Data flow
ESA’s Aeolus wind satellite was in a polar, Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 320 km. It took 90 minutes to complete one orbit around Earth and seven days to cover the globe.
ESA’s European Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Germany operated the Aeolus satellite via the ground station in Kiruna, Sweden.
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The scientific data, however, were downlinked from the satellite to the ground station in Svalbard, Norway.
Thanks to the ground station’s northerly position, the satellite’s polar orbit took it within view of the ground station in the vast majority of its orbits so that data can be downlinked directly.
Once the data had been received in Svalbard they were sent to Tromsø for processing. From Tromsø, the data were then sent for further processing to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and to ESA’s centre of Earth observation, ESRIN, in Frascati, Italy.
ESRIN is responsible for making the data available to users.
