Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
In Europe we are entering the summer holiday season, and people are starting to go away to relax and refresh themselves; however, there is no such slowdown in the Earth Observation sector with the potential for a launch three times in six days.
25th July Launch
This one we are certain about, as the Vega-C rocket successful launched five satellites into orbit for the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) last Friday from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. These were the MicroCarb mission and four for the Optical Constellation in Three Dimensions (CO3D).
The MicroCarb mission was put into a sun-synchronous orbit at an approximate altitude of 650 kilometres. It aims to monitor carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and help identify the world’s main sources and sinks of this gas. MicroCarb’s instrument is a dispersive spectrometer with four very-narrow Near Infrared/Short Wave Infrared bands operating with a spatial resolution of 2 x 2 kilometres. The instrument will help calculate the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air by analysing the sunlight reflected by the Earth’s surface. The temporal repeat cycle for MicroCarb will be 25 days.
MicroCarb serves as a precursor mission for the European Union’s Copernicus Greenhouse Gas Monitoring and Verification Support. In the future, the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) satellite constellation will provide greenhouse gas monitoring for this service.
The four CO3D satellites, which were built by Airbus Defence and Space, were put into orbits of 495-kilometre altitudes. Each satellite carries a high-resolution optical imager, providing imagery in red, green, blue and near infrared bands, with a spatial resolution of approximately 0.50 m, and a ground footprint of 7 km x 5 km. These four satellites will produce high-resolution 3D and 2D maps of Earth’s surface to be used in applications such as urban planning, terrain modelling and precision farming and forestry.
30th July Anticipated Launch of NISAR Satellite
The eagerly anticipated launch of the joint NASA and ISRO NISAR Earth Observation satellite is scheduled for today, 30th July, at 5.40pm Indian Standard Time which equates to 1:10pm British Summer Time. It will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.
Last month we wrote a post giving the details about NISAR, which can be found here.
31st July Anticipated Launch of Pakistan’s Remote Sensing Satellite
This week the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission announced that it was hoping to launch it latest Pakistan’s Remote Sensing Satellite (PRSS) on the 31st July, from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center (XSLC) in China.
The satellite will be carrying an optical imager; previous version of the satellite have had a spatial resolution of approximately 3 metres for its multispectral mode, and approximately one metre for the panchromatic mode – although the precise details of the new satellite have not been announced yet. It has been confirmed that data from the satellite will be used for applications including precision agriculture, urban planning, environmental monitoring and disaster management particularly surrounding the predicting, and mitigating impacts, of floods, earthquakes, landslides, glacier melt, and deforestation.
Summary
There are several exciting satellite launches occurring at the moment, and it is hoped the data from these missions will enhance our understanding of how we interact with the planet.
