Oxford MIPAS meeting#138
29 Apr 08

Summary from the March Monthly Report

• MIPAS is back to full-time mission (100% duty cycle) since 1st December 2007.
• Since Monday 3 March 2008 the auto-recovery procedure implemented at ESOC was dismissed, a manual procedure will be used from now on in case of instrument anomaly. As a result the re-initialization gap is no longer present in the MIPAS data.
• The MIPAS level 1 NRT processing was restarted on 1st February 2008 at Kiruna and ESRIN stations, the products are available via the ftp rolling archive.
• During the reporting month MIPAS performed very well, in fact only 1 IDU error was recorded, but the instrument was not available from 26 to 28 March due to a macro-command transfer error (see ?2.2.2).
• The Baseline scenario for 100% duty cycle was planned; it consists of the following schema: 8 days NOM + 1 day MA + 1 day UA. Special in-flight calibrations were performed on 10 and 21 March. A more detailed description of the instrument planning for the reporting month can be found in ?2.2.1.
• New MIPAS weekly statistics are presented in this report and were calculated since start of RR mission. These weekly statistics show in more details the improvement in the instrument performances and the increase of duty cycle since January 2005. The availability of L1 NRT products is also computed starting with this report (see ? 2.2.4).
• The availability of L1 D-PAC products with respect to the expected time is around 95% in the last months (see ?2.2.5).
• The instrument temperatures slightly increase during the reporting month in line with the seasonal variation of the instrument temperatures, the variations are in the range of 1 ? 2 K (see ? 2.3.1).
• The cooler performs well during the reporting month; the vibrations were well below the warning level of 8 mg. However in the last month we observe an increase of the cooler vibrations that is nominal in this period of the year, while we are approaching to the next seasonal decontamination planned for the first week of May (see ? 2.3.3).
• The long term trend of ADC max counts in channel A1 shows a strong correlation with the instrument self-emission and with the detector ice contamination. During the reporting month the ADC counts slightly increase following the variation of the instrument temperature (see ?2.3.4).
• The monitoring of the spectral correction factor shows a slight decreasing trend; nevertheless the variations over more than two years of operations are really small (??? 2 ppm). The observed spreading of the points is due to the noise in the determination of this parameter (see ? 2.4.2).
• The gain weekly increase during the reporting month is nominal, the maximum of gain increase in all the MIPAS bands remains well below the acceptance criterion of 1%/week (see ? 2.4.3.1).
• The analysis of the accumulated gain allows monitoring the level of detector ice contamination. During the last year we observed a decreasing slope of the gain curve, showing that the detector is more and more ?ice-free?. This is due to the better performances of the cooler obtained with more frequent decontamination. In the last weeks the slope of the curve increases slightly, this is nominal since we are approaching the hottest period of the year (see ?2.4.3.2).
• The absolute mispointing is stable around a value of -25mdeg. The seasonal variations of the pointing error are small and below the fixed threshold of 8mdeg. Less and less stars are available in the last months for the LOS calibration, as a result the mispointing estimation is becoming less precise (see ?2.4.4).
• The long term monitoring of fringe count errors (FCE) shows that the width of the statistical distribution of the FCE can be used as a measure of the INT performances. In particular we observed that the FCE can be correlated with the number of IDU errors. This correlation is evident during the bad periods of the MIPAS mission (June 2005 and February 2006), while in the last months no clear correlation can be found (see ? 2.4.5.1).
• The long term monitoring of the detected spikes shows that the number of detected spikes in channels A1, A2, B1 and B2 is varying with time with some peaks probably related to variation of the solar activity. The channels C and D (the detector most affected by spikes) didn?t show any trend so far. From this analysis we can conclude that the number of detected spikes is still really small to impact the L1b products quality (see ? 2.4.5.2).  
• The level 0 NRT daily reports can be accessed at the following address:

• The level 1b NRT daily reports can be accessed at the following address:

• The level 1b OFL daily reports can be accessed at the following address: