Team: Ground Stations

National Ground Station System
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The ground station in Neustrelitz (designated NSG) is located north of Berlin at 53° 19.779’ N, 13° 4.247’ O, which is an ideal location for achieving maximal coverage of Europe. Before German unification it was an important receiving station in the Eastern European INTERKOSMOS programme and it has been a part of DFD since 1992.

The station is designed to receive both remote sensing and science data and to provide a TT&C service in collaboration with the German Space Operations Center (GSOC). Another partner is the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (Boulder, Colorado, USA) for the ACE/DISCVR mission. The system is highly autonomous with defined interfaces to national and international partners, including USGS. There are also direct interfaces to the data processing systems of internal and external partners.

The reception system has the following characteristics:

Operating concept
  • Operational multimission system
  • Single-operator support as needed
  • Reconfigurable system based on radio frequency and data matrices
  • NRT data provision in bit stream, VVCDU, ISP and L0 formats
Supported missions
GRACE-1/2, TET-1, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, Landsat-8, IRS-P5, TERRA, AQUA, Resourcesat-2, ACE, intended: DISCVR, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, EnMAP
Antennas
  • GSC-X1 (7.3 m, L/S-band downlink, X-band downlink)
  • GSC-X2 (7.3 m, S-band downlink, X-band downlink, S-band uplink)
  • GSC-X3 (7.3 m, S-band downlink, X-band downlink, S-band uplink)
  • VT-63 (6.3 m, S-band downlink)
  • GSC-L1 (4.0 m, S-band downlink)
G/T
  • 13.5 dB/K (L band), 17.0 dB/K (S band) , 31.5 dB/K (X band)
Demodulators
  • ZDS Cortex CRT&HDR, Alcatel Omnisat
Recording and processing systems
  • MDA direct archive systems (X band)
  • Supervised front end processor systems (S band, X band)
Infrastructure
  • Distributed monitoring and control system
  • Redundant time reference system (GPS receiver, IRIG-A/B, ntp)
  • High availability cluster system for planning and accessing services
  • KVM matrix and direct rack cooling system

 
The team’s responsibilities include the following tasks related to the receiving system:

  • Systems engineering, integration, tests, and development (SW+HW)
  • Development and/or integration of ground station components
  • Developing and maintaining a monitoring and control as well as a station planning system
  • Developing and maintaining telemetry/data recording and preprocessing systems
  • Supporting radio frequency compatibility tests for the payload realm
  • Operational readiness, systems administration and operations support (analyses)

In the framework of national and international projects the team supports corresponding processes in project teams and review boards.
 

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