact of e-services
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Welcoming joint efforts in cyber-security There is another important agenda item for regional ICT cooperation — namely the issue of cyber-security. Estonia hosts the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and has worked together with countries all over the world in sharing their expertise. “Regional cooperation in the Baltic area would have enormous leverage for all the neighboring countries, which is why Estonia is very much looking forward to joint cyber-security efforts in the area,” Sikkut affirms. Strong potential for leading the way in cross-border e-services A recent memorandum of understanding between Estonia and the United Kingdom to work together on developing public services that are digital by nature is a great example of two countries trading know-how. Quoting Liam Maxwell, UK Government Chief Technology Officer: “As the first fruits of this new agreement, we are also announcing today the launch of three initiatives to consider open standards, identity verification and open data. These will initially be set up bilaterally between the UK and Estonia, but we welcome participation from other countries in the future.” If collaboration between the UK and Estonia – countries that are rather different in size and culture as well as far apart compared to the Baltics and Nordics – is possible, it only stresses the potential that neighboring countries possess in setting up true cross-border services. The political will as expressed by the heads of state shows strong signs that the Nordic-Baltic ICT alliance will soon be a leading example for the rest of the world.
Estonians are happy to be in a position where many public services that would otherwise consume a lot of time, energy and paper are available electronically — as e-services. A study commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and the ICT Demo Center sought to study the impact of e-services. The study concluded that e-services have made public services faster than conventional services and improved their quality. Studies so far have focused on the service user statistics and user satisfaction. However, the aspects behind satisfaction or dissatisfaction, as well as the broader impact of e-solutions on different groups, had not really been analyzed thoroughly. Are e-services the way to go? Estonian officials in charge of public services as well as the developers of the e-services have become more and more interested in finding out whether introducing e-services has produced the desired result. The answer to this question could only be acquired by executing an objective study. »4«
The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
The fact that this information had so far been unavailable suggested that collecting data would not be an easy task. Estonian experts from the Institute of Baltic Studies and the Praxis Center for Policy Studies took on the challenge. Measuring the impact of e-services How do you measure the impact of a service change? According to Marek Tiits from the Institute of Baltic Studies, the simplified idea of an impact assessment is taking the initially planned impact and comparing it to the actual impact. “We expected our findings to help us answer the question whether the intended result or impact was achieved or not. The study also included an efficiency analysis of the e-service provider organizations — meaning their savings in time and money,” he explained. Setting the objectives The objective of the whole study was to identify and prove the positive social and economic impact achieved by developing public services and implementing e-services in Estonia. The study set out to develop the numerical indicators that could be used to plan the further development of e-services, as well as to improve the marketing of Estonian e-government solutions. “We also identified the technological, legal and organizational prerequisites that have to be fulfilled for the successful implementation of e-services, and any obstacles to achieving greater impact. Since the study was the first of its kind, we also had to develop a methodology that could also be used in the future,” Tiits added. Discovering the baseline Putting the new methodology into use helped to uncover an issue: with many e-services, no real goals were set upon implementation. “From the beginning two obstacles had to be tackled in parallel — we could not just develop the methodology, but a huge part of original data had to be collected, all the while keeping in mind the relatively short time-frame of the project,” explained Tarmo Kalvet from Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology. What were the results? Fifteen e-services with different levels of maturity and export potential were selected for the study. The impact of Estonia’s e-services was measured on three target groups: 1. users (citizens and enterprises), 2. service providers, 3. ICT companies developing the e-services (especially in relation to export).
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The users of e-services stated that the examined services have had a positive impact on them: the services helped them to save a lot of time and made government more accessible. For 12 of the 15 services studied, over 80% of users confirmed that they consider using the online version of the public service much easier. The top three e-services that displayed the biggest savings in time compared to regular offline services were 1. establishing a company, 2. submitting tax reports (VAT, income or social tax), 3. i-voting. The savings were derived from no longer having to visit various government agencies physically or having to obtain information from several separate information systems. The overall opinion of users is that all of the 15 services have become more accessible and easier to use. The online submission of tax returns to the Estonian Tax and Customs Board and the e-service of the Estonian Agricultural Registers and Information Board stand out as having the biggest impact on accessibility compared to offline services. Real cost savings The aforementioned savings can with some effort be translated into saved working hours. • In the case of i-voting, the cumulative time savings in the Estonian parliamentary elections of 2011 were 11,000 working days, which would amount to around 504,000 euros in average wages. • Another example comes from the Estonian Road Administra tion – the estimated savings from using paperless services in 2011 were 1,922,656 euros. • The e-tax saves Estonian companies 7 euros on average per income and social tax declaration, around 726,000 euros in total. The savings depend on the average income of the country. In the case of Estonia with its small population of 1,300,000 inhabitants, the savings per capita are rather significant. The economies of scale could potentially be even larger in bigger countries and wealthier economies.
