Station on Gran Canaria

The ESA-built Maspalomas Medium-Earth Orbit Local User Terminal (MEOLUT) on Gran Canaria, the largest island of Spain’s Canary Islands, part of an extension of the international Cospas–Sarsat search and rescue programme into medium-altitude orbits, spearheaded by Galileo. Each site is equipped with four antennas to track four satellites. There are three sites in all, forming a triangle around Europe: Maspalomas, Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic and Larnaca in Cyprus. These three sites are monitored and controlled from the Search and Rescue Ground Segment Data Service Provider site, at Toulouse in France. The stations are networked to share raw data, effectively acting as a single huge 12-antenna station, achieving unprecedented detection time and localisation accuracy in relaying search and rescue signals to local authorities.