February 1984
From The Space Library
The mission of ESA's first preoperational remote-sensing satellite, ERS-1, would be mainly to monitor ice and coastal and ocean zones, the agency announced. Among the instruments in the ERS-l payload would be an active microwave instrumentation package operating in the C-band and combining the functions of a synthetic aperture radar, a wave scatterometer, and wind scatterometer for the purpose of measuring wind fields and the wave image spectrum and taking all-weather high-resolution images of coastal zones, open oceans, ice areas, and (on an experimental basis) land. Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Canada, each built a C-bank scatterometer for comparison of data in order to evaluate the optimal technical characteristics of the C-band scatterometers on board ERS-1 and to check the mathematical models used for data processing.
This experimental campaign organized by ESA would operate in the North Sea, in conjunction with a German scientific platform supplying "sea truth" data, and about 40 kilometers off the Brittany coast, in conjunction with a French oceanographic vessel supplied by the Centre National d'Exploitation des Oceans (National Center for Ocean Exploitation). This would allow comparison of the data acquired by the various scatterometers and data acquired by conventional means on board the platform and the oceanographic vessel. (ESA Release, Feb 6/84)
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