| Summary: | The German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ operates a satellite-receiving station at Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen, to receive data from scientific satellites in polar orbits. The station has received data from the satellite CHAMP since 2001, but soon also from other satellites like those of the GRACE-mission. Notable is the continuous provision of received data through this station at low latencies and operation costs, which helped, e.g., to establish GNSS radio occultation measurements on satellites as a novel observation type for weather forecasts. The station efficiency has been improved constantly with technical and operational amendments over the years, so that it could even be qualified to serve for the actually most important task as the primary downlink station of the GRACE Follow-On satellite mission.
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