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
Lessons to learn for service developers The study highlights several key lessons for future development projects. One of the main suggestions that the authors put forward is that funding decisions for e-society development projects should be based on a holistic view of the benefits of e-services, including a total cost of ownership analysis. Large-scale projects would need to describe the expected impact as well as set up the procedures for gathering usage data.
Large-scale e-society development projects should be setting concrete goals and conducting thorough cost-benefit analyses. A good standard has been set by the Tax and Customs Board, which has based the priorities of making public services avail-
Top 5 Technology Transfers from e-Estonia
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able online on the actual usage of the services. e-Tax is also a good example of integration and utilization of available data — pre-filled forms have made the tedious task of filing taxes very simple for Estonian inhabitants. Towards better e-services The study has provided a valuable baseline and a methodological standard for future developers of e-services. The established principles for the successful implementation of e-services should be of interest to everyone in the public sector planning to take services online, but also for the developers of IT solutions looking to cooperate with the state. The citizens of Estonian e-society have something to look forward to from the application of the study, as improvements to the process of creating and developing e-services will make their lives even easier.
drivers pay for parking using their mobile phones. In Estonia, 90% of parking fees are paid via mobile. The solution has been re-adopted, copied, replicated and mimicked all over the world (e.g. the US, Canada, Austria, Sweden and Dubai), so it’s become almost impossible to track all the implementations. However, to our knowledge Estonia remains the only country where mobile parking is the prevalent method of payment and is present in all the paid parking areas all over the country. 2. e-Cabinet The solution also known as e-Government is a tool that the Estonian government uses to streamline its cabinet meetings. Besides contributing to the environment by going paperless, the tool actually helps to improve the decision-making process and make better use of the time at the meetings.
Exporting public e-services can be complicated, since every country is unique in its legislative and institutional environment. Oftentimes, a country’s historical and cultural background makes it difficult to accept changes to the existing services. Still, some ideas are just so appealing that they find their way in. We’ll describe five components of Estonian e-society that have managed to cross borders successfully. 1. m-Parking Probably the most widespread technology transfer to come from Estonia, m-Parking in simple words is a system that lets
How long would you imagine a cabinet meeting lasts? After the implementation of e-Cabinet and agreeing on the process (not an insignificant factor!), the Estonian government has managed to cut the average length of the weekly cabinet meetings from 4–5 hours to just 30–90 minutes. e-Cabinet has been adopted in Finland, but also in Qatar and Oman — Middle Eastern countries that are looking to define themselves through clever use of technology. 3. X-Road While it's not one of the most visible solutions for the general public, X-Road is the backbone of Estonia’s information society e-services. The infrastructure that allows linking various e-service databases, both in the public and private sector, is an »6«
The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
open solution. Just recently, Estonia’s PM Andrus Ansip called out for neighbouring countries to adopt X-Road as the medium to open the way for cross-border use of e-services. Currently, Finland is building a central solution similar to XRoad with guidance from the Estonian Information System’s Authority, while Latvia already has an existing comparable system. Perhaps the most thorough implementation of X-Road outside Estonia has been in Azerbaijan; the country is determined to benefit from integrating the different state databases and start offering e-services to their citizens. 4. e-ID / Mobile-ID Electronic ID or e-ID stands for government-issued identity cards for both online and offline identification. In Estonia, nearly 90% of the country’s residents have them, and they’re being used for various purposes. They serve as travel documents and health insurance cards, but most importantly they enable digital authentication for online banking, digital signatures, i-Voting, picking up e-prescriptions, etc. Among other countries that have adopted e-ID are Finland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania and Spain and many more. m-ID or Mobile-ID is a service that allows a client to use a mobile phone as a means of electronically identifying. m-ID is directly tied to a person’s e-ID, so their legitimacy is equal. Developed by the oldest mobile operator in Estonia, EMT, it has spread to several countries, including Azerbaijan, Lithuania and Moldova. The latter also received an award for its m-Government at the 18th Annual Global Mobile awards in Barcelona, with the Estonian m-ID solution playing a big part in that. While Estonia is not the inventor or originator of e-ID, it clearly shows how to use the functionality of the card to its fullest. 5. Runner-up: i-Voting Right after Hurricane Sandy shook up the election process in the US last year, and some states had to resort to voting via fax machine or e-mail, i-Voting made the papers globally, with Barack Obama saying the current US election system needs to be “fixed”. Estonia has been using i-Voting since 2005, with the first parliamentary e-elections in the world held in 2007. While opponents have been trying to show i-Voting as something insecure and dangerous, it’s actually a rather robust system and every bit as safe as internet banking or other e-services. Modelled after postal voting, it makes participating in elections possible for people who would otherwise not be able to vote or would write it off as too inconvenient.
