Oxford MIPAS meeting#12
13 Aug 02

ENVISAT Commissioning Status

The ENVISAT spacecraft with all instruments performs well with stable performances.

The start of the data delivery to the Cal/Val PIs has been delayed by an instability of various elements of the ground segment, which in turn require extensive manual procedures and lead to a lower throughput than expected in the end-to-end chain of processing, data distribution and handling of requests in general. These difficulties are currently being dealt with and the data delivery to Validation PIs will start by mid August 2002.

The calibration and validation (Cal/Val) activities are nevertheless progressing and the preparation of the two workshops is on schedule:

• Calibrationreview, 9 to 13 September at ESTEC;
• Validationworkshop, 9 to 13 December at ESRIN.

In the period September to December i.e. between the calibration review and the validation workshop

• dataacquisition and product distribution for cal/val projects will becompleted
• anoperational scenario will be set-up using the station in Svalbard inaddition to the station in Kiruna, to compensate for the Artemisunavailability; this scenario will reduce the current overload of Kirunaand extend the current acquisition capabilities;
• sampledata sets will be made available to all PIs by early October
• ascalibration and validation of individual products is completed these willbe made progressively available to PIs, allowing a gradual phase-in ofservices offered to PIs
• the service for commercial users will be set up to start in January 2003;
• all services will remain available for all PIs and commercial users.

According to current plans, Artemis will reach its geo-stationary orbit and be ready for interface testing from February 2003 onwards. The integration of the Artemis relay capability will complete the operational set-up of the mission.