28 July 2026 11:30
Telespazio, a Leonardo Group company, has successfully completed the installation of a new proprietary S/X-band satellite antenna on the island of Santa Maria, in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores (Atlantic Ocean).
For Telespazio, this represents a further, significant strengthening of its international network of ground stations, expanding the range of satellite services the company offers in support of next-generation space missions.
The new facility in the Azores is part of Telespazio's Polar Station Facility (PSF) programme, a strategic investment by the company aimed at managing an interoperable platform of ground infrastructure, both proprietary and third-party. The system also enables integration with various control centres, creating an advanced architecture based on the Ground Station as a Service.
The platform makes it possible to manage all the operational phases of a space mission in a unified way: from planning satellite acquisitions to distributing S/X-band data, in both real-time and near real-time modes, ensuring high levels of throughput and communication reliability.
In addition to the Santa Maria antenna, the current infrastructure pool includes two polar antennas located in Sodankylä, Finland, and the BTS-2 antenna installed at the Fucino Space Centre, in Abruzzo.
Thanks to this distributed network, Telespazio is positioned as a ground station service provider capable of supporting institutional and commercial missions, with extended coverage and centralised resource management.
The infrastructure’s first operational use will be in support of the IRIDE-FOS project, as part of the IRIDE programme – the national Earth Observation infrastructure owned by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and developed in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) – through the acquisition of data from the NIMBUS and PLATiNO satellites.
Future applications are also already planned as part of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation programme, promoted by ASI and the Ministry of Defence, confirming the solution’s strategic role within the national and European space ecosystem.