Envisat orbital change starting on 22 October 2010
20 October 2010
As planned (see Envisat news on 29 September and 4 June 2010), ESA is currently modifying the Envisat satellite orbit to ensure the continuation of the mission for an additional 3 years. The first satellite manoeuvres will take place on the morning of 22 October 2010. Users are invited to the following:
- The Envisat data flow is therefore suspended between 22 October and 2 November. To facilitate a quick resuming of the operations, some data are acquired during this period and are available in the various ESA internet access points (e.g. rolling archives). However users are invited to discard such data as they are only for ESA internal verification.
- The Envisat mission will resume on 2 November, with the gradual availability of all data to users. 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.
- 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.
ESA is making important efforts to reduce the impact of the Envisat orbit change to users to a minimum.