* Astronomy

ESA’s Envisat satellite and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) data relay test satellite Kodama have successfully completed an interoperability test demonstrating that scientific data from Envisat can be transmitted to Kodama and from there transmitted to the Japanese ground receiving station in Tsukuba.
With more than 50 environmental satellites orbiting in space, interoperability and cross-support are important topics among space agencies because compatibility between the systems would allow for more efficiency and flexibility in the mission operations and the integrated analyses of the millions of data sets being created.
Envisat has been successfully relaying data to the European data-relay spacecraft Artemis, in geostationary orbit, since 2003 in order to allow data to be acquired, downlinked, processed and delivered to end users much faster. Envisat is able to do this because it is equipped with an antenna terminal that allows data to be transmitted on two channels of 100 Mbp/second each in the 27 GHz radio-frequency bandwidth, normally referred to as Ka-band.
Like Artemis, Kodama is in geostationary orbit at an altitude of approximately 36 000 km, making it possible to use the same Envisat functions used for communicating with Artemis. However, in order to store and process the Envisat data downlinked by Kodama to Tsukuba, it was necessary for ESA to provide JAXA with specialised equipment configured specifically for handling Envisat science data.

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