In a ceremony that took place in December last year at the premises of Alcatel Espacio in Madrid, the thermal vacuum chamber that lodged the AmerHis payload was opened, which successfully concluded a critical phase of the development of this project. The AmerHis payload has now been sent to Astrium EADS in Toulouse where it has been integrated with the Amazonas satellite.
The Amazonas satellite due for launch this year will enable the operator, Hispasat, to provide high performance interactive multimedia services on its four Ku band coverage zones: North America, South America, Brazil and Europe.
The AmerHis payload will work like a switchboard in space managed by a Network Control Centre on the ground able to configure the payload, assign capacity and manage user traffic. Furthermore, four Gateways to provide the access system to the terrestrial network and user terminals are under development, completely directed to the commercial exploitation of new services.
Such services as high-speed Internet access, MPEG-based services, video and radio on demand will be available at a much lower cost.
This ambitious project marks a new era in communication satellites thanks to the ESA initiative, well supported by the Spanish Centre of the Industrial and Technological Development (CDTI) and funded according to the ESA Telecommunications programme rules.
| The multinational consortium working on this project and led by Alcatel Espacio comprises Alcatel Space from France, Mier Comunicaciones and Indra Espacio from Spain, EMS Technologies from Canada and Nera from Norway. |  click for larger image |
