Artist impression of Sentinel-6/Jason-CS satellite. Image courtesy of ESA/ATG medialab.
This week we start in the future with ESA’s announcement of an online press conference on Friday 16th October to discuss the November launch of the Copernicus Sentinel-6 ‘Michael Freilich’ ocean-monitoring satellite; scheduled to take off on the 10th of next month from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This is a collaborative mission between ESA, NASA, Eumetsat and NOAA, with support from the French space agency CNES.
Sentinel-6 ‘Michael Freilich’ will, like all Sentinels, eventually be a multi-satellite constellation focusing on collecting data over the oceans, coastal areas and inland waters. It will carry two main instruments:
- POSEIDON-4 is a pulse pulse-width limited radar altimeter in the KU and C bands which will continue the dataset begun by the TOPEX/POSEIDON mission launched in August 1992, followed by JASON-1, JASON-2 and JASON-3 creating an almost 30-year unbroken ocean dataset. It was also influenced by CryoSat-2
- AMR-CÂ is a multi-channel radiometer for high-resolution retrieval of water vapour content over global and coastal ocean. This is an important correction for the height data generated by the altimeter.
Sentinel-6 ‘Michael Freilich’ will go into a low-earth non sun-synchronous orbit at approximately 1 336 km and will map 95% of Earth’s ice-free ocean every 10 days and will also measure ocean currents and speed, ocean heat storage, together with temperature and humidity of Earth’s atmosphere.
We’ve used the Jason datasets for many years, as they are the basis of our inland water body products, as well as ocean products, and we are excited for the next phase in this dataset to begin.
Coming back from the future, earlier this week China launched the latest component of its China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS) when Goafen-13 took-off from the recently renovated Xichang Satellite Launch Centre on board a Long March 3B rocket. Despite the global pandemic, China has had a prolific launch schedule in 2020 with this being the 30th of the year.
Gaofen-13 successfully reached its geostationary orbit. It is believed to be a high-resolution optical satellite, although little detail has been released about the instrument or resolution. It is thought to be an improved version of Goafen-4, which was launched in 2014 with a 50 m ground resolution; and the upgraded version is predicted to offer 15 m ground resolution.
The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation noted that the data from the satellite will be used for applications such as land survey, crop yield estimation, environmental governance, weather forecasting, disaster prevention, and will provide information services for the construction of the national economy.
For launches past we are turning to Capella Space who, last week, released the first images from its Sequoia satellite that was launched on the 30th August this year. Sequoia is described as the USA’s first commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Earth Observation (EO) satellite, offering a spatial resolution of around 2 m, and Capella hopes to develop a constellation of 36 of these SAR satellites.
The images they released, which were acquired on the 2nd October, were:
- Palm Jumeirah in Dubai – an often used, but still impressive site.
- Santa Ana Volcano in El Salvador
- A river in the Sundarban National Park in India showing the Mangrove forest contrasting with the harvested land on the opposite bank.
Despite everything happening on the planet, the EO world continues to develop and evolve!
