Workshop on Optical Space Sensor Pre-flight Calibration and Characterisation
Save the Date!
19-21 November 2024
Location: ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, the Netherlands
It’s time to block your calendars to make sure you don’t miss out on the CEOS-WGCV and CGMS-GSICS Workshop on Optical Space Sensor Pre-flight Calibration and Characterisation, which is set to take place from 19-21 November 2024 at ESA-ESTEC (Noordwijk, the Netherlands).
Register your interest here!
Over the next decades an ever-increasing demand for Earth Observation data is foreseen to meet the demanding needs of climate science and operational monitoring of the planet, across land, ocean and atmospheric domains. These demands will be met by a combination of traditional civil space agency missions and commercial / institutional low-cost micro/nanosatellites, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum. The rapid emergence of space-based Greenhouse Gas monitoring missions and hyperspectral imagers and their application to the ’net zero’ agenda has further grown the EO landscape.
While ensuring and quantifying the performance of all types of sensors is demanding, those operating in the optical domain present a particularly large range of challenges. However, it is also a domain where there have been many recent advances in the technologies available to support sensor pre-flight calibration and characterisation.
In planning and developing the next generation of sensors, agencies engaged in CEOS and GSICS are faced with the demands and challenges of ever-increasing operational requirements and the need to demonstrate high mission value. Additionally, agencies are now also being asked to consider the potential advantages of leveraging ‘New space’ innovations.
Over the last few years, agencies have expressed a strong desire for a ‘community workshop’ to share best practices, lessons learned, and to explore new calibration and characterisation methods, which can be both ‘fit for purpose’, cost effective, and lead to transparent, accessible information on expected performance.
The intent is to hold an open access international workshop, encouraging participation from not only CEOS-WGCV and CGMS-GSICS member agencies but also instrument builders, ‘calibrators’ and users/specifiers from industry and academia. By addressing the whole community, the workshop will seek to provide comprehensive information and strategies to support smooth transitions between on-ground calibration and pre-flight characterisation and the operational phase of missions.
The scope of the workshop will be limited to passive sensors operating in the solar reflective (SR) domain. That is, the workshop will cover all ‘optical related’ aspects of the pre-flight calibration/characterisation of the sensor and/or its on-board calibration/monitoring systems, e.g., radiometric gain, stray light, spectral response functions (incl. spectroscopic), linearity, polarisation etc.
More details will follow in the coming months, but in the meantime please mark your calendars for 19-21 November 2024. This website will be updated with information on the programme and a registration form in due course.