Envisat orbital change starting on 22 October 2010 - more information
29 September 2010
As already announced (Envisat news on 04 June 2010 and Implementation of Envisat extension orbit in October 2010), an important Envisat orbit change will be performed starting on 22 October. The text below provides a summary on how Envisat operations are planned until December 2010.
- For ASAR High Rate and MERIS Full Resolution data acquisitions prior to the change of the Envisat orbit on 22 October 2010, the requests for acquisitions will be accepted until 07 October.
- During the period 22 October - 02 November a series of satellite manoeuvres will be performed to bring Envisat to its new orbit. During this period, the Envisat data flow will be suspended. To facilitate a quick resuming of the operations, some data will be acquired during this period and will be available in the various internet access points (e.g. rolling archives). However users are invited to discard such data as they are destinated only for the ESA internal verification.
- The Envisat mission will resume on 02 November. For a period up to three months, ASAR High Rate and MERIS Full Resolution data acquisitions will be scheduled via a Predefined Planning (not based on regular user requests, but consolidated by ESA according to the main user needs). Regular user requests will progressively resume in early December for acquisitions starting in January 2011.
- All Envisat data products will be made available to users as from 02 November 2010. A disclaimer will be added to the data products until a full quality verification (including recalibration and validation) has been performed for each data type. ESA's objective is to complete such quality verification activity by end 2010, so that full nominal operations will resume during January 2011.
ESA is making important efforts to reduce the impact of the Envisat orbit change to users to a minimum. Those activities are needed to ensure the continuation of the Envisat mission for an additional 3 years.