Innovation | Portfolio of services

Portfolio of services

We provide various services that are useful for the Institute’s activities, including satellite tracking data services, GNSS-based space weather products and a GNSS receiver in the cloud.

The IEEC offers different services that are relevant to the Institute’s research and innovation activities. All of them provide data or products within the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Union (EU) programmes, and are managed through contracts or agreements. These are complemented by industrial contracts for a specific use of these services. Also, the Institute contributes to the construction and maintenance of key laboratories and infrastructures that have been established and are offered as services for internal users (researchers, engineers, and the own IEEC’s staff) or external users (public and private).

Some of our consolidated services are described below.

Satellite tracking data with the TJO robotic telescope

The IEEC carries out daily observations aimed at contributing to the satellite tracking carried out by the Joan Oró robotic telescope (TJO) at the Montsec Observatory (OdM) since 2014.

The Institute is responsible for implementing a continuous maintenance plan and several updates to the TJO to improve the performance of the satellite data extraction system. The satellite tracking data service has also been contracted by different satellite operators and is part of the EU SST program (Space Surveillance and Tracking) of the European Union. This service is expected to be expanded, providing tracking data of near-Earth objects (NEO) as part of ESA’s Space Safety Program (S2P).

GNSS-based space weather products

The IEEC members contribute to the ESA’s Space Safety Program (S2P), through the network called ESA Space Weather Service Network, as part of the Ionospheric Weather Expert Service Center (I-ESC).

A total of five products related to the monitoring and immediate detection of solar flares based on data from the processed global satellite navigation systems (GNSS) are provided in real time. In case of detecting a solar flash oriented towards the Earth in real time, automatic alerts are also activated and are made available to the service user’s community.

GNSS receiver in the cloud using Amazon Web Services

The IEEC members have developed a GNSS receiver in the cloud, a software as a service (SaaS).

It is a remote application to which the user can access through a web browser or an application programming interface (API) and obtain the position from a snapshot of GNSS signal’s samples. For this purpose, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used as the cloud computing infrastructure.