Thales Alenia Space has been chosen by EUMETSAT, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, to provide a key subassembly in the ground segment for the Eumetsat Polar System – Second Generation (EPS-SG), comprising data acquisition, processing and product generation for the polar-orbit meteorological satellites Metop SG-A et Metop SG-B.
Airbus Defense and Space's MetOp-SG
This part of the ground segment that covers data acquisition, processing and product generation, is called PDAP (Payload Data Acquisition and Processing). The development contract was approved during the latest EUMETSAT council meeting on December 6 and 7.
The PDAP mainly comprises a new-generation data processing center, and will be capable of extracting both geophysical and environmental products in virtually real-time. It will be mainly deployed in Darmstadt, Germany, and will include about 20 production lines. It will also include two ground acquisition stations, for Ka-band in Svalbard (Norway), and for X-band in the Azores, along with ground transponders in Turkey, used to calibrate the scatterometer instrument SCA.
The proposal for this contract was led by Thales Alenia Space at the head of an European consortium and in partnership with the critical information systems and cybersecurity teams from Thales, who will supply the data processing infrastructure and contribute to the development of part of the production lines. Thales Alenia Space Germany will participate in on-site validation operations.
“This contract, along with the contract already won by Thales Alenia Space for the data processing center in the Meteosat Third Generation program, reflects EUMETSAT’s renewed confidence in our ground segments for meteorological systems, which will continue over future generations,” said Hervé Hamy, head of Observation and Science at Thales Alenia Space. “Our comprehensive expertise in image processing, amply demonstrated in the first-generation Metop, Envisat, MSG and Puma programs, as well as through optical recognition systems, will now beapplied to the ambitious Metop-SG program, for the greater benefit of meteorology in Europe."
