Fitting the pieces together

Meet Laura Gomez Almaraz, one of many behind the Meteosat Third Generation mission

As we gear up for this year’s launch of the second of the Meteosat Third Generation satellites, we’re shining a spotlight on some of the experts who are making this mission happen.

Last Updated

17 February 2025

Published on

17 February 2025

In late 1997, during a layover at Heathrow Airport in London, Laura Gomez Almaraz chatted with a stranger over beers.

Gomez was returning to Spain from Edinburgh, where she had spent the past year completing a Master’s degree in remote sensing. The stranger, a Spanish woman moving to Scotland and unsure of what to expect, wanted to find out what was so different about the two countries.

“Everything is different,” Gomez told her.

“And you will notice it the moment you land in Edinburgh and you open a toilet door. But the people are the same. Scottish people are really open, just like people in Spain.”

Now, as Integration, Verification and Validation Manager for Meteosat Third Generation (MTG), Gomez puts her scientific background in remote sensing, which she began in Scotland, to good use.

To ensure that the observations made by MTG satellites are useful, the data need to be processed correctly through all the steps along the way. This involves the antennas on the ground receiving them correctly in their raw form and then those data being processed, leading to images that meteorologists display on the news.

Gomez leads the team responsible for the integration and verification of the elements involved in this data processing chain. This entails testing the various software components to ensure their compatibility.

“In theory, when the software components were made for the MTG ground system, they were thought to be compatible,” she said.

Laura Gomez Almaraz, Integration, Verification and Validation Manager for Meteosat Third Generation satellites

“But the design and the requirements were set many years ago, so it is nearly always the case that these components don’t exactly match each other in the present. In addition, we always need to do this integration because when the different companies develop the software, they test them with synthetic data, which are artificially generated to resemble real data. So we need to test our software components with each other using more representative input data to ensure that the output of one is compatible with the input to another and that the generated products are as they should be.”

As tricky as this can be, she considers her biggest challenge in her work on MTG to not be a technical one. Instead, she has found coordinating different people’s needs in order to achieve an outcome that satisfies everyone to be the greatest puzzle to fit together – and the one with the greatest rewards.

Now, on the cusp of the launch of the first MTG sounder satellite, MTG-S1, planned for launch in 2025, Gomez looks back on her seven years working on the MTG system with pride for her team.

“At the start of the programme, only a few members of my team had any experience working on integration or verification,” she said.

“But over the years, we have developed into a very proficient and capable team that I’m super proud of.”