Copernicus´s Precise Orbit Determination service is declared to be operational

The Precise Orbit Determination (POD) service developed and operated by GMV for the Sentinel-1, -2 and -3 missions of the COPERNICUS program of the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) was officially declared to be operational on 7 October 2014, coinciding with the start of the operational life of the Sentinel-1A satellite, launched in April 2014.

The service operates routinely and continuously to the client’s entire satisfaction, using mission data on a 7x24 basis from GMV’s central site in Tres Cantos near Madrid. This service is capable of processing state-of-the-art satellite tracking techniques (including GPS and laser) and providing orbits at different levels of precision and response time, ranging from quasi real time solutions to offline solutions of higher, centimetric precision. This level of precision is needed for reconstructing the radar missions of the Sentinel- 1 mission. In 2015 this service will increase its capacity with the launch of the satellites Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-3A.

Precise Orbit Determination (POD) has traditionally been an area of expertise reserved for research institutes and space agencies. The reason for this is the detailed and complex modelling needed to achieve the required accuracies and state-of-the-art tracking techniques involved. Very few firms have yet developed the required expertise in this field, so GMV now boasts a clear industrial leadership in these activities.

GMV, notably, has been carrying out POD activities since the early nineties. The first steps involved support for ERS missions at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Since then GMV has provided uninterrupted expert support for ESA in this field for other missions, including estimation and propagation of the precise orbits and clocks of the GPS and GLONASS constellations at ESOC’s Navigation Facility. Other examples are the ENVISAT or GIOVE-A/B satellites, EUMETSAT’s Metop satellites, ESA’s SWARM mission and the Spanish PAZ Earth observation satellite.