Odenwald Station

ESOC Bodenstation Odenwald
The ESRO council held on 23-24 November 1972 decided that the ground station for the control of geostationary satellites should be located at ESOC/Odenwald..

Following the time schedule for GEOS, the start of construction for the station building in the Odenwald was foreseen for April 1974. This date had to be met to ensure equipment installation beginning of January 1975.

Die ESOC-Bodenstation Michelstadt (früher: ESA Groundstation) war die zentrale Empfangsstation für die Satellitenbilder des Satelliten Meteosat. Sie wurde 1975 errichtet und befand sich nordwestlich von Michelstadt und westlich von Zell im Odenwald. Sie war durch ihre großen Parabolantennen weit bekannt.

Historical archive

Source: A History of the European Space Agency Vol.1 (p.324)
With regard to the choice of the site, the starting point was the Council decision, taken in November 1972, that all ESRO's geostationary satellites should be operated by one control station located in Odenwald, near Darmstadt. Should it prove impossible to operate any particular satellite from this station, a second possibility was offered by installing the necessary facilities at the station ESRO had established in Villafranca del Castillo, near Madrid, to operate the IUE satellite.

Source: A History of the European Space Agency Vol.2 (p.303)
Meteosat: From French to European satellite

End 1971, the attempt to give the meteorologists responsibility for a major component of the ground segment failed. The majority of the Ad Hoc Group and notably the British and German representatives of the 'Wetterdienst', preferred a centralised system combining all the functions in one coordinated unit. They accepted, however, that the telemetry and command functions might be executed up to a hundred kilometres away from the pre-pre-processing and processing functions so that the antenna would be free from interference. As the UK delegate to the first meeting of the Programme Board put it, "complete real-time processing of meteorological data is a complex task needing continuous use of a CDC 6600 computer and many staff," and was beyond the means of national stations. To "avoid having the satellite produce a large amount of data that could not be exploited by the national agencies for lack of sufficient computer capacity", he said, it was essential to foresee a properly equipped central station in the European programme. 858 In the face of this pressure, the French capitulated and the Ad Hoc Group decided unanimously in favour of "the lumping of the meteorological and space sections of the central station". This was located at ESOC in Darmstadt, while the DATTS function was situated in Odenwald.

Configuration
The Odenwald ground station is equipped with three large antennas whose diameters are 10m, 13.5m and 15m respectively (as depicted in the figure). The station baseband infrastructure permits the support of two mission spacecraft and one standby spacecraft with some redundancy.

METEOSAT Role
The Data Acquisition, Telecommand and Tracking Station near Michelstadt, with its impressive 15 and 13.5 metre antennae,  acquires from the satellite raw images, housekeeping data and messages from the Data Collection Platforms. It transmits to the satellite telecommands and meteorological data or images for dissemination to the user stations.

La station de l'Odenwald est équipée originellement d'une antenne de 15 m pour contrôler le satellite Météosat F1. Après le lancement de Météosat F2 en juin 1981, quand il est clair que ce nouveau satellite ne peut pas supporter la mission de collecte de données, une nouvelle antenne de réception, de 10 m, est installée en quelques mois, elle permet de poursuivre la mission de collecte de données grâce à Météosat F1. Plus tard, quand ce satellite qui ne peut plus être maintenu à poste est définitivement retiré du service, en octobre 1984, cette antenne est adaptée pour recevoir les messages de collectes de données via le satellite américain GOES-4 pr êté à l'ESA par la NOAA.

En préparation à la mission ADC, une nouvelle antenne de 13,5 m est installée début 1991. A partir de ce moment, l'ESOC avec trois antennes peut assurer la mission Météosat sur l'Europe, opérer un deuxième satellite au-dessus de l'Atlantique et maintenir jusqu'à deux satellites supplémentaires en réserve.

METEOSAT-3 Cooperation with NOAA
For the orbital control of Meteosat-3 at its temporary position over the Americas, where it is out of sight of the Odenwald ground station in Germany,a dedicated ground station has been set up by ESA on the US east coast at Wallops, state of Virginia. This station is connected via commercial satellite telecommunications links with the ESA Meteosat facilities in Darmstadt in order to receive and transmit images, telemetry data and telecommands. The raw images from Meteosat-3 are actually processed at ESOC and digital high-resolution images transmitted back to the US weather service, NOAA, for use in conjunction with daily weather forecasts for the United States. Meteosat-3 plays an important role during the annual hurricane season, as it is able to observe in real time the creation and movement of tropical storms that have their origins in the eastern Atlantic. As a consequence, loss of life was minimized during two natural disasters that hit the US recently - Hurricane Andrew on 14 August 1992 and the blizzard of 12/13 March 1993 - thanks to timely warnings issued on the basis of Meteosat imagery.

Meteosat-3 has been put free of charge at the disposal of the United States of America by the European Space Agency for this joint mission named XADC(eXtended Atlantic Data Coverage). The United States only reimburse ESA for the operations costs.

Source: METEOSAT: Europe's First Application Satellite.

Closure
When did it happen.

What triggered the decision

Meteosat 1, 2, ....
Hipparcos