The Megha-Tropiques Mission: Overview

The Megha-Tropiques mission is an Indo-French mission built by the Centre National d'Études Spatiales and the Indian Space Research Organisation. It was launched on October 12th 2011 with the PSLV rocket from the Indian launch pad. Megha means cloud in Sanskrit and Tropiques is the French word for tropics. The major innovation of MT is to bring together a suite of complementary instruments on a dedicated orbit that strongly improves the sampling of the water cycle elements. Indeed the low inclination on the equator (20°) combined to the elevated altitude of the orbit (865km) provides unique observing capabilities with up to 6 over-passes per day. The scientific objective of the mission concerns i) Atmospheric energy budget in the inter-tropical zone and at system scale (radiation, latent heat, . . . ) ii) Life cycle of Mesoscale Convective Complexes in the Tropics (over Oceans and Continents) and iii) Monitoring and assimilation for Cyclones, Monsoons, Meso-scale Convective Systems forecasting. These scientific objectives are achieved thanks to the following payload: SCARAB : wide band instrument for inferring longwave and shortwave outgoing fluxes at the top of the atmosphere (cross track scanning, 40 km resolution at nadir); SAPHIR: microwave sounder for water vapour sounding: 6 channels in the WV absorption band at 183.31 GHz. (cross track, 10 km) and MADRAS: microwave imager for precipitation: channels at 18, 23, 37, 89 and 157 GHz, H and V polarisations. (conical swath,<10 km to 40 km). In this presentation, a rapid overview of the Mission will be given as well as the current status of the mission.