[Satnews] The European Space Agency has extended, until 2017, the maintenance and development contract of the SMOS (Soil Moisture & Ocean Salinity) mission user segment, entrusted to Indra.

The service could, thereafter, be extended for another two years, until 2019, depending on the program's development.
 

Artistic rendition of SMOS in orbit.

Image is courtesy of the European Space Agency (ESA).

The SMOS satellite user segment for studying the Earth's water cycle is located at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Villafranca del Castillo (Madrid). This mission's satellite was launched into space in November 2009 with a useful life of three years according to initial calculations, but the spacecraft's excellent technical and scientific conditions have now extended the mission.
 
Indra, as the company that led the SMOS user segment, has undertaken corrective and preventive maintenance since the start of operations in June 2010, including engineering tasks that have introduced major improvements to the processing and reprocessing chain to generate products of higher quality. In this regard, the successful implementation of a new software version or baseline has been completed with corporate support for all elements of the user segment. This update will allow for generating higher quality data to be used for obtaining more precise images of the planet’s distribution of moisture and salinity values.