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Tromsø Satellite Station ( no, Tromsø Satellittstasjon, TSS), until 1988 known as Tromsø Telemetry Station ( no, Tromsø telemetristasjon), is a satellite earth station located in
Tromsø Tromsø (, , ; se, Romsa ; fkv, Tromssa; sv, Tromsö) is a municipality in Troms og Finnmark county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality is the city of Tromsø. Tromsø lies in Northern Norway. The municipality is the 21s ...
,
Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...
. The facility is owned by Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), a joint venture between the Kongsberg Group and the
Norwegian Space Centre The Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA) (formerly the Norwegian Space Centre (NSC); Norwegian'':'' ''Norsk Romsenter'') is a Norwegian government agency that follows up Norway's public space activities. NOSA's goal is to ensure that Norway benefits f ...
(NSC). In addition to hosting its own antennas serving thirty satellites, TSS acts as the center-point of KSAT's operations and provides backbone services for the high Arctic
Svalbard Satellite Station Svalbard Satellite Station ( no, Svalbard satellittstasjon) or SvalSat is a satellite ground station located on Platåberget near Longyearbyen in Svalbard, Norway. Opened in 1997, it is operated by Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), a jo ...
(SvalSat) and the Antarctic Troll Satellite Station (TrollSat). Originally proposed in 1965, the station was established by the
Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research The Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research ( no, Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Forskningsråd) or NTNF was the first of five research councils established in Norway. It existed from 1946 until the end of 1992, when the f ...
(NTNF) in 1967 in close cooperation with the
Norwegian Defence Research Establishment The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (''Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt'' – ''FFI'') is a research institute that conducts research and development on behalf of the Norwegian Armed Forces and provides expert advice to political and mi ...
(NDRE) and located adjacent to Tromsø Geophysical Observatory. From its inception until 1974, it served
low-Earth-orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never mor ...
(LEO) satellites operated by the
European Space Research Organization The European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) was an international organisation founded by 10 European nations with the intention of jointly pursuing scientific research in space. It was founded in 1964. As an organisation ESRO was based on a ...
(ESRO). To a lesser extent it was also used by
Canadian Space Agency The Canadian Space Agency (CSA; french: Agence spatiale canadienne, ASC) is the national space agency of Canada, established in 1990 by the ''Canadian Space Agency Act''. The president is Lisa Campbell, who took the position on September 3, 20 ...
and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding ...
(NASA) LEO satellites. Norway's non-membership in ESRO and later the
European Space Agency , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...
(ESA) caused Tromsø to not become a ground station for
Landsat The Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise for acquisition of satellite imagery of Earth. It is a joint NASA / USGS program. On 23 July 1972, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite was launched. This was eventually renamed to L ...
. A gradual increase in operations occurred from 1982, such as for the
International Cospas-Sarsat Programme The International Cospas-Sarsat Programme is a satellite-aided search and rescue (SAR) initiative. It is organized as a treaty-based, nonprofit, intergovernmental, humanitarian cooperative of 45 nations and agencies (see infobox). It is ded ...
and the
European Remote-Sensing Satellite European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS) was the European Space Agency's first Earth-observing satellite programme using a polar orbit. It consisted of 2 satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2. ERS-1 ERS-1 launched 17 July 1991 from Guiana Space Centr ...
. TSS became part of NSC in 1990, although it was partially sold to the
Swedish Space Corporation The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) provides space subsystems, space and satellite operations, rocket and balloon systems including experiment equipment, launch services, aerospace engineering services as well as airborne maritime surveillance s ...
(SSC) in 1995. SvalSat merged with TSS in 2002 to form KSAT.


