HADS (High Speed Acquisition & Distribution system) is a new International Space Station project that will be realized by SPACEBEL, for the account of EADS-Astrium.

Several scientific experiments will take place on the International Space Station (ISS), some of them generating a huge amount of data – mainly video and science data – that have to be transferred to the ground for analysis. In order to download this kind of data to the Columbus Control Centre in München, which concentrates all ISS traffic, a high speed data stream will be used instead of the classical low to medium speed telemeasurement / telecommand (TM/TC) link.

The HADS system will be located on the ground, and its role will be to handle and ingest this high speed data stream through a series of successive operations ranging from raw archiving over time restoration and decoding to final distribution to the several Facility Responsible Centres, with, in the end, a perfect re-synchronization of the various elements of the data stream.

In other words, the challenge of HADS is to do the job in real-time.