Abstract
The surge in the number of earth observation satellites being launched worldwide is placing significant pressure on the satellite-direct ground receiving stations that are responsible for systematic data acquisition, processing, archiving, and dissemination of earth observation data. Growth in the number of satellite sensors has a bearing on the ground segment payload data processing systems due to the complexity, volume, and variety of the data emanating from the different sensors. In this paper, we have aimed to present a generic, multi-mission, modularized payload data processing system that we are implementing to optimize satellite data processing from historical and current sensors, directly received at the South African National Space Agency’s (SANSA) ground receiving station. We have presented the architectural framework for the multi-mission processing system, which is comprised of five processing modules, i.e., the data ingestion module, a radiometric and geometric processing module, atmospheric correction and Analysis Ready Data (ARD) module, Value Added Products (VAPS) module, and lastly, a packaging and delivery module. Our results indicate that the open architecture, multi-mission processing system, when implemented, eliminated the bottlenecks linked with proprietary mono-mission systems. The customizable architecture enabled us to optimize our processing in line with our hardware capacities, and that resulted in significant gains in large-scale image processing efficiencies. The modularized, multi-mission data processing enabled seamless end-to-end image processing, as demonstrated by the capability of the multi-mission system to execute geometric and radiometric corrections to the extent of making it analysis-ready. The processing workflows were highly scalable and enabled us to generate higher-level thematic information products from the ingestion of raw data.
Highlights
The systematic data acquisition, processing, archiving, and dissemination of satellite data is a fundamental task performed by most satellite ground receiving stations across the world [1,2,3,4,5].These ground segment activities are critical in ensuring data utilization and directly impact the success of satellite missions
Core ground segment functions such as data reception, processing, valorization, archiving, discovery, access, and dissemination are evolving with time to meet the increasing demands of modern image processing [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
We further identified the importance of the process control subsystem for scheduling and monitoring the process workflows, a quality assessment subsystem, and a data management subsystem for data management services for efficient operational image pre-processing in our review
Summary
The systematic data acquisition, processing, archiving, and dissemination of satellite data is a fundamental task performed by most satellite ground receiving stations across the world [1,2,3,4,5] These ground segment activities are critical in ensuring data utilization and directly impact the success of satellite missions. Direct receiving stations (DRS) receive raw data from the satellite through ground antennas before it is down-converted and demodulated and transferred for systematic processing [6,7,8]. This procedure involves converting the raw, unitless relative reflectance digital numbers of the original bands into true measures of radiance. There has been a significant rise in the Sensors 2019, 19, 3831; doi:10.3390/s19183831 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
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