![]() ![]() “We have four new cryogenically cooled ‘low-noise amplifiers’ in each station for receiving the signals from space.”īy cooling the ‘antenna feed’ to just 10 degrees above the lowest temperature possible in the Universe, increasing the amount of data that can be downlinked from spacecraft by up to 40%. And that’s just the start of the list," says Åge-Raymond Riise, Station Coordinator for Euclid. “Faster communication lines were installed between the control centre in Germany and the ground stations located in Spain and Argentina. First, Euclid will be ESA’s first science mission at the second Lagrange point to use the higher frequency ‘K-band’ (26 GHz), which enables a higher data rate. To make it possible to beam so much data in such a short time, two of ESA’s 35 m antennas had to be upgraded in various ways. If Euclid were to transmit data in the same way as ESA's Gaia mission, also orbiting at ‘L2’, it would hopelessly congest ground stations as it sends twice the amount of data. The first step was to make it possible to sustain a high data downlink rate of up to 75 megabits per second between Euclid and the Estrack ground stations to download all its data comfortably and efficiently within four hours. Upgrading deep space antennas Cebreros and Malargüe With Euclid’s shorter ‘passes’ – talk time – with ESA ground stations, this has required the Euclid ground segment to become especially efficient to enable such a large flow from Euclid to Earth and onwards to science teams. That’s roughly twice the daily data volume that space telescopes like James Webb and Gaia transmit from the same orbit at Lagrange point 2, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. This takes the image file size into the gigabytes and leads to the key challenge for the mission’s ground segment: getting up to 100 GB of big files downlinked every day during a limited, four-hour time window. The value of these images lies in their incredible preciseness and detail. Euclid’s instruments collect ultra-accurate images in order to identify faint distortions in the shape of very distant galaxies. In the case of Euclid, it is designed to create the largest, most accurate-ever 3D map of the Universe. “Through years of technological advancements, standardisation efforts and the operational adoption of innovative engineering solutions we have successfully tackled the challenges for the ground segment of this extraordinary mission,” says Mariella Spada, Head of Ground Systems Engineering and Innovation at ESA.Ĭreating a conduit for Euclid’s science dataĮvery science mission has its own unique constraints and requirements depending on what it hopes to achieve over its lifetime. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |