Svalgrund is two 7.3 m X-band antennas, an S-band TT&C chain, a small equipment building and no people. Everything is operated from Cassini, our mission operations room in Toulouse, 3,200 km away.
Designing for unstaffed operation changes every decision. There is no one to power-cycle a stuck receiver, so everything has out-of-band remote power control on a separate path. There is no one to notice that the antenna radome is icing, so there are cameras and heaters and an ice-detection interlock that will refuse a pass rather than damage a drive.
The connectivity was the part that worried us most and turned out to be least troublesome — a diverse pair of fibre routes, which the region has because of other industries.
The part that has been most troublesome is scheduling. A high-latitude station sees nearly every pass of a polar orbiter, which sounds like an advantage until you are resolving conflicts between six satellites wanting overlapping windows on two antennas. The scheduler is on its third rewrite.
Commissioning completes in September. Latency for European customers should fall to under ninety minutes.