DLR welcomes satellite ground station experts from all over the world to Rostock
October 7, 2022
DLR welcomes satellite ground station experts from all over the world to Rostock
The German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) in Neustrelitz was host to the 31st Landsat Technical Working Group Meeting that took place in Rostock from October 3-7, 2022. The Neustrelitz ground station is a component of the international ground station network of the U.S. Landsat earth observation programme. The first Landsat satellite was launched 50 years ago.
Thirty-eight experts from the USA, Australia, India, Italy, Korea, Norway, So Africa and Germany shared information on the current status of the Landsat-8 and Landsat-9 missions. All the participating countries gave reports about their own earth observation research activities and described their current and planned national earth observation missions. DLR in Neustrelitz is a partner in many international cooperative agreements and currently assists in the reception of data from 20 satellite earth observation missions.
The programme also included a visit to the DLR antenna site in the Mecklenburg Lake District. The ground station experts could inform themselves about the modern infrastructure and view the antenna system that had recently been officially opened there. With this investment DLR has prepared itself for future missions in order to reliably acquire a data volume from future satellites that in some cases amounts to a ten-fold increase. DLR engineers and representatives of the VERTEX antenna company answered numerous questions posed by the interested international specialists.
Prior to this, colleagues from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and EOC had met for a three-day workshop in Oberpfaffenhofen. The aim of the talks from 28-30 September was to deepen the cooperation on many topics. USGS is already represented in the Science Advisory Group of EnMAP and supports the validation activities of EnMAP. The common interest in hyperspectral earth observation was therefore a focal point of the discussions. DFD projects in which Landsat data is used, such as the World Settlement Footprint (WSF), were also presented. An exchange of experiences with the respective big data platforms, as well as a visit to the DLR terrabyte platform at the Leibniz Computing Centre in Garching, rounded off the range of topics.
