Real Betis Balompié has joined the space race to solve a pressing problem: collisions between satellites

It sounds unlikely, but it is a fact. Real Betis Balompié has entered the space sector. And without leaving Seville.

GMV’s new partner. The historic football club and the aerospace company GMV have installed in the Rafael Gordillo sports city a satellite surveillance and tracking antenna.

The agreement makes Betis the first football club in the world to host a facility dedicated to the sustainability of the space. More specifically, at pressing space debris challenge and the increasing risk of collisions in orbit.

Betis 1 – Space trash 130 million. Earth orbit congestion may not be the main concern of green and white fans, but it is a danger for the satellites we use every daywhether with the car navigator, to see the weather forecast or when we turn on the broadcast of a football match.

Thousands of operational satellites coexist with up to 130 million fragments of space debris: pieces of dead satellites and rocket remains that travel at hypersonic speeds and have triggered the evasion maneuvers of the active satellites. It is “one of the great challenges that humanity faces in the orbital environment,” says Miguel Ángel Molina, of GMV.

Monitor and prevent. This is where the new 2.7 meter satellite dish installed at the Betis training center in Seville comes into play. Its mission is to track space debris and predict collisions in order to avoid them.

To this end, GMV internally developed a system called Focusear. It works by “listening” to the signals that the satellites themselves emit in the Ku band (the same one used by satellite television) from the geostationary orbit, about 36,000 km high.

Nanosecond precision. Upon receiving these signals, the system uses radio frequency triangulation techniques (TDoA and FDoA) to determine the position and orbit of the satellites with a margin of error of about three meters, equivalent to 10 nanoseconds.

These data are vital to inform satellite operators, who are in charge of managing the evasion maneuvers of their fleets. But also to expand the European Space Surveillance System (EUSST), a catalog of objects that helps prevent large-scale collisions.

Why Betis. The Sevillian club had created the Forever Green foundation, whose name has a double meaning. In addition to being green for its kit, Betis has become the most sustainable club in LaLiga (and the second in Europe) in terms of energy efficiency, recycling and water reuse.

Expanding this vision of sustainability to space is literally taking its environmental commitment “beyond the Earth,” says Rafa Muela, manager of the foundation. But there is something else. Seville is the headquarters of the Spanish Space Agencyso the choice is not accidental. Somehow the Andalusian capital must be placed on the map of national spatial development.

Image | GMV, Real Betis Balompié

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