(source www.vito.be)
After a long and successful career as Europe's
first truly operational satellite system for global monitoring of
vegetation, the SPOT4 and SPOT5 missions are nearing the end of their
life cycle.
The Vegetation-1 and Vegetation-2 instruments onboard
the SPOT 4 and SPOT 5 satellites will only be available until May 2014.
For more than 15 years, these instruments have been monitoring the
worldwide vegetation; providing essential information on crop yields,
droughts, desertification, changes in the type of vegetation,
deforestation, etc.
Driven by the success of SPOT-VEGETATION,
Belgium decided to build a new satellite mission, PROBA-V, which will
act as the successor of SPOT-VEGETATION. Despite being 10 times smaller
and lighter than SPOT-VEGETATION, the micro-satellite Proba-V will
monitor the earth surface at a much higher spatial resolution (the pixel
resolution improves from 1km to 1/3km daily global coverage and 100m
global coverage every 5 days). The continuation of the time series of
environmental data is essential to study environmental processes on our
changing planet.
PROBA-V is designed under the authority of ESA
by a full Belgian consortium. QinetiQ Space NV is the prime contractor,
OIP developed the instrument which is composed of a combination of three
small TMA telescopes, while VITO developed the user segment (i.e., the
processing chain) and acts as Principal Investigator for the mission.
Once in operation, VITO will be responsible for the processing,
archiving and dissemination of the data. Every day images will be taken
and processed of the entire planet.
PROBA-V is the first mission
for global environmental monitoring entirely built by Belgian industry.
Hence, it can be considered as a milestone in our national space
activities.
On March 6, 2013, the satellite has left the clean
room of QinetiQ Space NV to be shipped to the European launch base in
Kourou (French Guyana). There, PROBA-V will be launched with ESA's new
VEGA launcher. If everything occurs according to plan PROBA-V starts its
journey in space on April 19, 2013.
For more information on
Proba-V and our upcoming conference "Probing VEGETATION", please check:
proba-v.vgt.vito.be (new window) .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeWQ9COO718
http://www.lalibre.be/societe/sciences-sante/article/801362/un-satellite-made-in-belgium-en-route-pour-l-espace.html
http://espacedessciences.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2013/03/06/proba-v-en-route-pour-l-espace.html
