Updated: 07 Mar 2005

TERSS History

• CSIRO Division Marine Research (formerly Division of Oceanography)
• CSIRO Office of Space Science and Applications (COSSA)
• The University of Tasmania
• The Australian Space Office (since disbanded)
• The Bureau of Meteorology
• The Australian Centre for Remote Sensing (ACRES)
• The Australian Antarctic Division

For more about the role of each current member of the Board in the design and installation stage, see: The TERSS Board Members.

The CSIRO Division of Oceanography and the University of Tasmania were the main proponents of the project.

The primary goal for the project was build a receiving station for the reception of synthetic apearture radar (SAR) data over the Southern Ocean. Previously, the only facility capable of receiving this data was the ACRES ground station at Alice Springs. However the location of the ACRES antenna at Alice Springs meant that coverage of the Southern Ocean was very limited. The TERSS facility, located in Hobart, was to provide full coverage of the Southern Ocean region (including a small part of Antartica).

The station was built by the CSIRO and the University of Tasmania and officially opened in June 1994. In the period following the opening, work was carried out on the "bridge" to ACRES archiving and processing system via the development of the DTU (Data Transcription Unit). The DTU was required to transfer satellite pass data from the TERSS archive tape (Exabyte at that time) to ACRES optical tape, the main archiving media. This development culminated in the first end-to-end ERS image of the Ashburton area of New Zealand (see below). The image was produced by ingesting the ERS-1 data area over the interest from the optical tape into the Aethers Fast Delivery Processor, ACRES SAR image processing system at that time. Since then, the Aethers system has been replaced by the SARPS system, which can produce a wider range of SAR data products.

During the first few months of operation satellite mission planning was carried out by the CSIRO, Marine Laboratories for mainly scientific users.

The operation and maintenance was allocated, by TERSS Board agreement, to ACRES in August 1996. ACRES, as operator of TERSS, agreed to undertake the following tasks:

(a) Mission Planning and Satellite Scheduling

(b) Routine preventative maintenance of the ground station equipment

(c) Minor troubleshooting and fault resolution

(d) Fault reporting and performance statistics compilation

(e) General administration

(f) Cataloguing of satellite passes

(g) Archiving of satellite data

(h) Product generation and data sales to customers

• For further information about TERSS Operation
• For further information on the TERSS technology