GOCE, or the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, is part of ESA’s Living Planet programme. It will be the first of a series of Earth Explorer satellites in orbit, designed to provide information for understanding critical Earth system variables. Planning and construction of the GOCE spacecraft involved 45 European companies led by Thales Alenia Space.
The ESRIN telecommunications lab will be involved in the support of the GOCE event in several ways.
“We will perform uplink on the ESA capacity on Hellasat, of the complete ESRIN event from our laboratory,” explains Stefano Badessi , senior engineer at ESRIN. “In detail, we will receive an audio/video signal that shall be encoded, modulated and transmitted by us for external users to receive.”
ESRIN will act as back-up for the ESA-TV contributions and interviews from the launch site, and the lab’s fibre optic connectivity and related video converters will be used to relay the video signal from the Even Hall to the Magellan meeting room.
ESRIN, known as the ESA Centre for Earth Observation, is one of the five ESA specialised centres situated in Europe. Located in Frascati, a small town 20 km south of Rome in Italy, ESRIN was established in 1966 and first began acquiring data from environmental satellites in the 1970s. ESRIN’s telecom lab provides European industry and institutions with easier access to space telecom infrastructure.
The GOCE satellite has been at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome since the end of July 2008 undergoing preparation for launch. Activities have now turned to rolling-out the Upper Composite to the actual launch pad, which is about 5 km from the spacecraft preparation facilities, and integration with the rest of the launcher. The launcher is operated by Eurockot Launch Services, a joint venture between EADS Astrium and the Khrunichev Space Centre (Russia).
For more information regarding the GOCE and ESRIN's uplink capabilities, visit the links at the top right corner of this page.
