Pictured at University College Dublin are Professor Lorraine Hanlon, UCD School of Physics and Parameter Space, co-founder; Dr William O'Mullane, Head of Operations Development Division, ESA and Dr Sheila McBreen, UCD School of Physics and Parameter Space co-founder.

Parameter Space Ltd, a new University College Dublin (UCD) spin-out company, has secured a €800,000 contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to fund a 3-year project.

The objective of the project is to develop new software capable of exploiting the unprecedented volume of data returning to Earth from ESA's Gaia satellite which was launched in late 2013
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The contract will also enable the company to create 4 new jobs.

The main goals of this €700 million mission are to measure the precise positions and luminosity of one billion stars and to discover thousands of planets around other stars and supernovae.

Since July 2014 Gaia has made nearly 100 billion measurements with its 1-billion pixel digital camera. Gaia’s database will eventually grow to 1 Petabyte in size which is equivalent to about 200,000 DVDs worth of data.

Analysis of this data will result in the creation of a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy.

Parameter Space will develop a portal to host analysis algorithms provided by the scientific community and develop specific tools for enhanced analysis and access to this data.

Parameter Space was established in 2014 by astrophysicists Professor Lorraine Hanlon and Dr Sheila McBreen as a spin-out from the UCD School of Physics. They established the company following completion of the 5-week 2014 UCD Commercialisation Bootcamp held at NovaUCD.

They lead the UCD Space Science and Advanced Materials group and together have over 30 years of experience working on space missions, including ESA’s INTEGRAL mission and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.