Awarua Tracking Station, with 3.5m diameter tracking antenna deployed.Awarua Satellite Ground Station (formerly Awarua Tracking Station) is an

Earth station A ground station, Earth station, or Earth terminal is a terrestrial radio station designed for extraplanetary telecommunication with spacecraft (constituting part of the ground segment of the spacecraft system), or reception of radio wave ...

built initially to support the

European Space Agency , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...

Ariane 5 ES ATV (

Automated Transfer Vehicle The Automated Transfer Vehicle, originally Ariane Transfer Vehicle or ATV, was an expendable automated cargo spacecraft, cargo spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), used for space cargo transport in 2008–2015. The ATV desi ...

) launch campaigns. Located in New Zealand, it was developed by Venture Southland, a joint committee of the

Invercargill City Council Invercargill ( , mi, Waihōpai is the southernmost and westernmost city in New Zealand, and one of the southernmost cities in the world. It is the commercial centre of the Southland region. The city lies in the heart of the wide expanse of ...

Southland District Council Southland District Council is the territorial authority for the Southland District of New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island ( ...

and

Gore District Council Gore District Council is the territorial authority for the Gore District of New Zealand. The council is led by the mayor of Gore, who is currently . There are also eight ward councillors and three councillors elected at large. Composition Cou ...

.
Venture Southland
' on Venture Southland website, viewed 2011-04-06 The site on Awarua Plains was chosen because of its

high latitude The polar regions, also called the frigid geographical zone, zones or polar zones, of Earth are the regions of the planet that surround its geographical poles (the North Pole, North and South Poles), lying within the polar circles. These high l ...

, low horizons and isolation from sources of

radio interference Electromagnetic interference (EMI), also called radio-frequency interference (RFI) when in the radio frequency spectrum, is a disturbance generated by an external source that affects an electrical circuit by electromagnetic induction, electrost ...

. It has a fibre-optic

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

link to the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

.
NZ space link seen as a showcase for satellite imaging
'' by

NZPA The New Zealand Press Association (NZPA) was a news agency that existed from 1879 to 2011 and provided national and international news to the media of New Zealand. The largest news agency in the country, it was founded as the United Press Associa ...

, retrieved from

Yahoo News Yahoo! News is a news website that originated as an internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo!. The site was created by a Yahoo! software engineer named Brad Clawsie in August 1996. Articles originally came from news services such as the Associate ...

website on 2011-02-15 The station was first used in 2008 to track ''

Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne (;''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary''. ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ''Voyages extraord ...

'',
One giant step into space for Southland
' on

Stuff.co.nz Stuff is a New Zealand news media website owned by newspaper conglomerate Stuff Ltd (formerly called Fairfax). It is the most popular news website in New Zealand, with a monthly unique audience of more than 2 million. Stuff was founded in 20 ...

website, retrieved 2011-04-11 and subsequently four more Automated Transfer Vehicles servicing the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest Modular design, modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos ( ...

. The station now supports many of the well known names in the small-sat world.

Work with Planet Labs

In 2014 the Awarua Satellite Ground Station was chosen by Planet Labs to download some of the data from their 28

earth observation satellites An Earth observation satellite or Earth remote sensing satellite is a satellite used or designed for Earth observation (EO) from orbit, including spy satellites and similar ones intended for non-military uses such as environmental monitoring, me ...

called

Flock-1 Flock-1 is a CubeSat satellite constellation launched on 9 January 2014. The satellite is built in a CubeSat bus, and each constellation consists of 28 satellites. All instruments are powered by solar cells mounted on the spacecraft body, along ...

.
Pioneering earth observation project comes to Southland
' on Venture Southland's website, retrieved 2014-12-02 A 7-meter radome was constructed at the site to house the satellite dish that would download the data from the satellites.

References

Buildings and structures in Southland, New Zealand European Space Agency Earth stations in New Zealand {{NewZealand-struct-stub