SCIAMACHY Mission Planning Concept

The ENVISAT mission planning is a distributed task in the ENVISAT/SCIAMACHY ground segment. Responsibilities are shared between ESA as mission provider and DLR as AO instrument provider, who has agreed to host all operations responsibilities also on behalf of the Dutch and Belgian partners.

The main effort of SCIAMACHY's mission planning starts with the orbit analysis by SOST-DLR/IMF. This allows the investigation of instrument specific orbit characteristics. Sun and moon related events (e.g. Sunrise, moonrise, sub-solar events) can be analysed to provide the basis for the definition of timelines applicable in specific intervals of the orbit. These timelines, combined with the rules established for the implementation of the SCIAMACHY mission scenarios, lead to the regular AOP SCIAMACHY input for the ENVISAT mission planning. The planning effort on ENVISAT side is therefore to determine of the absolute time-tags for the events requested in the SCIAMACHY planning input. Absolute time-tags are dependant on the actual ENVISAT orbit, i.e. they can only be provided by the ENVISAT Flight Operation Control Centre (FOCC) at ESOC.

SCIAMACHY planning documents with relevance for actual instrument operations are listed below.



Page generated 20 February 2002; last update: 22 July 2015