Operational Optical Data Services for Meteosat Satellites
Following an open invitation to tender, the technology multinational GMV, European industrial leader in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST), has been awarded a new contract by the European Organisation 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, manoeuvre 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 manoeuvre estimation operations will be performed by GMV making use of its sstod software. This highly performant, multipurpose and state-of-the-art software is operationally used in a large number of systems including the Spanish, Polish and Romanian Operations Centres contributing to the EU SST, the Spanish military SST Operations Centre (COVE), the GMV’s Focusoc commercial operations centre 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. This new contract also reinforces the position of GMV as the most relevant provider of Flight Dynamics technology and the main industrial player in the Space Surveillance and Tracking in Europe.
GMV is a privately owned technology business group founded in 1984 and trading on a worldwide scale in the following sectors: Aerospace, Defense and Security, Cybersecurity, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Automotive, Healthcare, Telecommunications and IT for government authorities and major corporations. In 2020, it had revenues of nearly 260 million euros. Working with a staff of over 2,500, the company now runs subsidiaries in Spain, USA, Germany, France, Poland, Portugal, Romania, UK, The Netherlands, Belgium, Malaysia and Colombia. Seventy five percent of its turnover comes from international projects on all five continents. The company’s growth strategy is based on continuous innovation and it plows back 10% of its turnover into inhouse R&D. GMV has reached CMMI level 5, the world’s most prestigious model in terms of enhancing an organization’s process capability, and it has numerous international patents. Currently, GMV is the world’s number-one independent supplier of ground control systems for commercial telecommunications satellite operators and the European leader in the ground segment of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (EGNOS and Galileo). It is also the primary provider of C41 command and control systems for the Spanish Army and the leading national provider of telematic systems for public transport. For over 15 years now it has also been a tried-and-trusted provider of telematics software, services and systems in the automotive sector. In the ICT sector it has become a national benchmark as a provider of advanced cybersecurity solutions and services for IP networks, ICT applications and mobility applications for governments and the development of e-Administration.
