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Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) is one of the Announcement of Opportunity (AO) instruments on board the European Space Agency (ESA) satellite ENVISAT. It is the most recent in a series of instruments designed primarily to measure Sea Surface Temperature (SST), following on from ATSR-1 and ATSR-2 on board ERS-1 and ERS-2. AATSR data have a resolution of 1 km at nadir, and are derived from measurements of reflected and emitted radiation taken at the following wavelengths: 0.55 µm, 0.66 µm, 0.87 µm, 1.6 µm, 3.7 µm, 11 µm and 12 µm.

aatsr

AATSR

The Accelerometer measures the Swarm satellite's non-gravitational acceleration in its respective orbit. The instrument helps scientists to study factors that cause non-gravitational accelerations such as air drag, winds, Earth albedo, and direct solar radiation pressure on the spacecraft.

accelerometers

Accelerometers

The Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE-FTS) is the primary instrument selected for the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) mission onboard the SCISAT satellite.

ace-fts

ACE-FTS

ACGS (Atmospheric Carbon dioxide Grating Spectrometer ) is a state-of-the-art hyperspectral grating spectrometer aimed at allowing XCO2 retrievals by measuring backscattered sunlight in three NIR/SWIR bands: the oxygen (O2) A-band (758–778 nm with ~0.04 nm spectral resolution), the CO2 weak band (1594–1624 nm with ~0.125 nm spectral resolution) and the CO2 strong band (2042–2082 nm with ~0.16 nm spectral resolution). CO2 column information is largely drawn from the weak CO2 band which includes a series of strong but not saturated CO2 lines which respond to even small variations in atmospheric CO2. The O2 A-band hyperspectral measurement contains information on aerosol and cloud scattering both in total scattering amount and scattering vertical distribution. The strong CO2 band provides information on aerosol and cloud scattering at longer wavelengths, in conjunction with information on CO2 and water vapour.

acgs

ACGS

acoustic-sounders

Acoustic Sounders

active-remote-sensing

Active Remote Sensing

The AIRS (Atmospheric Infrared Sounder) instrument is a high spectral resolution grating spectrometer containing 2378 infrared channels in the 3.74 to 15.4 micron spectral range for obtaining atmospheric temperature profiles and a variety of additional Earth/atmosphere products. AIRS is centred on measuring accurate temperature and humidity profiles throughout the atmosphere. AIRS also provides four visible/near-infrared channels to characterize cloud and surface properties.

airs

AIRS

AIRSAFE uses an ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) receiver for tracking of aircraft on a global scale.

airsafe

AIRSAFE

aladin

ALADIN

altika

ALTIKA

A different type of instrument named a altimeter records very precisely the time it takes for a microwave or laser pulse to be bounced back to the satellite, measuring both land and sea height to an accuracy of a few centimetres. Laser altimeter— An instrument that uses a lidar to measure the height of the platform (spacecraft or aircraft) above the surface. The height of the platform with respect to the mean Earth’s surface is used to determine the topography of the underlying surface.

altimeters

Altimeters

altimeters_1

SAR wave mode provides two-dimensional spectra of ocean surface waves. For this function the SAR records regularly spaced samples within the image swath. The images are transformed into directional spectra providing information about wavelength and direction of wave systems. Automatic measurements of dominant wavelengths and directions will improve sea forecast models, but the imagettes can also show the effects of other phenomena, such as internal waves, slicks, small scale variations in wind and modulations due to surface currents and the presence of sea ice.

ami-sar

AMI/SAR

The purpose of the Wind Scatterometer is to obtain information on wind speed and direction at the sea surface for incorporation into models, global statistics and climatological datasets. It operates by recording the change in radar reflectivity of the sea due to the perturbation of small ripples by the wind close to the surface. This is possible because the radar backscatter returned to the satellite is modified by wind-driven ripples on the ocean surface and, since the energy in these ripples increases with wind velocity, backscatter increases with wind velocity.

ami-scatterometer

AMI/Scatterometer

The AMR-C is an evolution of the AMR developed by NASA-JPL, for Jason-2 and Jason-3, which itself was based on the TOPEX Microwave Radiometer (TMR) and Jason Microwave Radiometer (JMR) on the TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 missions respectively.

