Ground Station Control Software

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center operates a ground station for remote sensing satellites and for small scientific satellites at Neustrelitz. This site allows the receiving of real-time data from all over Europe. Actually the ground station serves satellites from ESA, NASA, India, and Germany. The DFD engineers develop a set of software components, which integrates the multi-mission subsystems and specific equipment from the supplier of each customer. The paper describes the functionality and the design of the ground station control system. The overview over the utilized ground station equipment gives an impression over the complexity of today's ground stations. The software system covers the common required ground procedures like planning, monitoring&control, as well as technical and operational reporting. Furthermore the integrated system supports modern standard to interact with mission control centers, user entities and processing systems for higher level earth observation products.