Following an open invitation to tender, the technology multinational GMV, European industrial company in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST), has been awarded a new contract by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), located in Darmstadt (Germany) for the provision of Operational Optical Data Services to support the flight dynamics operations of its fleet of Meteosat (MSG and MTG) satellites in GEO.
The main purpose of the service is the regular provision of high accuracy optical data and orbit determination solutions, fully integrated with the EUMETSAT operational environment, under stringent accuracy and timeliness requirements. This information will support the orbit determination, maneuver estimation and ground station calibration operations at EUMETSAT and complement schedule or contingency station outages. The nominal duration of the contract is 3 years with 2 optional yearly extensions.
The optical data will be provided by the Polish 6ROADS network of telescopes, which has already worked along with GMV in several ESA and CNES projects and contribute regularly with optical data to the EU SST system. 6ROADS counts on a global network of telescopes in Poland, Italy, Spain, Namibia, USA, Chile and Japan.
The data curation, orbit determination and maneuver estimation operations will be performed by GMV making use of its sstod software. This multipurpose and state-of-the-art software is operationally used in a large number of systems including the Spanish, Polish and Romanian Operations Centers contributing to the EU SST, the Spanish military SST Operations Center (COVE), the GMV’s Focusoc commercial operations center and the ArianeGroup’s GEOTracker system, among others.
With this new service, GMV strengthens its strong commitment with EUMETSAT, being one of its main providers of ground segment software infrastructure. This includes the flight dynamics systems for the Metop, Metop-SG, Sentinel-3, Sentinel-6 and MTG satellites.