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We awarded i-Voting the runner-up status since electronic voting experiments have been conducted in around 20 countries in different parts of the world, but mostly via voting machines at polling stations. If there’s important know-how to be exported from Estonia, it is certainly in i-Voting. How can we facilitate the export of e-services? A recent analysis of the impact of Estonian e-services also discussed the potential of the services being exported to other countries. It claimed that exporting e-services has significant obstacles in the form of local organizational and institutional environments and suggested that standardizing the ICT platforms internationally could facilitate such technology transfers to other countries. While four of the five e-services listed in this article are public services, it was actually the one commercial service – m-Parking – that could claim the title of the widest spread service. This shows the potential that lies in exporting unique commercial services, once the public sector joins in promoting them. If there is one thing that could really help to spread e-services to other countries in Europe and the world, it is a common platform — such as the EU interoperability platform for e-ID. Hopefully Nordic-Baltic cooperation in ICT issues can create viable examples for the rest of the world to draw from.
EU's IT Agency's Sets Up In Estonia The European IT Agency has been called the biggest IT challenge for the entire European Union. What does the agency do, how did it come to reside in Estonia and what is the meaning of such an institution for the local entrepreneurial environment? In December 2012, the European Agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems in the area of freedom, security and justice – eu-LISA – finally opened its doors. The location? Tallinn, Estonia. The work of the agency has so far gone publicly unnoticed. But that’s not without a reason. Since the agency has to maintain the security of the entire EU in several fields, the work done behind closed doors is obviously not the type that everyone should be able to have a peek at.
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
The biggest IT challenge in the EU The IT Agency has also been called the biggest information technological challenge of the whole European Union. Any country to host the agency should be titled a high-level provider of e-services and IT solutions all over Europe. We met with Piret Lilleväli, adviser from the Ministry of the Interior, and Ave Poom, policy adviser for eu-LISA, who helped us understand how a small country like Estonia succeeded in bringing such an important agency into its backyard and the impact of hosting the institution. Estonia vs France – from competition to cooperation Estonia had been preparing its candidacy for the seat of the Agency for almost two years before the European Commission
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even presented the draft regulation of the European Parliament and EU Council establishing the agency in 2009. By that time it had become an established fact that IT systems were extremely important in guaranteeing the internal security of the EU. In line with other risk-reducing measures, like police cooperation and internal migration control, IT solutions are considered the main cornerstones of reducing cross-border risks. When we talk about the specific systems, there are currently three cornerstones that ensure the internal security of the European Union: • Visa Information System (VIS) • The European fingerprint database for identifying asylum seekers and irregular border-crossers (Eurodac) • Schengen Information System (SIS) »8«
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
Since December 2012, Estonia is responsible for the operational management of these large-scale databases through eu-LISA. Competing to host the agency “We were not interested in bringing just any kind of agency to Estonia. IT is what we, Estonians, all understand and what we appreciate. It is part of our national image. We already host the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence, so our line of thought was that if you have an important IT institution like that, it makes sense to expand further in this specific area — this is what we started to fight for,” Piret Lilleväli tells us. This brings us to the competition between Estonia and France. Turning the tables France had managed the first generation SIS system for the member states before the Agency was created, so it automatically became the main candidate for hosting the Agency as all the systems were there. Estonia’s candidacy was based on a particular decision made by the European Council for new EU institutions to be located in new member states combined with the years of work that Estonia has done in building up its reputation as an e-state.
join forces with other countries. As a side benefit, the workforce for the projects is likely to be employed from Estonia,” Lilleväli explained. According to her, many well-known IT companies have already shown interest in bringing their subunits near the agency. There have also been events to introduce the developers and managers of Estonian information systems to the IT director-general Krum Garkov. “With this we are creating a support system for exchanging ideas. I’m certain that future IT success stories will have their origins in these contacts,” Lilleväli expressed. Growth plans At the moment, 13 people are working in the Tallinn headquarters of the IT Agency, five of them Estonians. Hiring is being done throughout the EU member states.
With negotiations over the agency’s location lasting more than a year, a compromise was eventually reached. The headquarters, including its functions and IT development, would be based in Tallinn, Estonia, while the systems and the technical solutions would remain in Strasbourg, France.
“People working in the Strasbourg data center have more background in information technology; people working in Tallinn are from administrative fields. It is mostly because the main tasks of the headquarters in Tallinn are running the organization, coordinating tasks with other facilities (mainly with EU institutions and facilities responsible for internal security and IT administration in member states), reporting to the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament according to the Agency’s regulations, and managing internal/external communication as well as finance and other administrative questions,” Ave Poom described.
Staying ahead of the criminals Today, the main task of the agency is to take over the old systems from the European Commission and to ensure their functioning. “Our main focus is on SIS becoming operational, or actually SIS II, the second technical version of the system,” Lilleväli explains.
The goal is to reach 48 employees in the Tallinn office by the end of this year. While the agency is international to the core and may not boast a huge staff compared to international enterprises in the private sector, it is clearly a milestone in gathering toplevel IT competence to Estonia.
According to her, the postponing of the implementation and the increase in the planned cost has made European countries skeptical about the new system. In addition, some of the countries don’t feel safe about keeping the data in the agency’s large databases. “We are hoping that the agency will help to turn this skeptical attitude around and allow for more common IT solutions to be used for protecting European internal security. At the moment, it seems that the criminals are one step ahead of us,” she adds, half-jokingly.
FACT BOX What kind of information systems does the IT Agency administer?
Creating a network Through its procurements, an agency of this type has the power to benefit a whole array of companies and organizations. This leads to collaborative enterprises that have a way of creating synergies. “In the case of the IT Agency, it’s quite likely that Estonians will not have the resources and know-how to participate in the procurements on their own, which leads them to
• Visa Information System (VIS) - a database that supports the effectuation of united visa politics and facilitates control of borders. When the owner of the visa comes to the external border, the border crossing point has access to VIS to identify the person and to verify the visa’s authenticity. Schengen and Schengen-associated states' national consulates and official EU border crossing points are joined with the central VIS database to implement VIS. VIS is intended for use in different parts of the world: North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunis), the Middle East (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) and the area of the Persian Gulf (Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, South Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen). »9«
The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
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• European fingerprint database for identifying asylum seekers and irregular border-crossers (Eurodac) - a system that enables member states to identify asylum seekers and irregular border crossings. Thanks to Eurodac, member states can compare fingerprints and determine whether asylum seekers or foreign state citizens are illegally transiting through another EU member state or have already applied for asylum in another EU member state. Fingerprints are collected from persons over the age of 14. Additionally, sex, country of origin and date of collection are included.
• Schengen Information System (SIS) - one of the biggest and most important common databases, containing information about fugitives and missing persons, immigrants, stolen vehicles and properties (including firearms, money, identification cards).Currently, 35 states have joined SIS, which means over 32 million entries. At the moment, SIS 1+ is in use. In spring 2013, SIS II will be put to use in all EU member states.
What Can You Find Inside a Space Cube?
Generating specialists in the field CGI has been working in the space field for over thirty years. The company is mostly known for creating ground-based systems, though they have also created on-board software — for example mission control systems, which operators use on a daily basis for satellite observation and steering, orbit prediction and safe communication. As a result of more than two years of cooperation between Estonia and Germany, Estonia now has experts helping Germans on a regular basis in creating operating software for the European Space Agency’s and other clients’ missions. “For example, Estonians have to produce and be completely responsible for the operating system’s main module for Europe’s largest space program Galileo,” said Sisask. Space software as a “hobby project” Based on this experience, it makes quite a bit of sense that CGI decided to take part in Estonia’s first space mission — ESTCube-1. It will also provide CGI with an excellent opportunity to test out “Hummingbird” — a mission control system created by CGI workers mostly as a voluntary project during the past few years.