History


Establishment and use by ESRO

The first proposals for a telemetry station in Tromsø were made in early 1964. The concept was to build a real-time telemetry station which would allow for simultaneous observations of the ionosphere from both satellites and
sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are used to ...
s. The idea was backed by Norway's Space Research Committee. Ideas for a real-time telemetry station also arose in ESRO and NTNF included the project in its five-year space program in 1965. Similar proposals were made in northern Sweden and a race started between Norwegian and Swedish interests to gain ESRO's support for a station. Norway had budgetary limitations prohibiting a full-scale station, and instead support was gained from the United States and Canada. The project was also backed by NDRE. The choice of Tromsø as a location for a telemetry stations was in part tied to the Tromsø Geophysical Observatory—which had been located in Tromsø since 1928—and the planned
University of Tromsø The University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway ( Norwegian: ''Universitetet i Tromsø – Norges arktiske universitet''; Northern Sami: ''Romssa universitehta – Norgga árktalaš universitehta'') is a state university in Norway a ...
.Tjelmeland: 374 The Canadian Space Agency was at the time working on the
Alouette 2 Alouette 2 was a Canadian research satellite launched at 04:48 UTC on November 29, 1965, by a Thor Agena rocket with Explorer 31 from the Western test range at Vandenberg AFB in California. It was (like its predecessor Alouette 1, and Expl ...
program and were seen by NDRE as a natural cooperation partner. The NASA's International Satellite for Ionospheric Studies was also being designed and NASA therefore decided to supply equipment for a telemetry station in Tromsø to be operational by August 1966.Rødberg: 17 Parallel to NDRE's work, NTNF was working with ESRO to gain support for a telemetry station. There was a degree of urgency as ESRO wanted the facility completed by 1967 in time for the launch of the spacecraft ESRO-2. NTNF and ESRO were also working on the establishment of
Kongsfjord Telemetry Station Kongsfjord Telemetry Station ( no, Kongsfjord telemetristasjon) was a satellite ground station located nearby Ny-Ålesund in Svalbard, Norway. It was used between 1967 and 1974 as one of the four initial ground stations which were part of the ...
in
Ny-Ålesund Ny-Ålesund ("New Ålesund") is a small town in Oscar II Land on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway. It is situated on the Brøgger peninsula (Brøggerhalvøya) and on the shore of the bay of Kongsfjorden. The company town is owned ...
. The agreement to build the station was approved by the
Parliament of Norway The Storting ( no, Stortinget ) (lit. the Great Thing) is the supreme legislature of Norway, established in 1814 by the Constitution of Norway. It is located in Oslo. The unicameral parliament has 169 members and is elected every four years bas ...
in mid 1966. Part of the reason for the Norwegian support was the opportunity of training Norwegians in
pulse-code modulation Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the a ...
and digital computing. For NDRE the station was a chance to apply its latest
minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...
, the
Simulation for Automatic Machinery Simulation for Automatic Machinery or SAM were two unique minicomputers built by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (NDRE) in the mid-1960s. SAM 1, built between 1962 and 1964, was the first Norwegian-built programmable computer. It featur ...
(SAM). A major planning issue was the need for a minicomputer at the station. NDRE argued that it was fully capable of delivering such a system, but NTNF instead wanted to minimize risk by buying the
PDP-8 The PDP-8 is a 12-bit minicomputer that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the first commercially successful minicomputer, with over 50,000 units being sold over the model's lifetime. Its basic design follows the pioneeri ...
from
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...
in the United States. However, NDRE was awarded the contract, in part because of NTNF's obligation to support Norwegian technology and in part because NDRE agreed to purchase a suitable foreign computer if they could not successfully manufacture one themselves. A new minicomputer, SAM-2, was built at NDRE and completed in April 1967. It was the first computer built in Europe and among the first three in the world which used integrated circuits. SAM-2 was so successful that the developers established Norsk Data to commercialize the technology. The contract with ESRO resulted in TSS providing telemetry for ESRO-IA, ESRO-IB, ESRO-2B, HEOS-1, HEOS-2, TD-1A and ESRO-4, all of which had low Earth orbits.Rødberg: 33 The two telemetry stations used a large portion of the Norwegian space budget, but became platforms which allowed for development of technology. Tromsø Satellite Station worked well in tandem with
Andøya Rocket Range Andøya is the northernmost island in the Vesterålen archipelago, situated about inside the Arctic circle. Andøya is located in Andøy Municipality in Nordland county, Norway. The main population centres on the island include the villages o ...
and became an international center for study of the
auroral An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...
zone. The University of Tromsø was established in 1968 and started teaching in 1972. The same year, it took over the geophysical observatory and cosmic geophysics became one of the university's fields of excellence. The original contract with ESRO lasted until 1 July 1974, when their low-Earth-orbit program terminated. NTNF proposed closing Tromsø Telemetry Station as the remaining customers did not provide sufficient revenue to keep operations viable. Norway also declined to join the
European Space Agency , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...
(ESA), which resulted in little hope in ESA choosing to cooperate with a Norwegian earth station. NTNF also looked into outright selling the station to ESA, but the offer was turned down. Kongsfjord Telemetry Station was closed in 1974.


