The next 12 months likely will be a pivotal time for the European Space Agency in terms of securing the necessary funding to meet the needs of planned earth observation missions, with the upcoming ESA Council meeting at the ministerial level taking place in Berlin next month playing a vital role in the shaping of future missions, including the contracts that will issued to support the missions.

“We want more and better satellite services to be available in Europe and beyond,” Volker Liebig, head of earth observation at ESA told Satellite News, noting that a number of earth observation missions are set to retire in the 2010-2011 timeframe.

The first key program ESA will be looking to get approval for is the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), which is intended to provide earth observation data and applications to users. GMES is seen behind Galileo as one of the flagship programs of European space policy.

“We have about 12 to 16 services with more than 250 operational user organizations developed in the initial stage,” Liebig said. “Now we are proposing a second stage for the future space component of GMES. This space component, on the one hand will organize and implement the access to all national and third party missions, which are needed for feeding data into these services. On the other hand, it will close the gap in the timeframe from 2011 onwards in our data supply.”

Developing the new space component of GMES will cost about 2.3 billion euros ($2.7 billion) between 2006 and 2013, and the price of the ground networks will increase the price tag, Liebig said. But the program is well worth the costs, he said. “We feel that earth observation satellites and data are now used in many applications and it is based mainly so far on scientific satellites, and we have now to operationalize them, similar to what we have done in meteorology.”

In terms of the potential timeline for GMES services, it will begin with a pilot phase of the three first operational GMES services by 2008. The three services will be in the areas of land, marine and emergency services. A total of eleven initial services have already been identified, which could be deployed to support a wide range of needs. GMES is also seen as the main European contribution to the global 10-year implementation plan for a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

According to a recent communication from the European Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, “GMES will draw on existing in-situ and space-based observing capacities developed by EU and ESA Member States. In the longer-term, investments will be made in the deployment of new capacities to provide continuity of data sources and infrastructure in support of the development of GMES services.” The European Commission also expects to organize a GMES Summit in 2007. The Summit is likely to see a meeting of key public and private stakeholders and could pave the way towards an integrated worldwide Earth Observation system.

Liebig said, “We have two program proposals at the ministerial conference. Firstly, we have the Earth Observation Envelope program which is the Earth, science and technology development program and GMES phase one. Member States have signalled strong support for both programs. GMES phase one will bridge the time until the decision by the EU has been taken for the full GMES program. But, it is absolutely necessary to start immediately in order to avoid a big data gap after 2010, when many European satellites reach the end of their lifetime.”

While the emphasis on the GMES program will be European, national missions also will play an important role, Liebig said. “From the very beginning we planned to have national missions in the GMES system. A very important part of phase one in GMES that we propose in the next ministerial conference is to organize access to different national missions, because they all use different data formats and different technical interfaces. The users don’t care about the technical details.”

ESA also works together with European meteorological organization Eumetsat to extend the effectiveness of the GMES system. “Meterology is a model case,” he said. “Eumetsat is an operator for satellites, where is ESA is the organization developing the end-to-end system — the satellites and the ground segment. Here, I see a certain responsibility for certain areas in GMES when it comes to the areas concerning atmosphere and oceanography. More than likely, Eumetsat will be the operational organization. After ESA has developed the satellites, and delivered them into orbit and shown that they have worked, these kinds of satellites might be handed over to Eumetsat to deliver the operational data to the services.”

Liebig believes space based systems are vital “in many respects,” when it comes to forecasting and responding to weather events such as hurricanes. “The land fall of the hurricane can be forecast very strongly due to the fact that you have constant satellites in earth observation, and you can feed this data into models, which can calculate when the hurricane will arrive and also estimate its strength,” he said.

In the case of a tsunami, satellite data can help in a number of ways. “If you look at the tsunami case, the emphasis was on a comparison on the situation before and after the disaster,” “Liebig said. “Here you use more high-resolution optical data or radar data to support the help organizations. Satellites can show where the damage is and where camps can be set up. Only satellites can deliver this data straight after a disaster. These are very important. It helps reduce damage [in the aftermath of a disaster] and [helps] get things back in order.”

