THE NEW ESA TT&C GROUND STATIONS

Abstract

The European Space Agency is used to refer to its telemetry, telecommand and tracking stations as ground stations because they do not cover only TT&C as used in the world of telecommunication satellites. At present ESA is erecting a new generation of ground stations. They are not on newly opened sites. Partly they are self-contained stations and partly they are major replacements and upgradings of subsystems of existing stations. The design of all of these stations follows a common modular concept by breaking it down into subsystems which correspond to the functional tasks a station has to perform. The organisation of this paper is as follows : Section 2 describes the task of the ground station, Section 3 is concerned with its system breakdown, Section 4 outlines those modules which are common to all new ground stations, Section 5 lists briefly the sites and the stations found there and Section 6 tries to provide an outlook on the forthcoming development.