Canary Islands Space Centre ED8BGO

Next Tuesday, February 16, 2010 will activate the Canary Islands Space Center with the call ED8BGO.

Maspalomas Space Station is a center of Spanish satellite tracking under the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) and operated jointly with INSA.1 Officially called the "Canary Space Center," although it is a little known appellation even among the staff of INTA. It is located in the municipality of San Bartolome de Tirajana on the island of Gran Canaria, just a few miles from the tourist resort of Maspalomas.


Originally the responsibility of this complex was in the hands of the U.S. space agency NASA that launched the station in early 1960s following the signing of an agreement with the Spanish government on 18 March 1960, being completed in January 1961. Initial tests were conducted with the satellite launch and tracking Explorer 9 on 16 February 1961 and the first operational monitoring mission took place during the unmanned Mercury-Atlas 4 on 13 September that year.2

The station also participated in monitoring missions of the Gemini program and later in the mission of the Apollo program, after some changes and moving the center to a new location 4 km from the original site. It was later used for manned missions to the space station Skylab and tracking satellites. The station was finally closed by NASA on 31 August 1975 and reopened by INTA in 1979 to monitor the Nimbus 7 and Seasat satellites on behalf of ESA.

The station's main activity is to monitor and receive data from satellites such as Cluster II mission and other missions and satellites from different agencies and organizations like NASA, ESA, JAXA and others. These facilities are also part of the COSPAS-SARSAT to detect distress signals from ships, aircraft or people.2
The station has, among other equipment, with an antenna 15 meters in diameter with a capacity to receive S-band and band X.3