Telespazio has been confirmed as the operator of the ASINet network of the Italian Space Agency

Rome  01 August 2019 14:00

The Italian Space Agency (ASI) has assigned to Telespazio, a joint venture between Leonardo (67%) and Thales (33%), the management of the operations and maintenance of the ASINet network, which ensures communications among the national and international centres engaged in the space missions involving Italian participation.

Telespazio will also supply the architectural upgrade activities for the network as well as the hosting service for the ASINet equipment at the Fucino Space Centre, in Abruzzo.

The activities on the ASINet network will be carried out by Telespazio for the next three years, with the possibility of an additional 3-year renewal, and continue a collaboration between ASI and Telespazio started in 2000. The infrastructure for the multi-mission communications of ASI, in fact, has been designed, realised and managed by Telespazio.

In over eighteen years of operation, ASINet has allowed providing support to many space missions, both national and international, involving ASI. Among these, there are the PRISMA mission launched in March 2019, over fifty Space Shuttle missions to the International Space Station (ISS) to support the onboard MPLM modules, the thirty ARIANE carrier launches from the CNES base in Kourou, the support provided to the missions managed by ESA/ESOC, NASA, Eumetsat, SpaceX, CONAE and, finally, the Deep Space Networking activities.

The sites linked to the ASINet network are: the Fucino Space Centre of Telespazio; the ALTEC headquarters in Turin; the Telespazio office in Naples, the ASI Space Geodesy Centre in Matera; the ASI Broglio Space Centre in Malindi (Kenya); the ASI Headquarters and the Space Science Data Center (SSDC) in Rome; the NASA centres (JSC in Houston, MSFC in Huntsville); the ESA/ESOC headquarters in Darmstadt (Germany); the CNES European spaceport in Kourou (French Guyana); the INAF Satellite Deep Space Antenna (SDSA) site in Cagliari and the ARGOTEC headquarters in Turin.