Estonia is about to conduct its first space mission after nearly six years of hard work. The project has brought together specialists from the academic and the business world; around 100 students and scientists have contributed to the creation of the roughly one-kilogram satellite called ESTCube-1.
Compared to the European Space Agency’s software generally used for large-scale missions, “Hummingbird” is aimed at lower budget cube satellite projects, just like ESTCube-1. Its main advantage is its simplicity. In addition, the software is open source and web-based.
Speaking of the first Estonian space project, the fact that the mission control system (MCS) is also made by Estonians has undeservedly been overshadowed. The University of Tartu and IT company Logica Estonia (now part of CGI, a global provider of information technology and business process services) co-developed new, improved mission control software for ESTCube-1.
“We are pleased that ESTCube-1 has given us the opportunity to develop an alternative solution for mission software that is technologically modern, user-friendly and reasonably priced, and that can be continuously used in many other missions,” added Sisask.
According to CGI Estonia’s space project manager Andreas Sisask, this decision was made because the software currently in use is obsolete and expensive to use in smaller missions.
The first of its kind “Hummingbird” is being used for the ground segment of the ESTCube-1 satellite:for monitoring and controlling the satellite,
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The Newsletter of the Estonian ICT Demo Center / march / 2013
orbit prediction, monitoring and control of the ground stations and a weather station. ESTCube-1 will be “Hummingbird’s” first mission. This practical experience is vitally necessary. “No-one will easily accept new software without previous mission experience, even though it may actually be of better quality than the existing systems,” Sisask stressed. “For the first time the software will be put to use in April at the Tartu Observatory’s ESTCube-1 mission control center,” said Urmas Kvell, a PhD student taking part in the project. A webbased solution increases cooperation possibilities between different missions, offering an opportunity to unite their ground stations into one network. The “Hummingbird” mission software is one of the first to bring web-based controlling into the field of space exploration. “These competences and skills are necessary for the space industry in Europe and worldwide. In the future, the obtained skills and innovative approach can also be used for software solutions in other fields,” Kvell added. Regional cooperation in space projects The CGI office in Estonia is already talking about potential cooperation projects with cube satellite builders from Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. “They are all planning to fly their cubes into space soon, and we have been in contact and have offered our software. Their attitude is positive and they understand that there is no point in individually investing into building the same thing,” Sisask said. What makes the Estonian team’s work on space mission control software development especially valuable is the fact that right now its capabilities are completely unique — there is no real alternative anywhere in the world.
» e-estonia.com
really have the expertise in order to use this money for something ESA actually needs,” said Sisask. Estonia has gained this competency, which considerably improves the country’s opportunities to take part in ESA’s procurements. Knowledge transfer between old and new space countries The cooperation between ESTCube and CGI has provided the team with the experience of developing ground-based space software systems and valuable knowledge of operating a satellite. While initially it was the Estonian team learning from Germany’s experience, the team now has sufficient know-how to bring ideas to the table and even start a project from scratch. CGI Estonia’s experts have set their sights on the European Union’s program QB50. The goal of the program is to create fifty cube satellites and fly them off to space at the same time. “Today we are working on the plan of these fifty satellites using our software,” Sisask revealed. This goes to show that a country does not need to be big in size to be able to contribute to space innovation.
The big question — will it work? Software for a space project is clearly mission critical — what if something goes wrong on launch day? “On the day when ESTCube-1 will take off into space, the risks related to the ground-based software not functioning are not really big. If the ground-based system should experience some glitches, generally nothing will go wrong with the satellite, as they are built to be rather independent. Also, it is always possible to fix groundbased software, unlike the software on the satellite,” Sisask said. Helping to achieve full membership in ESA In parallel to the space project, Estonia is aiming for full membership in the European Space Agency (ESA). According to the plans, Estonia hopes to obtain member status by the year 2015. In light of this, the ESTCube-1 project helps by creating legitimacy. “The problem with new member states is that their competency in executing space projects is very low when they join ESA. The agency distributes funds between the member states more or less proportionally, but many countries do not
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