ESA image: The gold standard
The Eutelsat-9B satellite with its EDRS-A payload is shown in the anechoic test chamber of Airbus Defence and Space in Toulouse, France, having completed its final antenna pattern tests today.
EDRS-A is a hosted package as the first of two nodes of the European Data Relay System set to be launched next year.
Also known as Europe's SpaceDataHighway, EDRS will use cutting-edge laser technology to capture and relay information gathered by Earth-observing satellites. By travelling via EDRS's high-speed links and stationary position over Europe, the satellites' data reach the ground in near-real time.
While EDRS-A's Laser Communication Terminal is being checked for flight, the terminals on Copernicus' Sentinel-1A and Alphasat telecom satellite are already fully operational in space, ready to demonstrate their ground-breaking capabilities for multi-gigabit optical communications in space.
On Friday, 28 November the first Earth observation image gathered by Sentinel-1A and relayed to a ground station at the DLR German Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, via Alphasat will be presented at an event at ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
Provided by European Space Agency