A corner reflector was installed in the Montsec Observatory (Sant Esteve de la Sarga, Catalonia) in 2021. This facility, managed by the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), has many advantages for the operation of the reflector, and it also includes a GNSS station, functioning since June 2023.
Placed on a prominent location, the observatory is far from the possible interferences caused by urban centres, while close to Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-6 ground tracks. It is equipped with a meteorological station that offers a large amount of data needed for the calculation of small additional geophysical corrections. Furthermore, the fact that it is located inside the enclosed area of the observatory facilitates maintenance tasks by IEEC technical staff.
After almost four years of operations, the facility has demonstrated its capability to produce long and steady series of measurements for Sentinel-6 satellites. It has also showed good performances in collecting other radar altimeters time series, such as CryoSat-2 (since 2022) and Sentinel-3B (since 2023).