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JPSS-1 Launch - it all started more than 20 years ago

In 1995 a team from NASA came to Svalbard Norway in quest of an ideal location to establish a ground station for polar orbiting satellites. NASA had just embarked on the prestigious project, ‘’Mission to Planet Earth’’. A series of satellites, later called the NASA A-team, was about to be launched, and they needed a ground segment especially designed to efficiently receive data from polar orbiting satellites. At the same time, the predecessor of Kongsberg Satellite Service, (KSAT) was about to establish a new ground station at the very same Archipelago.

Located at almost 80´ N, Svalbard is the only location that can communicate with such satellites on every orbit. 

NASA and KSAT agreed that satellite ground stations are as important as the satellites themselves, because data has to be collected and distributed to be of value to the user community and thus a partnership was born. Even before the station building was in place, the antenna installation was ready to support the NASA satellites.