The RADARSAT remote sensing ground station for McMurdo station, Antarctica

Summary form only given. Under a memorandum of agreement with the Canadian Space Agency and NOAA, NASA has agreed to construct a remote sensing station and deploy it at McMurdo Base in Antarctica. The station is designed to receive the downlinked data from RADARSAT and to provide for future remote sensing applications on the Antarctica continent. The system, which was designed to meet the special requirements of this mission, incorporates numerous advancements in the state of the art. The design incorporates features that allow the system to be deployed in the short Antarctica working season and to operate in the extremely harsh Austral winter environment. In this environment, the system must operate autonomously at a site removed by almost two miles from the inhabited base. The only links for system control and data are via a dozen optical fiber cables. The authors discuss the current and potential requirements which drove the design and provide a description of the system which is currently under construction