As we develop an increasing on-orbit capability to collect gigabytes or more data from our remote sensing satellites, the challenge of getting it back to the ground becomes increasingly demanding. To provide insight into the solutions being developed to address this challenge, the Satellite Systems and Applications TPN arranged an evening seminar, held at the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, where representatives from Airbus Defence and Space described how their technologies are powering the European Data Relay Service, otherwise known as EDRS or the “Space Data Highway”, to help achieve this goal.
The session included presentations on the upstream hardware, presented by Martin Agnew, and the downstream service strategy, presented by Jacquie Conway, both based at Airbus Defence and Space in the UK. The evening concluded with a brief walk around the German-designed ground segment equipment, located at the entrance to the Harwell site, including an 8 metre dish and pre-fabricated concrete portacabin housing the dish control and radio electronics.
Martin Agnew’s talk on the EDRS laser link technology covered the route from technology demonstration on TerraSAR-X and NFIRE, providing years of pre-service testing, GEO demonstration on Alphasat, to service deployment on the Sentinel spacecraft. We continued to delve into future applications on airborne platforms, using EDRS to enable real-time tasking and data recovery, a concept dubbed “EO 2.0”
Every technology needs an application and Jacquie Conway’s subsequent talk on the Copernicus programme addressed how the ESA-funded Sentinel data sources are tailored to enable new service concepts, without risking disruption to existing European industry services that rely on Earth observation data. Here we learnt how the EDRS service, combined with the six Sentinel missions, is producing telemetry in such large quantities that we must now consider Big Data methods to effectively and efficiently examine the data products.
Together the speakers provided a complete picture of how this state-of-the-art and public service (the data are free for global personal and commercial use) has developed over the past 16 years. It provided insight into how the technologies have had to evolve and illustrated how the results are integrated into modern-day data services that are built on satellite data.
The SSA committee are keen to hold more events that combine presentations with tours or demonstrations. If you work at a site that has something interesting to show to the IET community, please contact the TPN committee.
Written by Chris Brunskill, IET Satellite Systems and Applications Chairman