Aurore will be the new monitoring and situation assessment solution for France. Credit: Thales.
The French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA) has awarded Thales a contract to develop, deliver, and deploy a new ground-based radar system for the surveillance of low Earth orbit.
Named Aurore, the system will monitor satellites and debris from the ground.
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Thales will design and manufacture the software-defined radar at its Limours facility in France, drawing on expertise from collaborations with several French small and medium-sized enterprises.
Aurore will operate in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band, offering “continuous surveillance and simultaneous multi-tracking” of several space objects.
According to Thales, the radar will provide real-time imagery of the space environment and will respond rapidly to activities in low Earth orbit.
Thales chairman and CEO Patrice Caine said: “With Aurore, the only radar of its kind in Europe, Thales is contributing to French sovereignty by strengthening its capabilities for monitoring the space environment at low orbits. Aurore demonstrates, once again, Thales’ leadership in the field of air and space surveillance systems.”
The contract to Thales forms part of the Action and Space Resilience (ARES) programme.
This comes as real-time identification and tracking of multiple small objects in space becomes increasingly important amid rising threats from military activity and space debris.
In March 2025, the Airbus-built Earth observation satellite for the French military was successfully deployed from the Ariane 6 launcher at Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guiana.
Later, in July, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a strategy to accelerate defence spending increases, bringing forward plans to double the country’s military budget by 2027 instead of 2030.
There will be an increase of €3.5bn ($4bn) in 2026 and a further increment of €3bn in 2027.
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