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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Earth Observations _ Proba-V

Posted by: Vultur Apr 28 2013, 10:23 PM

I didn't see a previous thread about this spacecraft...

According to http://spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html, ESA's Proba-V Earth-observation vegetation-observing satellite is currently scheduled to launch on a Vega booster late Friday (May 3rd) or early Saturday (May 4rd) depending on your time zone - about 2 AM GMT.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/About_Proba-V

ESA info about the vegetation instrument: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/V_for_Vegetation, http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/Serving_science, and http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/Fitting_the_world_in_a_box

It will also carry guest payloads: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/Detecting_radiation, a http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/Fly_by_fibre, http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/Tracking_aircraft_from_orbit and a http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Proba_Missions/New_space_semiconductor in its communication system.

Posted by: Vultur May 7 2013, 10:49 PM

Launched at 2AM GMT.

http://spaceflightnow.com/vega/vv02/130507launch/

Posted by: eoincampbell May 8 2013, 02:31 AM

Great! Thanks for posting those...

Posted by: vjkane May 8 2013, 04:54 AM

I hadn't heard about this mission before. It will make a nice extension of wide area monitoring of landcover. The TERRA and AQUA satellite MODIS instrument does the same, although with a wider range of bands. Still there's a lot that can be done with this instrument. The website doesn't mention whether or not ESA will be producing standard datasets like the normalized differential vegetation index (rough translation, how much stuff with chlorophyll) that is done with the MODIS instrument.

I went to a conference last fall and was impressed with what is being done with MODIS for global monitoring. It was US conference, so I expect similar things will be done with this mission and its SPOT counterpart.