Mission Planning

The Coordination Desk Service is a key and critical element of the ESA Copernicus Space Component (CSC), that is one of the largest and most proficient Earth Observation infrastructures in the world. 

The CSC operations involve many operational services and multiple service providers, with numerous interfaces between them. Each service operates autonomously, but an additional layer is required to ensure coordination across the various services, build up a comprehensive End-to-End view of the overall operations performance, and reach the highest performance levels.

This is one of the key objectives of the Coordination Desk service,

which provides a continuous interactive and comprehensive view of the operational status, covering operations from the mission planning to the availability of user level data, in particular, all operations necessary to:

  • Define the satellite observations and downlink activities.
  • Provide the necessary information to the acquisition services for receiving the downlinked Sentinel data.
  • Provide the necessary auxiliary and ancillary data for the processing activities, from internal and external providers.
  • Process the satellite data stream as acquired by the acquisition services according to the nominal processing scenario for each mission.
  • Archive the Sentinel data according to the archiving scenario for each mission.
  • Make the user level data available to users.

Within the CSC Coordination Desk context, AliaSpace Systems oversees the E2E Operations Monitoring of Sentinel-1 Mission, that aims at analysing the mission’s operational data flows and the operations performance, identifying and targeting any deviation, providing ESA, Copernicus stakeholders and data users with an integrated and comprehensive view of the results through an interactive up to date operations dashboard interface; it aims at coordinate the configuration, anomaly, and maintenance management between Sentinel-1 Ground Segment Services.

Moreover the Sentinel-1 Mission Specialists are involved in supporting ESA with the preparation and review of key documentation and of the online user guides (SentiWiki) such as during the ground services validation and testing activities.

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