Parameter Space, a spin-out from University College Dublin (UCD), has secured a €800,000 ($879,520) contract from the European Space Agency (ESA).

The cash will be used to fuel a three-year project into developing software capable of utilising the vast volume of data sent back to Earth from the ESA’s Gaia satellite, part of a €700m mission to measure positions of around a billion stars, discover new planets, and identify new stars and supernovae.

In the past nine months, the satellite…