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Kiruna North Polar Ground Station (CNPGS)

The China Remote Sensing Satellite North Polar Ground Station (CNPGS), the country’s first overseas land satellite receiving station, was put into trial operation near Kiruna, Sweden by the end of 2016. Constructed and operated by the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI) of CAS, the station will receive data transmitted from high-resolution Earth observation satellites. The construction took two years and passed the on-site inspection on 15 December 2016.

CNPGS, located at the Esrange Space Center at 67°53’ N and 21°04’ E about 200 km north of the Arctic Circle, has a special geographical advantage because polar-orbiting satellites fly over the station due to their north-south orbital direction around Earth. “CNPGS has laid a solid foundation for the longterm cooperation between China and Sweden in science, technology and economy,” said CHEN Yuming, Chinese Ambassador to Sweden in his congratulation letter.

CNPGS is expected to enhance the transmission efficiency of satellite data and improve China’s accessibility to global remote sensing data, which is of great significance in emergencies such as the aftermath of natural disasters. It is also the first engineering application of the three-band antenna technology for China. It is capable of receiving all-weather, all-time, and multi-resolution satellite data, and is compatible with follow-up Ka-band receiving requirements. The construction of CNPGS has led to breakthroughs in many key technologies, such as a large-scale three-axis antenna structure system. As a light, modular, low-temperature, easily disassembled and unmanned system, it can perform remote fault diagnosis and maintenance.

China launched its first fully owned overseas satellite ground station near the North Pole on 16 December 2016. This could be prove just as politically significant to Beijing as facility’s technological benefits, space experts said. The facility – one of the largest and most sophisticated in the Arctic region – located in Sweden about 200km north of the Arctic Circle, would allow China to collect satellite data anywhere on Earth at speeds that were more than twice as fast as before, said the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the academic governing body that built and runs the station. Construction of the China Remote Sensing Satellite North Pole Ground Station, as it is formally known, started two years ago at at Kiruna’s Esrange Space Centre, the world’s largest civil ground station for satellites.

Sweden is one the few European Union nations not to have joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – an intergovernmental military alliance – so is not so closely politically and militarily allied with the United States. In 2011 China’s acquisition of a ground satellite station in Dongara, Australia – a close US ally – sparked serious concerns in the White House because it was in the same place as sensitive facilities used by the US military and Nasa for its space programmes. The operation of the station is believed to have been halted after protests from the US.

China has previously built ground satellite facilities in numerous foreign countries, mostly in Africa and South America, which are all joint ventures. But the fully owned overseas ground station in Sweden would give China much greater freedom and security to operate its space projects, some of which had military purposes, a Beijing space scientist said. “The Americans have long regarded Western Europe its backyard, and strictly off limits to China,” the mainland researcher, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said. But the Kiruna station now provides China with a formal way in, he said.

Chen Yuming, China’s Ambassador to Sweden, sent a letter of congratulations after the launch ceremony, which marks the start of the station’s test trials. The station had laid a “solid foundation for the long-term cooperation of China and Sweden in science, technology and economic cooperation,” Chen was quoted as saying, according to a statement on the academy’s website. It would make “new, significant contribution to the peaceful use of space for the human race,” he said.

No officials from the Swedish government were believed to be at the ceremony, but Leif Osterbo, president of the Satellite Management Services Division at the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), was pictured cutting the ribbon at the ceremony, in photographs released by the academy. The SSC, which was also the contractor of China’s Dongara facility, did not mention the launch ceremony on its website. Professor Liao Mingsheng, a satellite radar expert at Wuhan University’s State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying,Mapping and Remote Sensing, said building the ground satellite station near North Pole had “cost a lot of money”.