The National Space Science Agency organized a series of meetings in Bahrain with leading companies pioneering the ground segment business, in preparation for initiating its project “Establishment of a ground station for receiving earth observation space data and training on its operation management”.

The meetings gave an overview for NSSA team on the scope, timeline, budget estimates, resource requirements of the project, and further expanded on ground station models, components, infrastructure requirements, major divisions, human resource requirements, operations and examples of earth observation ground stations in the region.

The Ground station will allow tracking LEO and MEO satellites in earth observation and remote sensing applications, supporting a range of antenna sizes in the future.

Dr. Mohamed Al Aseeri, NSSA CEO commented “All earth observation applications need for immediate access to current data and images. This requires fast, reliable communication links between orbiting satellites and the ground station, in addition to high accuracy tracking systems that can guarantee a stable and highly efficient data link throughout the satellite pass, which hopefully we will have one day”

Dr Mohamed Al Othman added, “NSSA will be completing this project in phases as early as 2020, starting from land preparation, then the construction of NSSA ground station facility, and finally acquiring a turn-key solution for implementing outdoor and indoor equipment along with capacity building, expected 2022.