National and international satellite missions such as the European Earth observation programs like Copernicus or the Sentinel satellites provide observational data on the state of the Earth's ecosystem. In addition,…
The ACES project will bring a new generation of very precise atomic clock into the microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS). The ACES payload will be mounted at…
The European Space Agency (ESA) runs several scientific exploration and research deep space missions e.g. Rosetta, Mars-Express, Venus-Express or space observatories like Herschel or Planck. To ensure a reliable communication with such deep space probes, ESA has built up a ground station antenna network all over the globe.
In 2009 the reduction of utilization of the ESTRACK 15m stations has been addressed and ESA decided to relocate the core X-band launch and early orbit phase (LEOP) functionality from…
The first payloads launched in 2016 and 2019 for the European Data Relay System (EDRS) system are the Sentinel-1 and -2 satellites of the Copernicus Program also known under Global…
The Alphasat I-XL, launched in 2013, included beyond its main task several ESA TDPs (Technology Demonstration Payloads). TDP5 includes a Q-/V Band communications experiment to assess the feasibility of these bands for future commercial applications.
In order to bundle the many different TV channel signals to a limited amount of antennas, high performance Tx switching and combining systems are required to guarantee a continuous operation.…
The Galileo Project is Europe's initiative for a state-of-the-art global satellite navigation system, providing a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. The fully deployed system will consist of 30 satellites and the associated ground infrastructure.
After the successful completion of the XAA project in 2009. MIRAD has been requested again by EADS Asrteium (now Airbus Defence & Space) for the procurement of a X-band Antenna…
In the early 2000s, more and more satellite missions were planned to collect large amounts of data or to enable broadband communications. At that time, however, only few ground stations…