Welcome to the Alaska Ground Terminal (AGT) Homepage.  The AGT is a remote ground station located in Fairbanks, Alaska in support of the GeoEye IKONOS imaging satellite.  GeoEye is a commercial company based in Dulles, Virginia where they support the GEOEYE-1 imaging satellite. The GeoEye facility that supports IKONOS is located in Thornton, Colorado, just north of Denver.  GeoEye's mission is to provide high resolution imagery from space and make the imagery commercially available.  IKONOS is capable of taking pictures showing objects on the earth's surface as small as one meter in size; something that's only been available to the public-at-large in recent years.

But why Fairbanks?  When IKONOS orbits the earth it is in a near-circular, sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination of 98 degrees.  Inclination indicates how much a satellite's orbit is tilted with respect to the equator.  A satellite with 0 degrees inclination goes around the earth directly over the equator, and a satellite with 90 degrees inclination goes from the north pole to the south pole and back again.  Since the IKONOS satellite has almost a 90 degree inclination, it goes nearly over the north and south poles on every orbit.  Fairbanks was chosen as a remote ground station because Fairbanks is close enough to the north pole to optimize our ability to see the satellite on almost every orbit, and provides the benefits of a metropolitan area.

The large dish behind our building is the parabolic antenna we use to download data from and send commands to the IKONOS satellite.  Not all of the data we collect is image data.  We also collect information about the health of the satellite.  If you drive by at the right time you will be able to see the antenna move to point at a spot near the horizon, then start to follow a long, lazy arc across the sky.  Approximately 10 minutes later it will be pointing at a different spot on the horizon, pause for a few moments, and then automatically reposition itself to point straight up which is what we call the "stow" position.


Inside the operations center we receive information from the satellite that includes temperatures, voltages, and other status indicators which we examine to determine if the satellite is healthy.  This data is analyzed here and at the main control center in Thornton.  We also receive the image data which is sent to Thornton on dedicated high speed data lines. We also write image data to 8mm tapes as a backup. The tapes can be sent to Thornton by overnight mail if the data links are unavailable. Originally, overnight mail was the only method of getting the data to Thornton. Later, we added a SATCOM link (that smaller, fixed dish behind the building) to provide a high speed data link to Thornton for our image data.  That system was retired in favor of a T1 link and a high speed VPN line..