This exciting new project, involving 16 partners from 9 different countries, gives Telespazio UK the opportunity to manage the operational service of the EarthCARE mission towards delivering the best possible quality of data to end users.
EarthCARE, ESA’s radiation mission to study the link between clouds, aerosols and radiation is a joint venture with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission was successfully launched at the end of May 2024 and carries newly-developed high performance UV Atmospheric Lidar (ATLID), Cloud Profiling Doppler Radar (CPR provided by JAXA), Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) and a Broad-Band Radiometer (BBR). All its four instruments have been fired up successfully and are working in synergy to monitor clouds and aerosols, and their role in regulating the climate. EarthCARE mission is by far the largest, most complex mission of the ESA FutureEO programme.
The EarthCARE DISC project commenced in September 2024 and is arranged in a cluster of several instrument and product expert groups to establish a complete product quality assurance framework. These include all activities relating to product algorithm evolution, calibration, validation support and performance monitoring for ESA’s EarthCARE products (JAXA’s product's quality assurance falls under the responsibility of JAXA). The key aim of the DISC project is to ensure that the different EarthCARE data products delivered to the end-users are of the highest quality, with continuous efforts to maintain and improve data processing algorithms to best meet the evolving needs of the users. Being in a low Earth orbit, at an altitude of just 393 km, the EarthCARE satellite has a limited lifetime in space. The DISC therefore will be critical to ensuring, in that short time (the mission is expected to deliver data for around three years), the best possible insight into the influence of clouds and aerosols to the Earth’s climate system.
The Telespazio UK project team consists of nine dedicated and highly skilled individuals, who bring together their experience of Earth Observation (EO) data product quality and calibration from operational and heritage missions. Alongside the overall Service Operations in the project, the team is responsible for leading the offline instrument calibration, quality control and monitoring, and user support and project outreach tasks, as well as having a strong involvement in the activities related to reprocessing campaigns and quality working group support. Telespazio UK already had strong heritage in the EarthCARE Mission data quality pre-launch as a result of our involvement with the EarthCARE Inter-Calibration Monitoring Facility (ICMF) where we led the development of the offline calibration processors for three instruments (BBR, ATLID and MSI).
Telespazio UK’s Head of Marketing and Sales, Dr Geoff Busswell, said: “We are delighted to play such a key role in the data quality assessment from the hugely complex EarthCARE satellite. Providing high integrity data products is vital to ensure the maximum impact of this mission, such as for best practice data assimilation to improve weather forecasting, or for more reliable climate projections.”
Michelle Odgers, Earth Observation Senior Data Lead at UK Space Agency, said: “This new ESA contract for Telespazio UK will see them playing a major role in the delivery of reliable, high-quality data from the EarthCARE satellite, to improve our understanding of how clouds and aerosols impact the Earth’s weather and climate.
“More than 20 organisations from across the UK space sector were involved in the mission’s development, underscoring the UK’s leadership in earth observation, and this contract will be part of setting new standards for accuracy in climate research and weather forecasting worldwide.”