Earth Observing-1 Launch Successful

Earth Observing-1 Launch Successful

Earth Observing - 1 (EO-1) was launched successfully on 21st Nov. at 1:24pm EST.

Earth Observing-1 Mission

The Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Mission will fly in a 705 km circular, sun-synchronous orbit at a 98.7 degree inclination. This orbit allows EO-1 to match within one minute, the Landsat 7 orbit and collect identical images for later comparison on the ground. EO-1 has three advanced land imaging instruments and seven revolutionary crosscutting spacecraft technologies. The three advanced imaging instruments will lead to a new generation of lighter weight, higher performance and lower cost Landsat-type imaging instruments for the Earth Science Enterprise. Additionally, the EO-1 Mission will flight validate a number of crosscutting spacecraft subsystem technologies which if successful, will enable future Earth and Space Science missions to be conducted using smaller, lower weight and reduced power spacecraft buses.

Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Instruments

The three primary instruments on the EO-1 spacecraft are the Advanced Land Imager (ALI), the Hyperion and the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectrometer Array (LEISA) Atmospheric Corrector (LAC). The EO-1 ALI consists of a 15f Wide Field Telescope (WFT) and partially populated focal plane occupying 1/5th of the field-of-view, giving a ground swath width of 37 km. Hyperion is a grating imaging spectrometer having a 30 meter ground sample distance over a 7.5 kilometer swath and providing 10nm (sampling interval) contiguous bands of the solar reflected spectrum from 400-2500nm. LAC is an imaging spectrometer covering the spectral range from 900 to 1600 nm which is well suited to monitor the atmospheric water absorption lines for correction of atmospheric effects in multispectral imagers such as ETM+ on Landsat. A summary of instrument characteristics is given in Figure 1. Details of the three instrument characteristics are provided in the following sections. A comparison with Landsat 7 is included.