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The Mission Groups Concept

The Mission Groups Concept has been developed for the GMES Space Component to help classify and express data access requirements and capabilities for the GMES Services.

The requirements of the different GMES Services on the one side and the current knowledge of technical and operational constraints on the other, require different number of satellites and multi-mission cooperation scenarios.

The data gap-analysis, performed by ESA, in terms of satellite capacity of the contributing missions and in order to guarantee sustainability and efficiency in the data offering has allowed the classification of the data needs for GMES services in five groups called Mission Groups.

These mission groups are:

• Mission Group 1: High and Very High resolution SAR imaging missions (different Radar bands)
• Mission Group 2: High and Very high resolution multispectral imaging missions
• Mission Group 3: Medium resolution Land and Ocean monitoring missions (wide swath ocean colour and surface temperature sensors, altimeter)
• Mission Group 4: Geostationary atmospheric missions
• Mission Group 5: Low Earth Orbit atmospheric missions

Each mission group is composed of a number of different contributing missions, which will evolve over time as new missions are launched, while other will cease their offer of data. Satellites dedicated primarily to GMES services (ESA-Sentinels) will be available only from 2011 onwards.

There is no one-to-one relation between a specific mission group and a GMES Service. Any single Service will have access to data from all different mission groups.

The mission group concept allows the medium term sustainability in the data supply chain. Every mission individually may either come to the end of its lifetime without a backup or be unavailable for some time, or have its instrument(s) degraded. In any case, a service planned for many years has to be able to handle multiple missions’ data. From 2008-2010 the GMES Space Component Data Access (GSC-DA) will mainly rely on existing data products, formats and data quality from Contributing Missions. New products might be generated chaining processing capabilities from different Data Providers processing services. The experience gained will eventually define the need for harmonisation of the data formats and quality across the different missions. It is part of the GSC-DA and the ESA GMES programme to make the transition from one to another mission of the same group as easy as possible for the GMES Services including the end-to-end validation of the new Contributing Mission.

In case options exist within each mission group, several elements are taken into consideration for the choice of the mission most suitable for implementing a given DataSet, including:

• Data that are from a mission fully European owned and operated (including FP7 associated states) would be preferred over missions only distributed in Europe
• Data that provide the best possible service performance and data quality standards
• Data that serves the maximum number of different services, i.e. meets the requirements of most users and that provide the most economic access conditions in the IPR, in technical and operational cost it will be chosen
• Continuity of the availability of a certain data type, for long-term planning and sustainability
• Data that provide the best possible service performance and data quality standards
• Technical data access conditions capability e.g. lead and tasking times and data provision reliability
• Restrictions on data use, Data Access Conditions restrictions and peculiarities; also data rights/ownerships, licensed rights for use (e.g. DEM derivation)

Whereas some datasets require contribution only from selected EO missions, especially for what concerns the Emergency Response domain, all available missions are used to ensure fastest acquisition times while for the Land Fast Track Service full, cloud free coverages of large areas can be achieved only using several EO missions together.