At the forefront of the Space Industry
INTA, a subsidiary body of the Ministry of Defence, has put its trust in Indra technology for PAZ, a dual use mission (military and civil) forming part of the National Earth Observation Programme (PNOT), which has been promoted by the Ministries of Defence and of Industry, Trade and Tourism. Its functions include surveillance, high resolution cartography, border control, tactical support for foreign missions, salvage missions, crisis and risk management, natural disaster assessment, environmental monitoring and surveillance, and monitoring piracy at sea. It will be able to cover an area of more than 300,000 square kilometres of the planet's surface every day, and send a hundred images a day with a spatial resolution of a square metre.
Indra will be responsible for integrating all the systems managed from Earth in what will be the largest and most complex satellite built in Spain. This project will also improve the company's position for leading future initiatives of similar characteristics in Europe or other continents.
The ground segment will be responsible for controlling the satellite and the radar sensor carried by Paz, and for generating, validating, calibrating, storing and publishing its images. Indra will integrate all the systems that will be located in the facilities of the National Technical Aerospace Institute (INTA) in Torrejón (Madrid) and Maspalomas (Gran Canaria), and in the Defence Database of the Aerospace Observation Systems Centre (CESAEROB), in the Torrejón air base.
The company will also be responsible for all management activities, systems engineering, and validating and checking the ground segment to ensure the success of the mission. Indra will provide the necessary training to familiarise the operators with the technology.
The nerve centre of the mission
The Data Processing Centre will be responsible for generating the products, the radar images requested by clients, whether military or civilian. These images will be created based on data captured by the SAR sensor carried on the Paz satellite. The technology developed by Indra will enable the management of user requests; the monitoring of the entire process; and the reception of the radar telemetry and the exact data for processing. Finally, the system will check that the products reach the established levels of quality, precision and features, and they will be made available through a user interface. As well as this system, a set of transversal subsystems must be developed, which will provide services to all the elements of the ground segment.
Indra has carried out flagship projects for the space sector, such as implementing the Spanish User Segment of the programmes of the Helios I and II satellites, the SMOS satellite or the Pleiades constellation of satellites. The company is also responsible for implementing the SMOS advanced processing centre for high level data generation and the image exploitation centre (SIGESTREDI) for military operations, among other important references.