France Orders Thales Aurore Radar to Redefine Europe’s Watch Over Low Earth Orbit
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France’s defense agency DGA has ordered Thales’s Aurore radar, a next-generation UHF space surveillance system to replace the GRAVES network by 2030. The upgrade expands France’s sovereign monitoring of satellites and debris, strengthening European space situational awareness.
The French defense procurement agency (DGA) announced on October 28, 2025, that France has ordered from Thales a new ground-based space surveillance radar named Aurore under the ARES program to monitor satellites and debris in low Earth orbit. The award follows a contract signature dated October 24 and positions Aurore to enter service around 2030 as the successor to GRAVES. Thales describes Aurore as the largest space surveillance radar yet deployed in Europe.Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link
Thales Aurore UHF space radar tracks LEO objects to 2,000 km, with rapid detection for France’s sovereign orbital awareness (Picture source: DGA).
Aurore is a software-defined radar operating in the UHF band and manufactured at Thales’s Limours site near Paris. The company says the architecture enables continuous surveillance with simultaneous multi-object tracking and fast responsiveness to events in low orbit, generating a high-resolution, real-time picture of the orbital environment. Thales also signals a growth path, noting that Aurore’s modular UHF backbone could evolve into a family of sensors contributing to early warning against ballistic and hypersonic threats, an important bridge between space domain awareness and air and missile defense.
The upgrade should be read against the benchmark of GRAVES, which has underpinned French space surveillance since 2005. GRAVES is a bistatic, continuous-wave concept in the VHF band that illuminates a 180-degree azimuth to build a catalog from Doppler and angular measurements rather than range. ONERA’s reference paper explains that GRAVES uses phased transmission panels and digital beamforming at the receiver, a low-power method that detects satellites but is inherently limited in characterizing small debris because of the long VHF wavelength. Aurore’s UHF, software-defined design is intended to lift those constraints with faster updates, improved angular precision and better detection of smaller objects.
DGA indicates the new radar increases custody over LEO to higher altitudes, with detection cited up to roughly 2,000 kilometers, and is planned to take over operational duties by about 2030. That expanded reach captures mega-constellations, reconnaissance payloads and high-risk fragments that drive today’s collision-avoidance workload. By producing a sovereign, continuously refreshed orbital picture, Aurore reduces reliance on non-European catalogs and strengthens France’s contribution to the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking partnership.
Configuration matters for resilience and coverage. Medias refer to “Aurore radars” in the plural, pointing to a multi-site layout even though neither DGA nor Thales has disclosed locations or site numbers. A distributed UHF array brings redundancy and wider sky access, improving revisit rates and orbit determination when fused with optical telescopes and passive sensors already in service. The result is a more continuous custody chain and better cueing for characterization sensors during close approaches.
Aurore’s data will feed the Space Command’s surveillance enterprise anchored by the COSMOS unit, long based at BA 942 Lyon Mont-Verdun and increasingly consolidating functions in Toulouse with the Commandement de l’Espace. That pipeline supports day-to-day conjunction assessment, re-entry monitoring and anomaly investigation, and gives commanders faster indications and warning of suspicious proximity operations. In practical terms, Aurore shortens the time from detection to decision for maneuver planning and attribution.
For the French forces, the tactical benefit is speed and precision. Simultaneous multi-object tracking and software-defined waveform agility allow the radar to adapt to denser orbital scenes and new counterspace techniques without major hardware swaps. The industrial footprint is equally strategic. Building Aurore at Limours anchors high-end radar engineering in France in line with the 2024–2030 military programming law and preserves sovereign know-how while tapping a network of French SMEs for subsystems and processing.
European context amplifies the stakes: the EU’s Space Strategy for Security and Defense calls for a stronger, shared threat picture and resilient access to space. By contributing to EU-SST services for collision avoidance, re-entry risk and fragmentation alerts, Aurore becomes a continental asset as much as a national one, raising the fidelity of warnings available to European civil and military operators.
As for exports, Thales has announced France as the lead and only customer to date. The company is openly positioning Aurore as the only radar of its kind in Europe and the largest of its type, which suggests an export ambition once the French baseline is proven, but there are no foreign orders confirmed as of October 30, 2025.
Aurore marks a generational shift from GRAVES’s low-cost fence to a high-precision, software-defined UHF system built for volume, resolution and speed. It gives Paris a sovereign catalog backbone, tightens decision cycles for on-orbit risk, and plugs France more deeply into Europe’s collective warning grid at a moment when the space layer has moved from niche to daily operations.
