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Malindi Ground Station, Kenya

Malindi is a popular tourist town in Kenya, 125km north of Mombasa along the Indian Ocean coast. The Malindi site is located at the base camp of the Luigi Broglio Space Center, which is a complex of facilities situated in Ungwana Bay, Ngomeni, near Malindi, Kenya. The site is on the coast about 115 km north of Mombasa. The station in Kenya was built by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to the Kenyan government. It is located in Ras Ngomeni, about 32 km from Malindi. It is divided into a sea launch platform and a land data receiving center. since years by the Research Center at St. Mark (San Marco Project Research Centre / CRPSM) on behalf of the University of Rome NASA cooperation with the management, since January 1, 2004 taken over by the ASI, renamed Broken Goeuriot space Center ( Luigi Broglio Space Center), the land part has been used as a satellite monitoring station, but the sea launching platform has not been used since 1988.

In Catholic Doctrine, Saint Rita is the patroness of impossible causes. Santa Rita, a 1500-ton triangular offshore oil rig, arrived at the port of Mombasa in early 1964. It was going to undergo a few more modifications before being moved to the Ungwana Bay (formerly Fomorsa Bay), off the coast of Malindi, for its main mission. There, its legs would be lowered to the ocean floor and the hull structure self-elevated on the legs. On March 25, 1966, another rig named San Marco was towed from La Spezia, Italy. It arrived at Mombasa two months later and stayed there for six months. On November 10th, it was towed to its resting point on Ungwana Bay, A ground station was then built in Ras Ngomeni, an initial temporary installation that took two months to complete. The last mission to ever take place from the San Marco platform lifted off on 25 March 1988. Christened San Marco after the launch platform, it was an Italian satellite weighing 236 kg. Since then, the platforms fell into disrepair but the ground station thrived, adding a remote sensing center in 1997 and acquiring new equipment for satellite data acquisition. A new 15-year renewable deal was signed between Kenya and Italy in 1995. In 2004, the Space Center’s management moved to the Italian Space Agency. It is now called the Broglio Space Center, named for the man who planned and implemented it.

The primary ground station for the Swift spacecraft is the Malindi Ground Station, which is located in Kenya at 40.1945 degrees east longitude and 2.9956 degrees south latitude. The ground station uplinks spacecraft commands received from the MOC. It also receives spacecraft real-time housekeeping data and forwards it to the MOC in real-time. Malindi also receives and records high rate spacecraft data, then forwards it to the MOC after each contact.