amr-c

AMR-C

amsr

AMSR

amsr-e

AMSR-E

amsr2

AMSR2

amsu-b

AMSU-B

An Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR), operating at C-band, ASAR ensures continuity with the image mode (SAR) and the wave mode of the ERS-1/2 AMI. It features enhanced capability in terms of coverage, range of incidence angles, polarisation, and modes of operation. This enhanced capability is provided by significant differences in the instrument design: a full active array antenna equipped with distributed transmit/receive modules which provides distinct transmit and receive beams, a digital waveform generation for pulse "chirp" generation, a block adaptive quantisation scheme, and a ScanSAR mode of operation by beam scanning in elevation.

asar

ASAR

ASCAT, on board MetOp is used in weather forecasting, climate research, land and sea-ice, snow cover and soil moisture.

ascat

ASCAT

The Absolute Scalar Magnetometer (ASM) measures the magnetic field intensity at the tip of the boom. The ASM is an absolute instrument, i.e. it is not subject to changes of its intrinsic parameters over time. It uses the PPS as the absolute, external reference. contains descriptions of the ASM intrinsic processing algorithms for both the nominal scalar mode and the experimental vector mode

aster

ASTER

The Atmospheric Lidar (ATLID), will be carried on board the EarthCARE satellite, provides vertical profiles of aerosols and thin clouds.

atlid

ATLID

The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), a cross-track scanner with 22 channels, provides sounding observations needed to retrieve profiles of atmospheric temperature and moisture for civilian operational weather forecasting as well as continuity of these measurements for climate monitoring purposes. Like the long heritage of its predecessors, ATMS combines all the channels of the preceding AMSU-A1, AMSU-A2, and AMSU-B sensors into a single package with considerable savings in mass, power, and volume.[Source: NPP home page, http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/atms.html].

atms

ATMS

ATSR consists of two instruments, an Infra-Red Radiometer (IRR) and a Microwave Sounder (MWS). On board ERS-1 the IRR is a four-channel infra-red radiometer used for measuring sea-surface temperatures (SST) and cloud-top temperatures, whereas on board ERS-2 the IRR is equipped with additional visible channels for vegetation monitoring. The MWS is a two channel passive radiometer.

atsr-1

ATSR-1

The Along-Track Scanning Radiometer 2 (ATSR) on board the European Remote Sensing Satellite 2 (ERS-2) produces infrared images of the Earth at a spatial resolution of 1 kilometer. The first ATSR instrument (ATSR-1) was launched on board the ERS-1 satellite in July 1991 as part of the European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Observation Programme. ATSR-2 on board ESA's ERS-2 spacecraft is an enhanced version of ATSR-1 and is equipped with additional "visible" channels for vegetation monitoring. The data from these instruments is useful for scientific studies of the land surface, atmosphere, clouds, and oceans. Additional information available at "http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov:2031/DATASET_DOCS/atsr2_gbt.html" [Summary provided by NASA]

atsr-2

ATSR-2

AVHRR, on board the Metop and NOAA missions, senses the visible, near-infrared, and thermal infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

avhrr

AVHRR

avhrr-2

AVHRR-2

avhrr-3

AVHRR-3

Advanced Visible and Near-Infrared Radiometer

avnir

AVNIR

The Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2 (AVNIR-2) is a visible and near infrared radiometer for observing land and coastal zones and provides better spatial land coverage maps and land-use classification maps for monitoring regional environment. The AVNIR-2 is a successor to the AVNIR onboard the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS) launched in August 1996. Its main improvement over AVNIR's is its instantaneous field-of-view (IFOV).

avnir-2

AVNIR-2

The Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) is an instrument on board ResourceSat-2.

awifs

AwiFS

The Broad-Band Radiometer (BBR), to be carried on board the EarthCare satellite, provides measurements of top-of-the-atmosphere radiances and fluxes.

beidou

Beidou

On board the Quickbird is the BGIS 2000 (Ball Global Imaging System 2000), collected 0.61m panchromatic and 2.88 m 4 band multi-spectral data.

