The 7.3-meter satellite tracking antenna of the Davao Ground Receiving Station. (Photo from PIA)
DAVAO CITY – The largest satellite tracking facility in the country has been inaugurated in this city.
The Davao Ground Receiving Station (GRS), launched on Sunday (June 30), is designed to communicate with the country’s earth observation satellites namely the microsatellites Diwata-1 and Diwata-2. The GRS will receive, process and distribute images gathered by the microsatellites. The GRS is located at the Civil Aviation Authority Philippines Transmitter Facility.
The Davao GRS is the second Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation (Pedro) with the first at the Department of Science and Technology-Advanced Science and Technology (DOST- ASTI) compound in Quezon City. The Davao GRS’s 7.3-meter satellite tracking antenna is bigger than the Quezon City GRS’s 3.7-meter antenna. This gives the Davao GRS a more efficient download of space-borne data at a higher bandwidth.
DOST- ASTI officials said the satellite tracking system would be most useful in disaster and risk management, maritime surveillance, urban mapping and agricultural monitoring,
“This tracking system will take images of the affected areas. It will be processed and downloaded and will be distributed to the agencies concerned,” Harold Bryan Paler, DOST- ASTI senior science research specialist, said.
He said the GRS PEDRO has access to high-resolution, multispectral optical data and cloud-penetrating, day-night imaging synthetic aperture radar satellite data.
Since Davao is rarely visited by typhoons, the city is deemed an ideal site to host the facility. The city’s high-speed internet will also give the facility the speed it needs to download high-resolution images. (Rommel F. Lopez)