ALOS and ACRES - A Question of System Design
Over the last decade, ACRES, the Australian Centre for Remote Sensing (a facility within the Geospatial and Earth Monitoring Division of Geoscience Australia), has developed an integrated, multi-mission system to enable the automated, remote and unattended operation of its satellite reception facilities. As these systems are designed to operate with several different satellites, the integration of a new satellite can be performed more quickly and at lower cost that would otherwise be possible.
ACRES receives data from several earth observing satellites and has developed integrated systems for scheduling, reception monitoring, archiving, cataloguing, ordering and data distribution. An integrated approach, rather than having separate systems for each spacecraft, provides a number of advantages. In particular, even though each new earth observation system has a number of unique requirements, the basic systems required to incorporate a new mission are typically similar to existing systems.
The design philosophy of the mission planning, reception, archiving, cataloguing and ordering systems in use at ACRES is discussed and compared with alternative architectures. The comparative advantages and disadvantages of each approach are discussed. The implementation of a new satellite, the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS or Daichi), is discussed in detail.
ALOS was launched in January 2006 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Geoscience Australia is the ALOS Oceania Data Node and is responsible for archiving and non-commercial distribution of imagery within Oceania. The integration of systems to enable reception, processing, ordering and distribution of ALOS data within the existing ACRES infrastructure is discussed in detail.