The Coordination Desk is a service that oversees 32 Consortiums which constitute the Copernicus Ground Segment. In January 2024, the entire Consortium of the Copernicus Coordination Desk contract gathered in ESA’s Earth observation centre—ESRIN, in Frascati, Italy—to launch the new year into a fruitful cooperation between the teams and to brainstorm for innovation.
The Coordination Desk is a service that oversees 32 Consortiums which constitute the Copernicus Ground Segment. In January 2024, the entire Consortium of the Copernicus Coordination Desk contract gathered in ESA’s Earth observation centre—ESRIN, in Frascati, Italy—to launch the new year into a fruitful cooperation between the teams and to brainstorm for innovation.
In 2022, ESA had awarded Telespazio (a joint venture between Leonardo (67%) and Thales (33%)) the contract for the coordination of all operations concerning the Copernicus constellation, which consists of the Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P satellites.
As the leading contractor, Telespazio has been at the head of this international industrial consortium, inclusive of its subsidiary Telespazio France, as well as Exprivia (Italy), S&T (Netherlands), AliaSpace (Italy), Eversis (Poland) and EJR-Quartz (Netherlands).
As a result of the 2022 contract, Coordination desk is coordinating the activities between the different services ensuring the smooth dataflow of Copernicus Data to the end users. It provides end-to-end monitoring of operations ranging from the planning and acquisition of observation data, to their effective distribution to end users in line with specific response times, while also ensuring prompt detection of any anomalies and their correction.
Coordination Desk serves as a link between all the services deployed by ESA, for the acquisition and generation of Sentinel data, as well as conducting regular campaigns to ensure the services’ compliance with the agency’s specific requirements.
The service ensures the distribution of auxiliary data to support processing, and maintains ESA’s recently revised Sentinel Online website in operation. This while still providing publication of all the news items and success stories deriving from the use of Copernicus data, with a new look and feel that has quadrupled its daily user visits.
On January 22 2024, ESA organised a workshop at ESRIN, inviting every member of each group within the Consortium, not only to go over the 2023 yearly achievements, but also to finally meet in person and to share ideas for the enhancement of the service.
For the first time all team members met and then split into corner/splinter sessions, featuring talks and PPTs, to show each other what they each deal with within their team. This allowed everyone to better understand the role that the others and the different teams have within the Consortium, and to launch a new cooperation, to ensure that the achievements gained this far will continue to develop into further successes.
ESA’s Technical Officer for this contract, Bogdana Tsonevska, stated, “The Service was created during the COVID pandemic and brought together people from over seven different nationalities through online communication. However, the in-person workshop proved to be very effective, resulting in more than 60 innovative ideas. It demonstrated that dedicated sessions for team building and innovation are crucial.
“Moreover, the Coordination Desk team achieved gender parity, which is exceptional considering that only 26% of professionals in technical fields are female. This showcase is encouraging for young girls to pursue studies and careers in science and technology,” concluded Tsonevska.