The contract for the procurement of the hosting services for a station in Spitsbergen (Svalbard), Norway, dedicated to the provision of Galileo Search and Rescue (SAR) services, was concluded with KSAT of Norway on 17 April 2013. It will lead to the implementation of the third and last Galileo SAR Ground Station.

The first Galileo SAR Ground Stations is being deployed in Maspalomas, Spain, for which a contract was signed with INTA (Spain) in March 2013, and the second station is planned to be installed in Makarios (Cyprus).

The role of a SAR ground station is :

• to collect the distress information sent by a distress beacon and relayed by the Galileo satellites
• to compute the accurate position of the beacon
• to pass the information to both the National Rescue Center (which will launch and coordinate the rescue operations) and the Galileo SAR Service Center in Toulouse.

- KSAT (Kongsberg Satellite Services AS) is a Norvegian site operator

- INTA (Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial) is a spanish site operator

- Galileo is the name of the European Satellite Navigation programme;