Data flow
ESA’s FLEX satellite flies in a polar, Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 814 km. It takes 100 minutes to complete one orbit around Earth and 27 days to cover the globe.
ESA’s European Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Germany operates the FLEX satellite via the ground station in Kiruna, Sweden.
Since FLEX flies 100 km ahead of a Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite, ESA and Eumetsat will work together to assure this tandem configuration.
The scientific data are downlinked from the satellite to the ground station in Svalbard, Norway.
Thanks to the ground station’s northerly position, the satellite’s polar orbit takes it within view of the ground station in the vast majority of its orbits so that data can be downlinked directly.
Once the data have been received in Svalbard they are sent to a dedicated processing facility and to ESA’s centre of Earth observation, ESRIN, in Frascati, Italy.
ESRIN is responsible for making the data available to users.
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