Tokyo – Infostellar announced today that it has achieved a critical customer milestone by downlinking X-Band SAR data in Canada and transferring that data in real time to a secure European payload processing center in Germany. The downlink service was enabled by Infostellar’s groundbreaking StellarStation software platform and was performed at the Happy Valley-Goose Bay (HVGB) Ground Station that is owned and operated by C-CORE of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
“This is a major milestone in our goal to reduce the cost of space operations by using spare antenna capacity for downlinks and employing innovative software services for data transfer,” said Tom Pirrone, Infostellar’s Chief Strategy Officer. Pirrone added, “By utilizing existing antenna capacity at C-CORE’s HVGB Ground Station, coupled with our unique StellarStation platform, we were able to demonstrate cost-effective services to our undisclosed European customer.”
By demonstrating this capability over the test campaign, Infostellar and C-CORE have now transitioned the ground station to the operational phase, which includes daily downlinks from a number of leading European SAR satellites. Using the StellarStation platform, the team routinely transferred the SAR files minutes after acquisition, faster than the required latency, to a secure European payload processing center in Germany.
“We are very happy to have achieved the milestone of near-real-time maritime monitoring working in collaboration with Infostellar. Our HVGB Ground Station is at a great location for monitoring Canada’s East Coast and Eastern Arctic, and has the technical capabilities needed for SAR and other remote sensing applications. We look forward to further our collaboration with Infostellar on this and other programs,” said Mr. Paul Adlakha, Managing Director of C-CORE’s LOOKNorth Centre.
“Now that we’ve formally commissioned the HVGB ground station for polar orbiting remote sensing satellites, we can scale this business by expanding these services to other locations,” Pirrone further stated, “Future Infostellar remote sensing sites include Northern Scandinavia, Asia, South America and Africa for starters.”
About Infostellar
Infostellar is a satellite ‘Ground Segment as a Service’ (GSaaS) provider. We provide flexible and scalable ground station services enabled by our cloud platform, ‘StellarStation’, which virtualizes ground station networks. By lowering the barriers to entry in the ground segment, Infostellar empowers “new space” businesses to build better missions and improve the quality of their service. Founded in 2016, Infostellar is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and has its European office in the UK.
For more information, visit https://www.infostellar.net
Logos and images can be found at https://infostellar.net/media-kit
About C-CORE
C-CORE is an innovative Canadian corporation that develops technology solutions (remote sensing, oceans, and energy) for complex challenges. The effort also includes the collaboration of LOOKNorth, a C-CORE Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research, dedicated to national remote sensing innovations that supports Canadian Northerners and small to medium enterprises in the remote sensing sector.
About StellarStation
StellarStation is a flexible, scalable, satellite ground station sharing platform. After a one-time setup, satellite operators can access any ground station across our global network. StellarStation also enables ground station owners to monetise their unused capacity by sharing it with satellite operators.
https://www.stellarstation.com/
Contact Name: Melissa Molseed, Communications + PR, pr@istellar.com
Janessa Hynes, Marketing, janessa.hynes@c-core.ca