The operations centre on the ground monitors and controls the systems on the International Space Station (ISS) and the transmitters on the animals. It consists of a monitoring and control centre in Moscow and a user data centre.
The control centre is responsible for the operation of Icarus on the ISS and is under Russian administration. Communication with the ISS takes place via the normal communication channels between the ISS and the control centre.
The ISS first sends the data to the Russian control centre. From there, the data is forwarded to the German user data centre, processed and made available to the scientific community via the Movebank database. The user data centre is the interface to the scientific community. The centre receives configuration commands for animal transmitters from users and forwards them to the ISS via the control centre in Moscow.
In principle, all the data is provided for the scientific community and made available in the Movebank database. Sensitive data, for example about endangered animal species, is protected and is not released.