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GMES Mission Capacity Planning
Starting from 2008, the EU Global Monitoring for Environment and Security Programme (GMES) will provide operational data, information, services and knowledge to support Europe’s sustainable development and global control of the environment.
ACS Prime will coordinate the consortium that sees EADS Astrium SaS, INFOTERRA, EADS Astrium Ltd and SPOT IMAGE assessing how the GMES dedicated and contributing space missions will fulfil the requirements of the future and potential operational GMES services.
The process of collecting data requirements for GMES services will be based on the capacity planning methodology, resulting from modelling of EO missions and sensors, the coverage analysis and simulations carried out with the support of mission analysis tools.
It is expected from the proposed methodology and support tools to permit easy updates in response to any new requirement originating from GMES Programme evolutions.
ADM Aeolus LTA
ADM Aeolus LTA contract will advance the Ground Segment standardisation concept through endorsement of ESA emerging MMFI technology. The peculiarity of this contract? No or minimal development activities. In line with its current trend for reducing development and operations costs, ESA has asked for a maximum reuse of its Multi-Mission Facility Infrastructure. Thus, the Agency’s MMFI will be reused and configured to serve as a managing platform where to plug in Mission specific Elements (MSE) such as e.g. Processors and Quality Control Facility provided as Customer Furnished Items.
ACS supported by VEGA Technologies brings into this project specific experience and knowledge of MSE interfaces specification, product formats and processors acquired during the ADM Aeolus PDS development.
CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval)
Is information really preserved and usable following multiple migrations and transformations?
Knowing there is much more to preservation but mere media and formats, CASPAR will work on enhancing the access to information rather than just data.
CASPAR partners are some of the major European stakeholder institutions in science (ESA, CCLRC), cultural heritage (UNESCO) and performing arts (INA, IRCAM, and CIANT).
This will facilitate the take-up of the project results and the preservation of digital content for generations to come. The CASPAR technological OAIS based platform (Open Archival Information System) will host software components for preservation activities in three testbeds: cultural, contemporary art and science.
Heterogeneous digital data will be made available through a common framework of existing and emerging standards and a variety of innovative applications and services.
MIMS Contract
Aims at implementing operational MERIS Information Mining Services at ESRIN. These value added services concern Content Based Image Selection and Retrieval, Information Discovery and Scene Understanding on system or user provided MERIS Reduced Resolution (RR) and Full Resolution (FR) products.
The MIMS project builds upon the results and functions already handled by the KIMV and KES.
However, some previously implemented features (i.e. Cloud Cover handling) have been further enhanced. Thus, MIMS offers system training to identify different, relevant cloud types. The result of this training process is applied to all images from a catalogue to extract the cloud cover percentage for each image.

GOCE 3rd User Workshop
Was held at the European Space Agency (ESA)-ESRIN from 6 to 8 November 2006. ACS’ Daniela Bencivenni presented the GOCE PDS-IPF solution, first designed and developed for ESA CryoSat mission. This very same modern and innovative architecture has been later selected for the ADM Aeolus Processing Facility.
The modularity and scalability of SW components, permitted ACS to realise additional GOCE facilities namely:
• the GOCE Calibration and Monitoring Facility I/F Infrastructure,
• the GOCE Long Term Archive Re-processor and GOCE Data Manager
(Source ACS)