Geoscience Australia is planning the relocation of its Landsat ground station facility in Alice Springs.
The multi-year project will begin with a contractor identifying the new site and planning the build, according to a tender published yesterday.
Geoscience Australia said the relocation will serve two purposes: it will take the facility away from the threat of urban encroachment, and expand the real estate available for more antennas, “calibration/validation infrastructure and other Earth monitoring technologies”.
The current site in Heath Road, Kilgariff, is already within 2km of housing in Alice Springs.
The site currently hosts two X/S band 9 metre antennas for telemetry and uplink to Landsat, and two smaller X/S/L band antennas of 2.4 metres and 3 metres, as well as associated infrastructure.
“These assets acquire data from several Earth observing satellite missions and deliver that data to a wide range of Australian Government and industry programs, including mission critical activities such as Geoscience Australia’s bush fire monitoring system (Digital Earth Australia Hotspots), and other Earth observation applications”, the tender documents explain.
“The ground station is certified as one of three global Landsat Ground Network (LGN) stations in partnership with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and provides a critical Telemetry Tracking and Commanding (TT&C) role for the Sustainable Land Imaging program satellites - Landsat-8 and Landsat-9.
“It is also a contributing ground station to the ANGSTT (Australian National Ground Segment Technical Team) network.”
ANGSTT is operated by federal and state governments, and provides “increased infrastructure resilience, improved data reception capabilities and access to data received through the network.”
The first phase of the relocation will comprise two phases: identifying a preferred site, with stakeholder consultation and preliminary site design; and a detailed and costed site design, implementation plan, and decommissioning plan for the Alice Springs ground station.
