Cryosat-2 Ground Segment Is Ready
10.08.2009 - Atmosphere & Space, Ice & Snow, Other, Arctic, Antarctic
CryoSat-2 is the European Space Agency's (ESA) new satellite. Its mission will be to measure the thickness of floating sea ice and survey the surface of continental ice sheets.
Five months before its projected launch date, the location of the ground segment, which will support CryoSat-2 by controlling the satellite and handling its data, and is already being used for ESA's Envisat and ERS-2 satellites, has been chosen to be Salmijärvi in northern Sweden. The ground segment is made up of:
- a Flight Operations Segment (FOS), which controls and monitors the satellite
- the Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS), which allows the data from the satellite to be extracted, processed, archived and distributed to its users.
ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Germany will be responsible for controlling and monitoring the satellite, while ESA's Centre for Earth Observation in Italy will process the data after the ground segment receives the data.
Cryosat-2 will replace the original CryoSat satellite, which was lost as a result of a failure in the timing of the launch sequence in October 2005. The new satellite is now awaiting shipment to a launch site in Kazakhstan.
