Ingenio, also known as SEOSAT (an acronym for Spanish Earth Observation Satellite), is the second mission of the Spanish National Satellite Earth Observation Programme (PNOTS https://pnt.ign.es/). The first one, PAZ, carries a synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is mainly dedicated to defence and was launched in February 2018.
Ingenio is an optical high-resolution imaging mission devoted to providing multispectral land optical images to different Spanish civil, institutional and government users, and potentially to other European users in the framework of Copernicus (formerly GMES, Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) and GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems). The satellite is planned to be launched in November 2020.
The overall mission objective is to provide information for applications in cartography, land use, urban management, water management, environmental monitoring, risk management and security.
With an image capacity of 2.5 million km2 per day and a resolution of 2.5 m in panchromatic and 10 m in multispectral, the satellite will be able to take up to 600 images a day. The combination of high resolution and high radiometric quality with four spectral bands will open up new possibilities for applications related to ground coverage and biophysical parameters’ retrieval.
The industrial team comprises a consortium of Spanish and other European industries. Elecnor Deimos has provided a significant contribution along the mission definition and implementation, focused on ground segment activities devoted to the exploitation of the on-board instrument data received in Earth.
In particular Elecnor Deimos has taken up the following responsibilities:
- Definition and preliminary design for the complete ground segment (phase A/B1)
- Design, development and validation of critical components for the ground segment, including mission archive and catalogue, the tool suite for calibrating, validating, and systematic quality control of the products, and the monitoring tool for operating the Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS)
- Design, development and validation of the operational L0 and L1 processors that process Ingenio’s raw telemetry data up to level 1c, providing high resolution multispectral optical images to meet demanding requirements in terms of processing time, making sure emergency images are supplied within 3 h of their acquisition.
- Support for the integration and validation (AIV) of the PDGS system
Deimos involvement in Ingenio over the last 12 years, with more that 30 staff participating along the project, has taken advantage of the significant background and experience acquired both in ESA projects and in Deimos-promoted missions. The Ingenio activities in turn have fostered Deimos access to international markets, where the company is recognized as a reliable and experience ground segment provider, meeting the objectives set by the Spanish Government when approving the programme.
Images Copyrights: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique Video du CSG – S. MARTIN; ESA – P. Carril