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France’s defense agency DGA has ordered Thales’s Aurore radar, a next-generation UHF space surveillance system to replace the GRAVES network by 2030. The upgrade expands France’s sovereign monitoring of satellites and debris, strengthening European space situational awareness.
The French defense procurement agency (DGA) announced on October 28, 2025, that France has ordered from Thales a new ground-based space surveillance radar named Aurore under the ARES program to monitor satellites and debris in low Earth orbit. The award follows a contract signature dated October 24 and positions Aurore to enter service around 2030 as the successor to GRAVES. Thales describes Aurore as the largest space surveillance radar yet deployed in Europe.
Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link
Thales Aurore UHF space radar tracks LEO objects to 2,000 km, with rapid detection for France’s sovereign orbital awareness (Picture source: DGA).
Aurore is a software-defined radar operating in the UHF band and manufactured at Thales’s Limours site near Paris. The company says the architecture enables continuous surveillance with simultaneous multi-object tracking and fast responsiveness to events in low orbit, generating a high-resolution, real-time picture of the orbital environment. Thales also signals a growth path, noting that Aurore’s modular UHF backbone could evolve into a family of sensors contributing to early warning against ballistic and hypersonic threats, an important bridge between space domain awareness and air and missile defense.
The upgrade should be read against the benchmark of GRAVES, which has underpinned French space surveillance since 2005. GRAVES is a bistatic, continuous-wave concept in the VHF band that illuminates a 180-degree azimuth to build a catalog from Doppler and angular measurements rather than range. ONERA’s reference paper explains that GRAVES uses phased transmission panels and digital beamforming at the receiver, a low-power method that detects satellites but is inherently limited in characterizing small debris because of the long VHF wavelength. Aurore’s UHF, software-defined design is intended to lift those constraints with faster updates, improved angular precision and better detection of smaller objects.
DGA indicates the new radar increases custody over LEO to higher altitudes, with detection cited up to roughly 2,000 kilometers, and is planned to take over operational duties by about 2030. That expanded reach captures mega-constellations, reconnaissance payloads and high-risk fragments that drive today’s collision-avoidance workload. By producing a sovereign, continuously refreshed orbital picture, Aurore reduces reliance on non-European catalogs and strengthens France’s contribution to the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking partnership.
Configuration matters for resilience and coverage. Medias refer to “Aurore radars” in the plural, pointing to a multi-site layout even though neither DGA nor Thales has disclosed locations or site numbers. A distributed UHF array brings redundancy and wider sky access, improving revisit rates and orbit determination when fused with optical telescopes and passive sensors already in service. The result is a more continuous custody chain and better cueing for characterization sensors during close approaches.
Aurore’s data will feed the Space Command’s surveillance enterprise anchored by the COSMOS unit, long based at BA 942 Lyon Mont-Verdun and increasingly consolidating functions in Toulouse with the Commandement de l’Espace. That pipeline supports day-to-day conjunction assessment, re-entry monitoring and anomaly investigation, and gives commanders faster indications and warning of suspicious proximity operations. In practical terms, Aurore shortens the time from detection to decision for maneuver planning and attribution.
For the French forces, the tactical benefit is speed and precision. Simultaneous multi-object tracking and software-defined waveform agility allow the radar to adapt to denser orbital scenes and new counterspace techniques without major hardware swaps. The industrial footprint is equally strategic. Building Aurore at Limours anchors high-end radar engineering in France in line with the 2024–2030 military programming law and preserves sovereign know-how while tapping a network of French SMEs for subsystems and processing.
European context amplifies the stakes: the EU’s Space Strategy for Security and Defense calls for a stronger, shared threat picture and resilient access to space. By contributing to EU-SST services for collision avoidance, re-entry risk and fragmentation alerts, Aurore becomes a continental asset as much as a national one, raising the fidelity of warnings available to European civil and military operators.
As for exports, Thales has announced France as the lead and only customer to date. The company is openly positioning Aurore as the only radar of its kind in Europe and the largest of its type, which suggests an export ambition once the French baseline is proven, but there are no foreign orders confirmed as of October 30, 2025.
Aurore marks a generational shift from GRAVES’s low-cost fence to a high-precision, software-defined UHF system built for volume, resolution and speed. It gives Paris a sovereign catalog backbone, tightens decision cycles for on-orbit risk, and plugs France more deeply into Europe’s collective warning grid at a moment when the space layer has moved from niche to daily operations.
