International cooperation boosts EarthCARE (Forwarded)

ESA News
http://www.esa.int

18 May 2007

International cooperation boosts EarthCARE

With the design consolidation phase soon to start for ESA's EarthCARE
mission, scientists and engineers from around the world recently met to
discuss preparations for a mission that is being implemented with the
cooperation of Japanese partners to address the need for a better
understanding of how the interactions between clouds, aerosols and solar
radiation regulate climate.

The workshop, held at ESA-ESTEC in the Netherlands on 7-9 May 2007, followed
the deadline for industry to submit proposals for design consolidation,
construction, launch and commissioning of the EarthCARE satellite. ESA is
presently evaluating the proposals and subject to a satisfactory evaluation
and negotiation of the procurement contract, Phase B will commence within
the next couple of months. This will be followed by full mission
implementation and launch in 2013, in cooperation with ESA's Japanese
partners JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) and NICT (Japanese
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology).

The decision to involve a partner agency from outside the ESA member and
cooperating states underlines the interest and importance of reliable
international co-operation for large Earth-observation research missions,
both from an engineering and scientific perspective. The success of the
EarthCARE mission will build on a favourable decision expected this summer
by the Japanese Space Advisory Committee allowing JAXA and NICT to initiate
the full implementation of one of its core scientific instruments, the cloud
profiling radar. EarthCARE will be the largest of ESAs Earth Explorer
satellites within the Living Planet Programme.

EarthCARE will improve our understanding of the relationship between the
three-dimensional structure of clouds and aerosols and radiative fluxes.
Clouds are the primary player in the Earth's radiation budget, while
aerosols both reflect and trap radiation and furthermore strongly influence
the life cycle of clouds. A thorough quantitative understanding of clouds,
aerosols and their coupling to radiation is therefore of paramount
importance for the understanding of our climate system.

The satellite will carry four instruments to measure vertical profiles of
clouds and aerosols with unprecedented accuracy employing a cloud/aerosol
lidar and a cloud radar with Doppler capability, with precise co-located
field-of-views. The lidar allows the observation of aerosols and the
optically thin regions of clouds (invisible to the radar), while the
optically thick region of the same clouds, which cannot be penetrated by the
lidar, will be observed using the radar. The two active instruments will be
supported by a 150-km swath multi-spectral imager in order to gain across
track information needed for the retrieval of three-dimensional structures
of clouds and aerosols. The corresponding short- and long-wave radiation
into space will be measured using a broadband radiometer with three viewing
directions (nadir, forward and backward), in order to link the observed
three-dimensional cloud and aerosol structures to the actual radiances and
radiative fluxes.

EarthCARE will not only evolve our understanding of the climate system and
improve cloud, aerosol and radiation modelling, but will also contribute to
improving weather prediction. Due to its aerosol observation capability
EarthCARE will also significantly contribute to air quality monitoring.

Experience presently being gained with NASA's A-Train constellation, in
particular from the CloudSAT and CALIPSO satellites with their cloud radar
and cloud/aerosol lidar, respectively, will be very useful for the
preparation of EarthCARE. Furthermore, the continuation of this kind of
observation by EarthCARE brings strong interest from the US science
community. This was demonstrated by a large US participation at the
workshop, including the principal investigators of CloudSAT and CALIPSO. The
impressive results of these missions are highly encouraging for the
international scientific community to press ahead with the exploitation of
the A-Train data and the preparation for EarthCARE. The workshop was
consequently used as an opportunity for scientific discussion and
intensifying cooperation with scientists working with A-Train instruments
and data.

The success of EarthCARE depends on international cooperation, in particular
with the Japanese partners, JAXA and NICT, who will provide the radar, which
at its core, uses a 94GHz Extended Interaction Klystron, a development
funded by ESA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and NICT. This klystron is
currently powering the CloudSAT radar and will now be procured, in a further
improved version, by NICT for the EarthCARE radar.

Stephen Briggs, Head of the ESA's Earth Observation Science, Applications &
Future Technologies Department pointed out, "EarthCARE will not only provide
most needed innovative scientific data for climate research, it is also an
engineering milestone mission for the development of active remote sensing.
Furthermore, it is a programmatic landmark for international co-operation
far beyond the ESA member state partners. It will prove that international
collaboration is a feasible route for the implementation of complex Earth
observation missions of the future."

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