DAVAO CITY—The government put up its largest ground receiving station that is able to receive higher frequency data fed from satellite stations in space, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) said on Wednesday.
The DOST said the ground receiving station is the second to be established by the Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation (Pedro) Center. This one, though, would have a larger moving antenna with a 7.3-meter diameter, “which is capable of receiving higher-frequency data.” The first is at the DOST-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (Asti) facility at the University of Philippines (UP) Diliman in Quezon City.
“The station has a 40-foot container van to serve as the control room”, it added. The Philippines’s Diwata-2 microsatellite, which was launched into space from Japan on October 29, 2018, is expected to feed data to Pedro.
Harold Bryan Paler, senior science research specialist at the DOST-Asti, conducted the orientation recently to the DOST Davao regional personnel on the operation, maintenance and troubleshooting of the station. Paler is also the operations team lead of the Philippine-Microsat Ground Receiving Station Project.
The Pedro would operate the ground receiving station “in time for the DOST Regional Science and Technology Week in July.”
The DOST said the ground facility “is designed to communicate with Earth observation satellites deployed in space by receiving, processing, exploiting and distributing space-borne imagery and derive information from remote-sensing satellites for various applications, such as disaster mitigation, natural-resource management, environmental monitoring, pollution control, energy exploration, intelligence and emergency response management.”
It said that the project is part of a multi-agency research and development effort of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, UP Diliman, DOST-Asti and two Japanese academic institutions, Tohoku University and Hokkaido University, under the Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation and Advancement Program, which succeeded the Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Micro-satellite Program.
The Diwata-2 microsatellite is part of this program.
