Nowadays the Earth Observation (EO) market is tending towards increased operational needs in terms of responsiveness, revisiting, and multi-mission complementarity as well as cheaper and tailored ground segments.

Addressing these needs in the EO ground segment perimeter, the Domino architecture is a modular, secured and evolutive architecture for EO Ground Segments with the goal to provide a standardized architecture shared by industry and institutions, by primes and providers of ground segment building blocks in Europe.

In order to do so, model-based system engineering standards are used to define a set of Dominos with standardized interfaces and clearly defined functions with modularity as a key driver. The modularity relies on the fact that a domino is autonomous, is monitored, produces key performance indicators on the delivered service, may serve more than one mission and relies on its own infrastructure. A ground segment is therefore an assembly of Dominoes fitting the needs.

The Domino architecture started as a French initiative (named Domino-X) supported by the French recovery plan France Relance together with significant investment from French industry. It is now developing in Europe thanks to national space agencies, ESA, and European Commission support.

The security of the Domino ground segment is ensured by design thanks to the defined interfaces and is also considered as part of each Domino design. Further analysis is done in the MESEO project (Multi-mission Efficient and Secure high capacity end-to-end EO) project which aims at enforcing security aspects at system and function levels by design focusing on a trustworthy cloud-based security through space for data sovereignty.