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Awarua Tracking Station

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Antennas at Awarua Satellite Ground Station
Antennas at Awarua Satellite Ground Station

Awarua Satellite Ground Station (formerly Awarua Tracking Station) is an Earth station built initially to support the European Space Agency Ariane 5 ES ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle) launch campaigns. It was established by Venture Southland in 2007. It is owned and operated by Invercargill-based Space Operations New Zealand Ltd (trading as SpaceOps NZ), which was spun off from Southland Regional Development Agency Ltd (the successor of Venture Southland) in 2021. The site on Awarua Plains was chosen because of its relatively high latitude, low elevation mask and isolation from sources of radio interference. It has a fibre-optic broadband links to the Internet. The station was first used in 2008 to track Jules Verne, and subsequently four more Automated Transfer Vehicles servicing the International Space Station. The station now provides telecommunications to commercial and space agency spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) with its own antennas and hosted antennas.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Awarua Tracking Station (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Awarua Tracking Station
Hamilton Road, Invercargill City

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

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N -46.513 ° E 168.375 °
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SuperDARN (TIGER-Unwin) (Super Dual Auroral Radar Network)

Hamilton Road
Invercargill City
Southland, New Zealand
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Website
superdarn.org

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Antennas at Awarua Satellite Ground Station
Antennas at Awarua Satellite Ground Station
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Nearby Places

Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter
Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter

The Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter is an aluminium smelter owned by Rio Tinto Group (79.36%) and the Sumitomo Group (20.64%), via a joint venture called New Zealand Aluminium Smelters (NZAS) Limited. The facility, New Zealand's only aluminium smelter, is at Tiwai Point, near Bluff. It imports alumina and processes it into primary aluminium. The plant's alumina is supplied from refineries in Queensland and the Northern Territory of Australia. Around 90 per cent of the aluminium produced at NZAS is exported, mainly to Japan. The smelter was opened in 1971 following the construction of the Manapouri Power Station by the New Zealand government to supply it with electricity. It uses 13 percent of New Zealand's electricity, and is reported to account for 10 percent of the Southland region's economy. Rio Tinto has threatened to close the smelter several times, for example in 2013 and 2020, but to date closure has been deferred after renegotiation of the price it pays for electricity. As of January 2021, Rio Tinto announced that it had reached an agreement with its power supplier Meridian Energy to pay a lower price in return for keeping the smelter running until December 2024. In July 2022, NZAS signalled that it would once again offer to remain open if it could secure new power agreements on favourable terms. In May 2024, new twenty year electricity contracts were agreed with three suppliers, allowing the smelter to remain open until 2044. There are concerns regarding the environmental legacy of waste stockpiled at the site, near to an eroding beachline.