ERS-1 IDHT - An intelligent system for instrument and data management in remote sensing satellites environment

A general description of the ERS-1 IDHT (Intelligent Data Handling and Transmission) system with a block diagram is provided, and the data handling, recording, transmission, control, and autocheck functions are considered. It is noted that the IDHT functions will help to realize the best tradeoff between satellite energy and resources utilization and data collection/transmission. The availability of an intelligent data handling subsystem makes possible the best utilization of the collected data, allowing both a good satetellite resources management and surveillance and the provision to ground of already formatted data. This solution avoids the need of data merging from different sources and speeds up the data analysis and interpretation activities.