A Mars Odyssey

“The support began as planned and without any problems. We were confident it would work given the extensive preparations and intensive testing we did in close cooperation with the Chinese,” said Erik Soerensen, Head of the System Requirements and Validation Section at ESOC.

On the morning of November 1, 2007, the mission controls in China reported that the Maspalomas station host which is located on the campus of the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aerospacial (INTA) in the southern part of the Canary Islands’ Gran Canaria, at Montaña Blanca, has transmitted telecommands to a Chinese satellite involving the Change’e-1 Moon mission. A major and successful milestone, the communication relay is the first time telecommands to a Chinese spacecraft have been successfully transmitted by a ESA station.

According to ESA, the first receipt of the telemetry signals was from the Chinese mission at ESA’s 35m deep-space station at New Norcia, Australia. Two hours and 39 minutes later, via ESA’s 15m station in Maspalomas, Spain, the first telecommands were transmitted when the satellite was approximately 200 000 km from the Maspalomas station. An hour later, the Kourou, French Guiana station successfully received Chang’e-1’s telemetry and transmitted commands. Now how is that for teamwork? Maspalomas, in addition to its 15m antenna, provides tacking, telemetry, telecommands, tacking, and radiometric measurements—such as ranging, Doppler, and meteo.

The high-tech Maspalomas station has a frequency and timing system, combined with a monitoring and control system, with a communication system that is enabled by the ESA Operations Network (OPSNET), a site that is equipped with a no-break power plant. Presently, it is being planned to upgrade the site for advanced X-band transmission and receive future capability.

With quite a history, Maspalomas was originally built for NASA’s Mercury program; supported Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, and Skylab from 1960-1975; routinely supports ESA’s Cluster-II; provided support to Kompsat-2 and MetOp-2 in 2006; supports missions for ESA via ESOC and EUMETSAT (European Organizations for the Exploration of Meteorological Satellites), JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency), and COSPAS-SARSAT (International Satellite System for Search and Rescue); and was used during ESA’s SMART-1 Moon mission and for Japan’s ETS-7 rendezvous mission.

TIME-LINE SUCCESS from ESA:
November 1, 2007, engineers working in ESOC’s ESTRACK Control Center reported the following series of events (times in CET = UTC+1):

04:35 ESA’s 35m New Norcia station successfully acquired Chang’e-1 telemetry
05:15 Beijing Aerospace Control Center (BACC) successfully connected to New Norcia via ESOC
05:15 BACC reported receipt of good telemetry

Marks the first time that an ESA station has received, processed and routed telemetry signals to a Chinese control center:
05:44 ESA’s Maspalomas station successfully acquired Chang’e-1 telemetry signals
06:50 BACC successfully connected to Maspalomas and reported good telemetry
07:04 Maspalomas successfully established the up-link to Chang’e-1 and BACC reported on-board lock
07:14 Telecommands from BACC successfully transmitted from Maspalomas
07:15 BACC reported telecommands successfully received by Chang’e-1

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 2:57 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.