blackjack

BLACKJACK

The C-SAR instrument is an active phased array antenna providing fast scanning in elevation (to cover the large range of incidence angle and to support ScanSAR operation) and in azimuth (to allow use of TOPS technique to meet the required image performance). To meet the polarisation requirements, it has dual channel transmit and receive modules and H/V-polarised pairs of slotted waveguides. It has an internal calibration scheme, where transmit signals are routed into the receiver to allow monitoring of amplitude/phase to facilitate high radiometric stability. SENTINEL-1's metallised carbon-fibre-reinforced-plastic radiating waveguides ensure good radiometric stability even though these elements are not covered by the internal calibration scheme. The digital chirp generator and selectable receive filter bandwidths allow efficient use of on-board storage considering the ground range resolution dependence on incidence angle. Group: Instrument_Details Entry_ID: SENTINEL-1 C-SAR Group: Instrument_Identification Instrument_Category: Earth Remote Sensing Instruments Instrument_Class: Active Remote Sensing Instrument_Type: Imaging Radars Short_Name: C-SAR Long_Name: C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar End_Group Group: Associated_Platforms Short_Name: SENTINEL-1 End_Group Online_Resource: https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/sentinel-1-sar-wiki/-/wiki/Sentinel%20One/Instrument Creation_Date: 2015-02-05 End_Group

c-sar

C-SAR

Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization

caliop

CALIOP

camera

CAMERA

cameras

Cameras

cameras_1

The CAPI (Cloud and Aerosol Polarization Imager) is a multi-band imager which provides radiance measurements in five bands (365-408 nm, 660-685 nm, 862-877 nm, 1360-1390 nm, 1628-1654 nm) from UV to NIR. In order to achieve more information on aerosol size, which has a significant impact on the wavelength dependence of aerosol optical properties, CAPI includes two polarization channels (660-685 nm and 1628-1654 nm) to measure the Stokes parameters.

capi

CAPI

the CER (Coherent Electromagnetic Radiation) objective is to determine ionospheric total electron density (TEC) by using a three-frequency beacon; cooperative ionospheric observations with fixed ground receivers.

On board PROBA-1, the Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) provides data of spectral reflectance’s.

chris

CHRIS

circ

CIRC

ÇOBAN was a low-resolution 8-channel camera on board BILSAT-1.

coban

COBAN

composition-analyzer

Composition Analyzer

The objective of CPR on board EarthCARE is to provide information on the vertical structure of all cloud systems.

cloudsat-cpr

cris

CrIS

COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation Synthetic Aperture Radar

csg-sar

CSG-SAR

The Coastal Zone Color Scanner Experiment (CZCS) onboard the Nimbus-7 spacecraft was designed to map chlorophyll concentration in water, sediment distribution, gelbstoffe concentrations as a salinity indicator, and temperature of coastal waters and ocean currents.

czcs

CZCS

desis

DESIS

The Doppler Orbitography and Radio-positioning Integrated by Satellite instrument is a microwave tracking system that can be utilized to determine the precise location of the ENVISAT satellite. Versions of the DORIS instrument are currently flying on the SPOT-2 and Topex-Poseidon missions.

doris

DORIS

Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) is a satellite tracking system designed by CNES as a new system to provide precise orbits on-board low Earth orbit satellites.

The relative motion of a satellite with respect to the beacon(s) in view induces a shift in the frequency due to the Doppler effect. This shift is directly proportional to the radial speed of the satellite with respect to the beacon. By combining this information with knowledge of the location of each beacon, it is then possible to derive the orbit of the satellite.

doris_1

earth-remote-sensing-instrument

Earth Remote Sensing Instrument

The Electric Field Instrument determines the ion density, the ion drift velocity, and the electric field at the S/C front panel (in-flight). The instrument consists of two components: the Langmuir Probe (LP) and the Thermal Ion Imager (TII).

The EGG (Electrostatic Gravity Gradiometer)has a double role. It is providing the gravity gradient measurements and it is also used as a main sensor in the DFACS. If this common mode acceleration in flight direction is not zero, the DFACS will respond by either increasing or decreasing the ion engine thrust to maintain the spacecraft in near-freefall conditions

EOC (Electro-Optical Camera) on board Kompsat-1, collects panchromatic imagery (spectral region of 510 - 730 nm) with a ground sample distance (GSD) at nadir of 6.6 m and a swath width of 17 km by pushbroom scanning.

Landsat 7 is equipped with ETM+ (Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus), which provides a ground survey in four modes: VNIR (Visible and Near Infrared), SWIR (Shortwave Infrared), PAN (Panchromatic - Panchromatic range), TIR (Thermal infrared - Thermal infrared range).

FAI (Fast Auroral Imager) images the auroral emission in the near infrared (NIR) and visible (VIS) spectral range.