Commercialization

In 1973 NTNF started planning to use the station for downloading from NASA's
Landsat program The Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise for acquisition of satellite imagery of Earth. It is a joint NASA / USGS program. On 23 July 1972, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite was launched. This was eventually renamed to La ...
. Sufficient funding from the government was secured in mid 1976, after a successful lobby operation which emphasized the possibility of environmental observation in Norway's
territorial waters The term territorial waters is sometimes used informally to refer to any area of water over which a sovereign state has jurisdiction, including internal waters, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, and potenti ...
. 7.5 million
Norwegian krone The krone (, abbreviation: kr (also NKr for distinction); code: NOK), plural ''kroner'', is currency of the Kingdom of Norway (including Svalbard). Traditionally known as the Norwegian crown in English. It is nominally subdivided into 100 ' ...
(NOK) was granted for upgrades in 1977. Norway entered negotiations with the US, but soon ESA and NASA started discussions regarding two European telemetry stations for Landsat to serve all ESA members. ESA and Sweden pushed for
Kiruna (; se, Giron ; fi, Kiiruna ) is the northernmost city in Sweden, situated in the province of Lapland. It had 17,002 inhabitants in 2016 and is the seat of Kiruna Municipality (population: 23,167 in 2016) in Norrbotten County. The city was ori ...
, Sweden, to be the location of ESA's northern telemetry station and Tromsø was discarded because of Norway's decision to not join ESA.Rødberg: 34 Norway expanded its exclusive economic zone to in 1977, increasing the country's land and sea area by more than one million square kilometers (400,000 sq mi). Because of the reserves of fish and oil it became imperative for the Norwegian government to conduct surveillance. NTNF therefore commenced work to establish an earth station for NASA's Seasat, which was approved by Parliament in early 1977. A processing computer was developed as a cooperation between the
Norwegian Institute of Technology The Norwegian Institute of Technology (Norwegian: ''Norges tekniske høgskole'', NTH) was a science institute in Trondheim, Norway. It was established in 1910, and existed as an independent technical university for 58 years, after which it was m ...
, NDRE, NTNF and Norsk Data, which was tailored to analyze Seasat's
synthetic aperture radar Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) is a form of radar that is used to create two-dimensional images or three-dimensional reconstructions of objects, such as landscapes. SAR uses the motion of the radar antenna over a target region to provide fine ...
(SAR) and named Computer of Experimental SAR. Seasat A failed after 104 days and Tromsø had by that time been used for telemetry for two minutes.Rødberg: 35 TSS did not become operational again until 1982, when the
International Cospas-Sarsat Programme The International Cospas-Sarsat Programme is a satellite-aided search and rescue (SAR) initiative. It is organized as a treaty-based, nonprofit, intergovernmental, humanitarian cooperative of 45 nations and agencies (see infobox). It is ded ...
made use of the station. The Ministry of Trade and Industry took a renewed interest in the satellite station in the early 1980s and proposed in 1982 that Norway join ESA's
European Remote-Sensing Satellite European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS) was the European Space Agency's first Earth-observing satellite programme using a polar orbit. It consisted of 2 satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2. ERS-1 ERS-1 launched 17 July 1991 from Guiana Space Centr ...
(ERS) program.Rødberg: 38 This started the process of Norway becoming a full member of ESA in 1987. The telemetry station received investments of NOK 100 million during the 1980s and was organized as a foundation in 1984.Rødberg: 48 It took the name Tromsø Satellite Station in 1988. Part of the goal of the project was to create technical
spin-offs Spin-off may refer to: *Spin-off (media), a media work derived from an existing work *Corporate spin-off, a type of corporate action that forms a new company or entity * Government spin-off, civilian goods which are the result of military or gov ...
; the one successful company was Spacetec, which had 45 employees at the time it was bought by
Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace is one of three business units of Kongsberg Gruppen (KONGSBERG) of Norway and the supplier of defence and space related systems and products, mainly anti-ship missiles, military communications, and command and weapon ...
in 1994. By then it had become a global manufacturer of Earth observation ground stations.Rødberg: 51 The Norwegian Space Centre was established as a foundation on 5 July 1987, under the protection of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. It immediately took over Andøya Rocket Range and TSS followed suit in 1990. TSS was upgraded in 1991 to be able to operate with ERS-1. In 1995 NRS established a subsidiary, Norwegian Space Centre Property, to own the facilities in Tromsø and Longyearbyen. The same year, TSS was converted to a limited company, of which half was sold to the
Swedish Space Corporation The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) provides space subsystems, space and satellite operations, rocket and balloon systems including experiment equipment, launch services, aerospace engineering services as well as airborne maritime surveillance s ...
(SSC). The aim was that TSS would operate as a fully commercial enterprise. Its first major contract was with the Canadian Radarsat. After Rolf Skår was appointed director of NSC, plans were launched to try to win the ground station contract for NASA's planned Earth Observing System (EOS). NASA was considering locating the ground station in
Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is ...
, at
McMurdo Station McMurdo Station is a United States Antarctic research station on the south tip of Ross Island, which is in the New Zealand-claimed Ross Dependency on the shore of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. It is operated by the United States through the Un ...
in Antarctica or at
Esrange Esrange Space Center (short form Esrange) is a rocket range and research centre located about 40 kilometers east of the town of Kiruna in northern Sweden. It is a base for scientific research with high-altitude balloons, investigation of the ...
in Sweden. Skår invited a NASA delegation to visit Svalbard, and from 1996 NSC and NASA started negotiating a contract to establish a ground station at Longyearbyen. The first satellite to use SvalSat was
Landsat 7 Landsat 7 is the seventh satellite of the Landsat program. Launched on 15 April 1999, Landsat 7's primary goal is to refresh the global archive of satellite photos, providing up-to-date and cloud-free images. The Landsat program is managed and ...
, which was launched on 15 April 1999. NSC bought SSC's ownership in TSS and Lockheed Martin's ownership in SvalSat in 2001. On 1 February 2002, NSC and Kongsberg Spacetec merged their interests in satellite technology and operations into Kongsberg Satellite Station, which became the sole owner of both SvalSat and TSS. Legally, Kongsberg Satellite Services is a continuation of the operating company of TSS. KSAT opened Troll Satellite Station in 2007.


