NEURO-RESPOND is an ESA SysNova activity led by OHB Hellas, focusing on the use of neuromorphic computing and event-based sensing for future Earth Observation missions.
The project investigates how low-power, event-driven on-board processing can reduce latency, downlink volume and ground dependency in time-critical applications. Instead of sending large volumes of raw data to ground for later analysis, NEURO-RESPOND studies how the spacecraft can detect relevant activity, filter information, and generate compact alerts directly on-board.
The mission concept is built around three complementary applications. Transient Sentinel targets near-real-time detection of fast Earth Observation events such as lightning, wildfire signatures and volcanic activity. RF Watch investigates on-board detection of RF interference and support to mitigation decisions. Neuromorphic FDIR explores low-power monitoring of spacecraft telemetry for early anomaly detection.
Together, these use cases allow the study to assess whether a shared neuromorphic processing concept can improve mission-level KPIs such as alert latency, autonomy, power consumption, downlink volume and effective duty cycle. This is consistent with the NEURO-RESPOND kick-off presentation, where the core question is whether neuromorphic on-board processing can improve latency, autonomy, power and data volume across heterogeneous spacecraft applications.