GSA Plugin

Ground Station Analysis Tool

v9.4.3

30 day trial version
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The Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme, now known as Copernicus, provides accurate, timely and easily accessible information to improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure civil security.
It is headed by the European Commission (EC) in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Environment Agency (EEA).
To ensure this operational provision, the GMES Space Component (GSC), managed by ESA, comprises two types of satellite missions that respond to European policy priorities and users’ needs: ESA’s  families of dedicated Sentinels and missions from other space agencies, called Contributing Missions that provide valuable complementary observation capacity.
The Sentinel missions provide information for all domains for GMES, starting for example with the all-weather, day and night radar imaging from Sentinel-1 for land and ocean services and high-resolution optical imaging for land services of Sentinel-2 .

The GSA, or GMES Station Analysis Tool, is intended to allow simulation and analysis of GMES payload station scenarios, with the main goals of:

  • Assessing options for location of stations and user access points
  • Verify impacts of temporary resource unavailabilities (e.g. station, network, satellite downlink)
  • Modeling GMES missions
  • Assessing connectivity requirements between stations and user access points to guarantee minimum delivery times
  • Assessing statistically end-to-end delivery times as a function of the sensing location
  • Verify critical requirements (e.g. zero blind orbits, minimum contact time per orbit, etc)

It is intended that GSA will support ESA in the verification of GMES Ground Station alternative scenarios when deciding among competitive offers of Ground Station operators.