Operations

TSS is owned and operated by Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), which is again equally owned by Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace and the Norwegian Space Centre, the latter which is an agency of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. KSAT is not tied to a particular operator of satellites and the antennas communicate with multiple satellites, thus reducing costs compared to dedicated ground stations. For a typical satellite, data is delivered to the end customer no more than thirty minutes after downloading. The site is only able to communicate with LEO satellites in ten of their fourteen orbits, unlike SvalSat and TrollSat which can communicate in all orbits. All three stations are interconnected and communicate with the Tromsø Network Operations Center, which is part of the TSS complex. This allows for redundancy as TSS, SvalSat and TrollSat can be used to communicate with all satellites connected to the system. The operation center is responsible for backup,
scheduling A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things are i ...
and conflict resolution, in addition to network planning, customer support and ground station control. The facilities use
interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...
and shared ground services, such as a common protocol for communication and similar design of the antennas, to increase flexibility and reduce costs and risk. The antennas at TSS serve more than thirty missions and contain both a multi-frequency uplink and L, S and X band downlink. In addition there are customer-owned reception, telemetry, tracking and control systems. TSS acts as a local user terminal for the Cospas-Sarsat system used for
search and rescue Search and rescue (SAR) is the search for and provision of aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger. The general field of search and rescue includes many specialty sub-fields, typically determined by the type of terrain the search ...
. By using a combination of SvalSat and TrollSat, customers can download data twice per orbit, twenty-six times per day, with only a forty-minute maximum delay. These are the only two ground stations able to communicate with all orbits of LEO satellites. Tromsø is connected to SvalSat via the
Svalbard Undersea Cable System The Svalbard Undersea Cable System is a twin submarine communications cable which connects Svalbard to the mainland of Norway. The two optical fiber cable consist of two segments, from Harstad to Breivika in Andøy, and from Breivika to Hotell ...
.


References

;Bibliography * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Tromso Satellite Station Education and research in Tromsø Buildings and structures in Tromsø Earth stations in Norway Kongsberg Gruppen Norwegian Space Centre 1967 establishments in Norway