Indra leads development and provision of the ground segment of satellite Paz for € 9m

 Indra, the premier IT company in Spain and a leading IT multinational in Europe, will lead the development and supply of the whole ground segment of the Earth Observation satellite Paz. The contracts awarded to Indra by INTA, an organ of the Ministry of Defence, amount to € 9M. The execution period of the project is 24 months and once delivered the segment will be ready to enter service.

The company will integrate all subsystems which will manage from the ground of what will be Spain’s most complex satellite ever built. This project will help boost Indra’s possibilities for future similar projects in Europe or in the rest of the countries.

The ground segment will control the satellite and the radar sensor of Paz. Besides this, it will generate, validate, calibrate, store and disseminate the rendered images. Indra will integrate all the systems to be installed at INTA, Torrejón and Maspalomas and at the Defence Data Center located at the Aerospace Observation Systems Centre (CESAEROB), Torrejon air base.

In addition to this, the company will be in charge of the management, system engineering, validation and verification of the ground system for the success of the mission. It will also deliver training so that operators can get familiar with the technology.

The brain of the mission

Indra will develop of the key elements of the ground segment: the data processing centre which will generate the radar imaging demanded by clients, from either the civil or military sectors. The imaging will be the result of the data captured by the SAR sensor of the satellite Paz.

The company’s technology will enable management of users’ requests, the monitorisation of the process, the reception of the radar telemetry and of the required data for processing. Finally, the system will verify the products possess the quality, accuracy and have the adequate features and will deliver them via a user interface.

Besides the development of this system, we should also mention a set of transversal subsystems which will provide services to the rest of the elements of the ground segment. Among them, we should highlight the communication network system connecting all the centres across the infrastructure. This system will be customised to make sure the information remains confidential.

The significance and the demanding nature of the PAZ programme’s technology will prove the company’s capacity to lead the most rigorous teledetection projects and will increase the company’s competitiveness in other markets.

Indra’s experience in this field includes 25 years throughout which it has delivered outstanding projects such as the implementation of the Spanish user segments of the Helios I and II, SMOS and Pleiades constellation. The company also carried out the implementation of the advanced data processing centre of SMOS for the generation of high-level information and the imaging exploitation centre (SIGESTREDI) for military uses, among other references.

Paz

The PAZ mission, part of the National Programme for Earth Observation, promoted by the Ministry of Defence along with the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism has a dual nature, civil and military. It will undertake surveillance, high-resolution cartography, border control, tactic support to missions abroad, rescue, risk and crisis management, evaluation of natural catastrophes, environmental control and surveillance and maritime piracy. In addition to this, the mission will have the capacity to provide coverage to an area of over 300 000 square kilometres a day, and to send a hundred images daily as well with a spatial resolution of a square meter.

Indra

Indra is the premier Information Technology company in Spain and a leading IT multinational in Europe and Latin America. It is ranked as the second European company in its sector according to investment in R&D with over € 500 M during the last three years. In 2010 revenues reached € 2,557 M of which a 44% came from the international market. The company employs more than 35,000 professionals and has clients in more than 110 countries.