Artist impression of Sentinel-6/Jason-CS satellite. Image courtesy of ESA/ATG medialab.
The latest satellite of the Copernicus Sentinel family was launched last Saturday, 21st November, at 17.17 GMT. Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich was taken into orbit by SpaceX via the Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA, just six days after they’d delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station on their first operational mission on behalf of NASA.
Delivered to a 1 336 km mile non-Sun-synchronous orbit, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, named after the NASA Earth Science division director Michael Freilich who died in August, is an oceanography satellite developed between ESA, NASA, NOAA, EUMETSAT and CNES (French Space Agency). A replay of the launch can be seen here.
The satellite is carrying two main instruments:
- POSEIDON-4 is a pulse pulse-width limited Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) altimeter in the Ku and C bands which will measure sea level by sending microwave pulses to the ocean surface, and measuring how long they take to return.
- AMR-C is a multi-channel radiometer for high-resolution retrieval of water vapour content over the global and coastal oceans. This is used to correct one of the sources of error for the SAR altimeter.
The satellite will be able to map 95% of ice-fee sea surface every 10 days, and this revisit time will increase when, like all, like all Sentinels, its twin – Sentinel 6B – is launched in five years time.
Between them, the two Sentinel-6 satellites will aim to continue the high precision sea-level height measurement dataset which was originally begun with the TOPEX/ Poseidon mission in 1992, and followed by JASON-1, JASON-2 and JASON-3 and now this illustrious group is joined by Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich with the ambition of continuing the dataset until at least 2030. In order to ensure that the data is cross-mission calibrated, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will spend its first year in orbit flying just 30 seconds behind Jason-3 for calibration and validation purposes.
As well as sea-surface height, the mission will also measure ocean currents and speed, ocean heat storage, together with temperature and humidity of Earth’s atmosphere, all of which will support the monitoring of climate change. Once the calibration phase is complete the data, like all Copernicus data, will be freely available for anyone to download and use.
We’re excited about this launch as we have a number of products based on the water-level surface height using Jason data, and also being frequent Sentinel data users. We’re looking forward to seeing this dataset, and to starting to integrate it into our products and services.
