Tromsø Satellite Station
From its inception until 1974, it served low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites operated by the European Space Research Organization (ESRO).
Norway's non-membership in ESRO and later the European Space Agency (ESA) caused Tromsø to not become a ground station for Landsat.
The concept was to build a real-time telemetry station which would allow for simultaneous observations of the ionosphere from both satellites and sounding rockets.
Ideas for a real-time telemetry station also arose in ESRO and NTNF included the project in its five-year space program in 1965.
Similar proposals were made in northern Sweden and a race started between Norwegian and Swedish interests to gain ESRO's support for a station.
[2] The Canadian Space Agency was at the time working on the Alouette 2 program and were seen by NDRE as a natural cooperation partner.
NDRE argued that it was fully capable of delivering such a system, but NTNF instead wanted to minimize risk by buying the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation in the United States.
[6] The contract with ESRO resulted in TSS providing telemetry for ESRO-IA, ESRO-IB, ESRO-2B, HEOS-1, HEOS-2, TD-1A and ESRO-4, all of which had low Earth orbits.
[7] The two telemetry stations used a large portion of the Norwegian space budget, but became platforms which allowed for development of technology.
[8] Tromsø Satellite Station worked well in tandem with Andøya Rocket Range and became an international center for study of the auroral zone.
NTNF proposed closing Tromsø Telemetry Station as the remaining customers did not provide sufficient revenue to keep operations viable.
Sufficient funding from the government was secured in mid 1976, after a successful lobby operation which emphasized the possibility of environmental observation in Norway's territorial waters.
Part of the goal of the project was to create technical spin-offs; the one successful company was Spacetec, which had 45 employees at the time it was bought by Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace in 1994.
[18] The same year, TSS was converted to a limited company, of which half was sold to the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC).
The operation center is responsible for backup, scheduling and conflict resolution, in addition to network planning, customer support and ground station control.
The facilities use interoperability and shared ground services, such as a common protocol for communication and similar design of the antennas, to increase flexibility and reduce costs and risk.
[26] By using a combination of SvalSat and TrollSat, customers can download data twice per orbit, twenty-six times per day, with only a forty-minute maximum delay.