FLORIS is a high-resolution imaging spectrometer acquiring data in the 500-880 nm spectral range.

floris

FLORIS

Flexible Microwave Payload version2 is a dual microwave payload composed of a GNSS-Reflectometer and L-band radiometer with interference detection/mitigation.

fmpl-2

FMPL-2

galileo

Galileo

GAP (GPS Attitude and Positioning Experiment) instrument objective is to measure S/C velocity and attitude as well as TEC (Total Electron Content) of the ionosphere. The relative phase delay of signals in both the L1 and L2 bands from a GPS satellite occulted by the limb ionosphere provide large-scale (1000's of km) information on how the total electron content responds to magnetospheric perturbations. GAP consists of two components:
- GAP-A: Three single-frequency (L1) GPS receivers and four patch antennas. This package is being used to provide an accurate absolute time reference, spacecraft 3-D attitude, and post-processed spacecraft position and velocity.
- GAP-O: The objective is to provide ionospheric tomography observations.

Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer is a geostationary scanning ultraviolet-visible spectrometer.

gems

GEMS

ESA selected the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) instrument for flight on the MSG-1 satellite.  The EUMETSAT Council decided in November 1998 to fund the flight of two additional GERB instruments on MSG-2 and MSG-3. The principle objective of the GERB mission is to measure the Earth radiation budget, in support of climate research and monitoring.

gerb

GERB

GIS is a pushbroom imaging system on board GeoEye-1 whose basic elements are the optics subsystem (telescope assembly), the focal plane assembly (CCD detector), and the digital electronics subsystem. GIS can collect over 350 000 square kilometres of VHR satellite imagery every day.

glonass

GLONASS

gnss

GNSS

goes-i-m-imager

GOES I-M IMAGER

goes-n-p-imager

GOES N-P IMAGER

goes-13-imager

GOES-13 IMAGER

GOME is a nadir-scanning ultraviolet and visible spectrometer for global monitoring of atmospheric Ozone, launched on-board ERS-2 in April 1995. Since summer 1996, ESA has been delivering to users three-day GOME global observations of total ozone, nitrogen dioxide and related cloud information. A key feature of GOME was its ability to detect other chemically active atmospheric trace-gases as well as aerosol distribution.

gome

GOME

GOME-2, on board Metop- and Metop-B, is a spectrometer used to get the total atmospheric content of ozone profile in the atmosphere.

gome-2

GOME-2

GOMOS is a medium resolution spectrometer covering the wavelength range from 250 nm to 950 nm. The high sensitivity requirement down to 250 nm has been a significant design driver leading to an all-reflective optical system design for the UVVIS part of the spectrum and to functional pupil separation between the UVVIS and the NIR spectral regions (thus no dichroic separation of UV). Due to the requirement of operating on very faint stars (down to magnitude 4 to 5), the sensitivity requirement to the instrument is very high. Consequently, a large telescope (30 cm × 20 cm aperture) had to be used to collect sufficient signal, and detectors with high quantum efficiency and very low noise had to be developed to achieve the required signal to noise ratios.

gomos

GOMOS

Through the GPS antenna, the GPS receiver (GPSR) receives the signals from all of the antenna visible GPS satellites. The L1b processing corrects for known effects related to the Swarm instruments and satellite. The external errors e.g. due to the GPS segment are corrected in the orbit determination processing.

gpsr

GPSR

The accelerometer serves to measure all non-gravitational accelerations on the GRACE satellite due to air drag, solar radiation pressure or attitude control activator impulses initiated by the attitude and orbit control system (AOCS).

grace-acc

GRACE ACC

grace-hairs

GRACE HAIRS

A technology demonstration that uses laser interferometry to measure fluctuations in the separation between the two GRACE spacecraft.

grace-interferometer

GRACE INTERFEROMETER

Laser Retro-Reflector consisting of four corner cubes mounted in a small pyramid on the underside of the spacecraft. They provide a means of tracking the GRACE satellites from the ground for backup and orbit verification.

grace-lrr

GRACE LRR

Star Camera Assembly (SCA) precisely determines the two GRACE satellite's orientation by tracking them relative to the position of the stars.

grace-sca

GRACE SCA

ACC is designed to measure the weak level of acceleration sustained in orbit by the satellites of the GRACE‐Follow‐on mission.

grace-fo-acc

GRACE-FO ACC

The objective of LRI is to measure the same range fluctuations as the KBR (K-Band Ranging) instrument, but with less noise. Additionally, LRI provides precise measurements of the relative pointing of the GRACE-FO satellites to each other.

THEMATIC AREA

missions

Instruments

Earth Online Newsletter 01 December 2023

How satellite data help to shape society