Meteorological And Ocean Color Imaging Optical Earth Observations From The Geostationary Orbit COMS Mission

For many years, Earth observation missions have been mainly flown in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), whilst the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) was dedicated to telecommunication and meteorological missions. Significant improvements in satellite technologies now make it possible to consider flying higher resolution optical missions in GEO, and thus to benefit from a near-to-continuous observation capacity over a given region. The COMS satellite developed by Astrium and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) is a first successful example of Earth Observation from the GEO. It hosts a ITT-developed Meteorological Imager (MI), an Astrium-developed 8-spectral band high resolution Ocean Colour Imager (GOCI), with an average resolution of 500 meters over Korea (corresponding 350 meters at equator) and an ETRI-developed Ka-band telecommunications payload. COMS is South Korea's first multi-mission geostationary satellite and the first ever of its type built in Europe. The satellite was launched on June 26, 2010 from Kourou. The In Orbit Testing was completed early 2011, including the tuning of the Image Navigation and Registration software which enables an accurate geo-localization of images captured by both optical instruments. Since then COMS is successfully operated by KARI for the benefits of all 3 end users (the Korean Meteorological Administration, the Korea Ocean Satellite Center, and the Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute). This paper proposes a short description of the system, presents the in-flight satellite performances, and briefly addresses the possibilities for higher resolution missions.

Name(s) of author(s) with affiliation(s)þ - Thierry BENCHETRIT, Hervé LAMBERT, Ivan LAINE, François Faure, Astrium SAS Satellite, Toulouse, France - Dr Koon-Ho YANG, Dr Myung-Jin BAEK, KARI, Daejeon, South-Korea