Heritage ERS-2 satellite returns to Earth

Launched in 1995, ERS-2 was a pioneering Earth statement satellite that significantly influenced our understanding of our planet and local weather change. Regardless of an supposed operational lifetime of solely three years, the satellite had a 16-year operational lifetime, and along with the just about equivalent ERS-1 satellite left an essential legacy for the way forward for Earth statement.

ERS-2 collected a wealth of helpful knowledge about our planet’s land surfaces, oceans and polar caps, and likewise monitored natural disasters together with extreme flooding and earthquakes in distant elements of the world.

Though the satellite was nonetheless functioning, the European House Company (ESA) introduced the mission to an finish in 2011. The longer an inactive satellite stays in orbit, the higher the chance of collision with different satellites or space debris, so the choice was made to decrease the ERS-2’s common altitude from 785km above the Earth to 573km, thus commencing the de-orbit course of. This lowered the time that that the spacecraft would spend in orbit from greater than 100 years to lower than 15.

On the time of launch, the ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites have been essentially the most subtle Earth statement satellites ever developed in Europe. In March 2000, a pc failure led to the top of the ERS-1 mission, nevertheless ERS-2 would survive for for much longer.

Floor temperature knowledge is required for climate forecasting, ocean prediction and local weather monitoring, and whereas “in situ” measurements (e.g., from buoys) are helpful, satellite data can cowl the entire ocean, together with in distant areas. Each ERS-1 and ERS-2 carried an instrument referred to as the Alongside Observe Scanning Radiometer (ATSR), which enabled scientists to precisely estimate temperature by detecting infrared warmth from the Earth’s floor.

The ATSR sequence have been initially developed by a U.Ok. consortium led by RAL House, and have gone on to affect future devices together with the Sea and Land Floor Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) for ESA’s Sentinel-3 satellites. The sequence are thought of among the many most correct distant sensing devices when it comes to knowledge calibration, having offered a “gold commonplace” for Earth’s floor temperatures over a interval of greater than 20 years.

The heritage of ATSR and its successors signifies that many workers have fond reminiscences of the sequence—these embody our former director Professor Chris Mutlow, who displays on the ERS-1 launch as considered one of his most memorable RAL House moments in this article from 2022.

Group chief Dave Smith says, “ERS-2 was the very first mission that I labored on,” says Dave, “so it is unhappy in a option to hear that the top has lastly come. Nonetheless the mission leaves behind a formidable legacy that lives on by quite a few different previous, current and future Earth statement satellites. It is a bittersweet second for the neighborhood however we needs to be actually happy with the mission’s success.”

ERS-2 additionally carried the International Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME), which was the primary ESA instrument to look at atmospheric hint gases in space. RAL House’s distant sensing group have been concerned in analyzing the information from GOME, which led to the primary direct measurements of tropospheric ozone from space, and likewise contribute to long run information of ozone profiles from GOME and its successor devices.

GOME and its successors proceed to feed knowledge into the European Union’s Copernicus Local weather Change Service, which gives constant and dependable info to tell EU insurance policies round local weather change.