The main areas of activity are:
-Ground Stations for Polar Orbiting Satellites
-Ground Stations for Geostationary Satellites
-Terminals for Ocean Surveillance
-Data Acquisition Systems: Digital demodulator and Front End Processors
-Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) systems
-Ground Station Control
-Ground Station networking
Ground Stations for Polar Orbiting Satellites
The MEOS Polar Ground Station is a multi-mission, flexible and modular turnkey system for acquisition, archiving, processing, analysis and distribution of meteorological data
The MEOS Polar Ground Station supports the following satellites, sensors and transmission formats:
| Satellites | Sensors | Transmissions |
| NOAA | AVHRR, TOVS, ATOVS | HRPT |
| SeaStar | SeaWIFS | HRPT |
| FY-1 | MVISR | CHRPT |
| TERRA and AQUA | MODIS, AIRS AMSU-A, HSB | Direct Broadcast |
| METOP | AVHRR, ATOVS | HRPT |
The MEOS Polar Ground Station can be delivered with support for any combination of these missions depending on the customer’s requirements. Other missions are available upon request
MEOS Antenna
A dualband (L- and X-band) antenna with reflector sizes ranging from 2.4 m to 4 m is available for the MEOS Polar system.
Ground Stations for Geostationary Satellites
The MEOS Geostationary Ground Station is a multi-mission, flexible and modular turnkey system for acquisition, archiving, processing, analysis and distribution of meteorological data.
The MEOS Geostationary Ground Station supports the following satellites, sensors and transmission formats:
| Satellites | Sensors | Transmissions |
| GOES | GOES IM Imager | GVAR |
| MTSAT | MTSAT Imager | HRIT/LRIT |
| MSG | SEVIRI | HRIT/LRIT |
| Figure 1: NOAA HRPT image after processing | Figure 2: MTSAT HRIT image after processing |
|---|
SAR Terminal for Maritime Surveillance
The SAR terminal is a compact system for real time reception and near real time processing of SAR satellite data into maritime surveillance products:
• Ship detection
• Oil Spill detection
• Ocean Surface Wind
• Waves
The terminals are available for Radarsat 1, Radarsat-2 and Envisat.
Figure 3: MEOS SAR Terminal
Satellite Data Acquisition Systems
The MEOS Capture product line consists of high performance data acquisition and management systems for the most demanding professional users, developed to bring all the user’s data safely home, always. This mission statement translates into the key properties of all MEOS Capture products: Performance, Reliability and Flexibility.
MEOS Capture systems are designed to acquire all data, right from the start of every satellite contact session. This, combined with the ability to make acquired data available to end users as fast as possible, makes MEOS Capture a good choice when timeliness is important.
MEOS Capture systems are designed for “lights-out” operations – once installed and configured it will do its job. This is achieved by incorporating mechanisms for automatic storage management, automatic recovery in case of network problems, data driven or scheduled operations, and use of well-proven, state of the art, hardware solutions.
Live with your MEOS Capture system! Updates are provided as software file, and systems may be upgraded from one model to another by adding additional modules.
Figure 4: All MEOS Capture products are multi-mission by nature, supporting current and future satellites
The following MEOS Capture products are available:
- MEOS Capture HRD – High Rate Demodulator
- MEOS Capture HRFEP – High Rate Front End Processor
- MEOS Capture HRDFEP – High Rate Demodulator and Front End Processor. All in one box
MEOS Capture systems are used in many mission critical environments, where “every bit counts”. Current users of MEOS Capture (and its predecessors) includes NASA EDOS, ESA ERS/Envisat, Eumetsat EPS and Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT).
Ground Station Control
MEOS Control is a flexible and scalable system, providing one interface, for both local and remote monitoring and control of standalone units at a Ground Station.
A typical Ground Station often consists of a number of specialized units, e.g. demodulators, modulators, antenna control units (ACU), converters, switch matrices, etc. (These units normal have their own Graphical User Interface (GUI), but also a well-defined interface (API)). Instead of handling these units as stand alone units, MEOS Control integrates them into one seamless system, with a common GUI and a common API for remote operations.
All units integrated into MEOS Control can be scheduled as one system, thus, being setup automatically prior to activities. MEOS Control supports both immediate and time-based scheduling. This implies that ACU, demodulators, switch matrices, etc. can be scheduled in one operation to handle the mission in question.
During operation, MEOS Control collects all available status information from the connected units. This status information can be provided in real-time through the MEOS Control’s external interface and through the embedded GUI, and summarized as post-pass quality reports.
Figure 5: MEOS Control Context
When combined with MEOS Connect, the Ground Station units become an integrated part of an overall Ground Station network
Ground Station Networking
MEOS Connect is a basic building block for implementing efficient Monitoring & Control infrastructures in distributed Ground Station environments
Masking the complexity and implementation of control systems is critical for providing interface flexibility and a consistent Monitoring and Control architecture. The individual system components must be accessible for commanding and component status retrieval, through a unified, well defined interface. In addition flexible mechanisms allowing efficient access to system configuration, historical status, events, alarms and scheduled activities are needed.
The primary mode of operation is to have MEOS Connect reside locally on each physical system node hosting the sub-systems. In this mode it is accessed directly from the central control system or operator MMI, with no intermediate links. This is suitable for ground station infrastructures having few physical nodes.
In system architectures with a larger number of nodes, centralized access to all subsystems may yield an un-necessarily complex architecture. MEOS Connect concept allows MEOS Connect instances to be inserted as intermediate links, creating a single access point to sets of nodes. E.g. one MEOS Connect box per acquisition site. The resulting monitoring and control hierarchy inherently allows virtually limitless system scalability and flexibility. The databases hosted by central nodes of the hierarchy are automatically populated and synchronised with those at lower levels.
Figure 6: MEOS Connect Overview Layout as Implemented for ESA ENVISAT GS
Contact
Kongsberg Spacetec AS
bq. Address: P.O.B. 6244, NO-9292 TROMSO, Norway
Phone: +47 77 66 08 00
E-mail: marketing@spacetec.no
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