After 10 years of service, Envisat has stopped sending data to Earth. ESA’s mission control is working to re-establish contact with the satellite.

Although this landmark mission has been in orbit twice as long as it was designed for, ESA hopes to keep the satellite in service until the launch of the successor Sentinel missions.

The first sign that there was a problem came on 8 April when contact with the satellite was unexpectedly lost, preventing the reception of any data as it passed over the Kiruna ground station in Sweden.

ESA’s mission control team declared a spacecraft emergency and immediately called for support from additional ESA tracking stations around the world. A team of operations and flight dynamics specialists and engineers was quickly assembled.

In a concerted effort, the recovery team, which included experts from industry, spent the next days trying to re-establish communications with the satellite.

While it is known that Envisat remains in a stable orbit around Earth, efforts to resume contact with the satellite have, so far, not been successful.

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As a result of an online vote, the first winner of the GMES Masters competition goes to Chelys for their Satellite Rapid Response System. They were voted Best Service Challenge.
The GMES Masters competition called for new ideas and services for the best use of Earth observation data from Europe’s Global Monitoring and Security programme.

The competition, which closed on 15 September, aimed to encourage students, researchers and entrepreneurs, new companies and small to medium enterprises to develop new applications for data from the GMES initiative.
More than 100 ideas were submitted and the winners will be announced following an awards ceremony on 19 October.

In the meantime, the Italian company Chelys has been voted the winner for the Best Service Challenge for their Satellite Rapid Response System.
This part of the competition invited service providers to upload profiles of their existing services to the GMES Masters competition website. Visitors to the website then had the opportunity to vote for the service they found most beneficial to European citizens
Submitted by Luca Mellano from Chelys, the award-winning Satellite Rapid Response System performs real-time processing of satellite data from ESA and NASA missions, making these data available only two minutes after acquisition.

Source: ESA GMES

From 2011 onwards the GMES Masters will reward on an annual basis the best projects and business ideas for a GMES commercial service, with the aim to support the development of GMES related entrepreneurship in Europe.
Initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Bavarian Ministry of Economy, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and T-Systems, the GMES Masters 2011 calls for proposals between 1 July and 15 September 2011 in five categories.

SRRS is participating in the GMES Masters Competition in the Best Service Challenge. If you consider this type of service useful, if you like it, if you would like to continue using it with new data that will be made available by GMES, then vote for the service at the following link:
www.gmes-masters.com

ESA has signed the Miravi upgrade contract. The new version, installed 28 February 2011, now includes support for processing ASAR Level1 products as well as a renewed MERIS Level0 processor, which has improved geolocation accuracy that reaches sub-pixel resolution.

The Miravi web interface has also been redesigned, and now offers support for the Google Earth browser plugin. The performance is still first rate: between 4 and 20 seconds for generating an ASAR image.

Miravi can be accessed through the following link miravi.eo.esa.int

Processing at every level is completely data-driven. No external intervention is necessary to manage the system.

The SRRS catalogue takes advantage of the most advanced web technology for visualization and user interaction. The interface adapts to the capabilities of the client through three levels of visualization: from the use of the Google Earth browser plug-in, to the static image, to the 2D interface created with Adobe Flash.