Getting satellite data out quickly following a disaster is a function of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, which came into being in 2000 and aims to foster international cooperation in terms of disaster relief. The Charter enables immediate access to earth observation data from participating space agencies for those dealing with major disasters.

That charter came into play following the tsunami in Southeast Asia in December 2004. As a result of the charter, data was acquired from many satellite sources after the event, including ESA’s Envisat, ERS and Proba satellites, the French spot series, Canada’s Radarsat, the U.S. Geological Survey Landsat, and India’s IRS together with very high resolution data from Ikonos and Quickbird series supported through the German Space Agency DLR and NASA respectively.

The mechanism has helped provide satellite data to aid in disaster recovery efforts of nearly 100 events such as flooding in the Alps, hurricanes and fires in Portugal, Liebig said. And in order to help bolster the earth observation data, ESA is looking to fund a variety of missions.

Cryosat-2?

ESA also is focusing in the area of earth science, where it is developing methods and technologies for future operational applications.

“We will fly a series of smaller satellites — almost one satellite per year,” Liebig said. “Cryosat was supposed to be the first explorer mission, but unfortunately we lost the satellite due to a failure of the Russian launcher. But the next mission, measuring the gravity field will be launched at the end of next year.”

The Cryosat mission aimed to resolve the question of whether global climate change is causing the polar ice caps to shrink by monitoring precise changes in the thickness of the polar ice sheets and floating sea ice. However, that satellite was lost Oct. 8 following an anomaly in the launch sequence on the Rockot vehicle the satellite was traveling on (SN, Oct. 17). It is likely that any potential launch of Cryosat 2 would take at least three years. A decision on whether there will be a new Cryosat mission is likely to be made at the ministers’ conference in Berlin.

Liebig said of when a possible Cryosat 2 launch: “We have made an analysis to how quick it would be to rebuild Cryosat. It will take three years to rebuild it. But, we need to decide this quickly. I hope we can start this early next year. The costs of rebuilding the satellite are 75 million – 80 million euros ($88 million – 93.8 million). The total costs for everything associated with Cryosat 2 would be around 140 million euros ($164.2 million). This includes the satellite, launch, operations, ground segment, etc.”

From a scientific point of view, the mission was seen as a vital one for ESA and Liebig is hopeful that a second Cryosat mission will take place. “If we want to repeat the mission, we have to do that within our Envelope program, and depending on the position of the Member States, we might have to postpone other activities,” he said. “I am ready to do that because this mission had a high priority. Five years ago, this had a high priority and this has not changed until now, because we have no other missions that could answer the questions that Cryosat could.”

Other Missions

The Cryosat mission was part of ESA’s Living Planet Program. Cryosat is an Earth Explorer mission. Earth Explorer missions are designed for research purposes. After the failure of CryoSat, the next mission to launch is the Gravity Field and Steady State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE). According to ESA, this mission is intended to provide the unique data set required to formulate global and regional models of the Earth’s gravity field to a high spatial resolution and accuracy. It will also advance research in the fields of steady-state ocean circulation and physics of the Earth’s interior.

The next mission after this, is the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), which is scheduled to be launched in 2007 and will provide global observations of soil moisture and ocean salinity. The first mission to take place in 2008, will be the Atmospheric Dynamics Mission (ADM-Aeolus), which aims to provide further information in terms of wind speeds.

A second mission, dubbed Swarm, is also planned for 2008. This mission will provide detailed data on the geomagnetic field and its temporal evolution, giving insights to improving the knowledge of the Earth’s interior and climate. The mission also will analyze the sun’s influence on the Earth and is expected to help provide better forecasting of radiation hazards in space and improved navigation and exploration for new resources on Earth. EADS Astrium said Nov. 17 it received an 86 million euros ($101 million) contract from ESA to build the three satellites for this mission.

–Mark Holmes

(Franca Morgia, ESA, Franca.Morgia@esa.int)