Developed for the operational needs of the Copernicus program (formerly GMES), Sentinel-2 will deliver high-resolution optical images for land services, providing, for example, imagery of vegetation, soil and water cover, inland waterways and coastal areas, as well as information for emergency services.
Elecnor Deimos involvement started at the early phases of the mission, undertaking the mission analysis in the GMES Architecture study, has continued during the implementation phase and will extend with the support to its operations.
As a key activity, Deimos is providing support to the Sentinel-2 team at ESRIN, will a collocated team of up to three engineers working in the design and supervision of the PDGS contract.
Elecnor Deimos is responsible for the development of one of the most critical elements of the Ground Segment, the Mission-Planning System (S2MP). The S2MP is in charge of the Sentinel-2 mission plan generation for imagery acquisition, payload calibration and the associated on-board data management activities and subsequent data downlink activities to ground-stations and/or EDRS.
S2MP is designed to work with multiple operational scenarios in parallel, that can be changed to adapt to new user requests and manual acquisitions or new ground stations scenarios. It incorporates a highly configurable and powerful tool, the Plan Edition Tool (PlanET) which provides an advanced graphical visualization of planned tasks, as well as an improved representation of the on-board resources and the detected conflicts.
The company has also been prime contractor for the Mission Performance Assessment system (S2MPA). This facility is composed of two software components, the Quality Control and Calibration (QCC) and the End-to-End System Performance Monitoring (E2ESPM).
The S2MPA-QCC is responsible for quality control and calibration/validation, generating the entire payload on-board and on-ground processing calibration parameters as well as raising alerts for Sentinel-2 products quality defects and mission anomalies. The S2MPA-E2ESPM monitors the Sentinel-2 system operations, analyzing the main business process contributing to the overall Sentinel 2 end-to-end system performance.
It is also relevant to mention the involvement in the Sentinel-2 Mission Performance Centre (MPC) in which Elecnor Deimos will provide one operator during mission commissioning and operational phases, providing expert support in the mission calibration, processing and system monitoring.
In the development of these systems Elecnor Deimos has incorporated elements from the gs4EO suite of products, already in used operationaly in their own mission DEIMOS-2. In total, more than 15 engineers have been working in the last years from Elecnor Deimos to help this mission becoming a reality.