Objective(s):

Development of a Direct Access Terminal, for processing data from 3 SAR satellites (PAZ, TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X), operated as a constellation, and provide users quick & direct access to data with local ground stations.

Background and justification:

A Direct Access Terminal (DAT) enables to access large volumes of Earth Observation satellite data on site, directly from the satellite. Indra decided to develop a DAT, building on their long experience on ground stations, to be able to offer to customers a competitive product for near real time high resolution imaging applications, leveraging on the SAR constellation agreement between Hisdesat and Airbus. The main customers for DAT are the Governments or Institutions and Agencies with national dependencies which dealing to monitor frontiers, coasts, forest, agriculture, surface movements, volcanology, cartography, etc.

Achievements and status:

The project has been completed with the Final Review held in July 2018, having achieved all the objectives of the GSTP Element 2 "Make" contract. The DAT software development has been completed, and the system deployed on the prototype platform at Indra Sistemas premises has been successfully tested, completing all of the integration and validation campaigns foreseen by the project development and testing plans.

Meanwhile, the PAZ satellite has been successfully launched early 2018 completing SAR constellation.

Benefits:

The project has allowed Indra and Hisdesat to develop a competitive DAT offer, with a number of key advantages: high spatial resolution, very low latency for acquisition and processing, high revisit time.