European Space Operations Centre

About: European Space Operations Centre is a government organization based out in Darmstadt, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Orbit determination & Space debris. The organization has 309 authors who have published 331 publications receiving 10399 citations. The organization is also known as: ESOC.

The Gaia mission

Abstract: Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the EuropeanSpace Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific community focusses on data processing for which the international Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) was selected in 2007. Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013 and arrived at its operating point, the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth-Moon system, a few weeks later. The commissioning of the spacecraft and payload was completed on 19 July 2014. The nominal five-year mission started with four weeks of special, ecliptic-pole scanning and subsequently transferred into full-sky scanning mode. We recall the scientific goals of Gaia and give a description of the as-built spacecraft that is currently (mid-2016) being operated to achieve these goals. We pay special attention to the payload module, the performance of which is closely related to the scientific performance of the mission. We provide a summary of the commissioning activities and findings, followed by a description of the routine operational mode. We summarise scientific performance estimates on the basis of in-orbit operations. Several intermediate Gaia data releases are planned and the data can be retrieved from the Gaia Archive, which is available through the Gaia home page.

Sub-Femto-g Free Fall for Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observatories: LISA Pathfinder Results

Abstract: We report the first results of the LISA Pathfinder in-flight experiment. The results demonstrate that two free-falling reference test masses, such as those needed for a space-based gravitational wave observatory like LISA, can be put in free fall with a relative acceleration noise with a square root of the power spectral density of 5.2 +/- 0.1 fm s(exp -2)/square root of Hz, or (0.54 +/- 0.01) x 10(exp -15) g/square root of Hz, with g the standard gravity, for frequencies between 0.7 and 20 mHz. This value is lower than the LISA Pathfinder requirement by more than a factor 5 and within a factor 1.25 of the requirement for the LISA mission, and is compatible with Brownian noise from viscous damping due to the residual gas surrounding the test masses. Above 60 mHz the acceleration noise is dominated by interferometer displacement readout noise at a level of (34.8 +/- 0.3) fm square root of Hz, about 2 orders of magnitude better than requirements. At f less than or equal to 0.5 mHz we observe a low-frequency tail that stays below 12 fm s(exp -2)/square root of Hz down to 0.1 mHz. This performance would allow for a space-based gravitational wave observatory with a sensitivity close to what was originally foreseen for LISA.

Operational Cloud-Motion Winds from Meteosat Infrared Images

Abstract: The displacement of clouds in successive satellite images reflects the atmospheric circulation at various scales. The main application of the satellite-derived cloud-motion vectors is their use as winds in the data analysis for numerical weather prediction. At low latitudes in particular they constitute an indispensible data source for numerical weather prediction. This paper describes the operational method of deriving cloud-motion winds (CMW) from the IR image (10.5–12.5 µm) of the European geostationary Meteostat satellites. The method is automatic, that is, the cloud tracking uses cross correlation and the height assignment is based on satellite observed brightness temperature and a forecast temperature profile. Semitransparent clouds undergo a height correction based on radiative forward calculations and simultaneous radiance observations in both the IR and water vapor (5.7–7.1 µm) channel. Cloud-motion winds are subject to various quality checks that include manual quality control as the la...