CANNES — French and U.S. engineers have completed assembly of the Calipso climate-monitoring satellite and have begun a series of tests of the spacecraft in preparation for a January shipment to the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch site in California.
Using a laser radar, or lidar, Calipso will study the interaction of small particles, or aerosols, in the atmosphere with clouds in an attempt to determine their effect on the Earth’s climate. The 580-kilogram satellite will be launched in April aboard the same Boeing Delta 2 rocket that will carry the U.S./Canadian CloudSat satellite. Cloudsat will make a global study of clouds.
Calipso and CloudSat are part of an ambitious NASA-led project called A-Train, which by mid-2005 should feature five satellites in closely coordinated low Earth orbits.
The first element of the A-Train formation, NASA’s Aqua spacecraft, has been in orbit since May 2002. Next up will be the NASA Aura satellite, set for launch in June aboard a Boeing Delta 2 rocket. The French Parasol satellite will follow in December, as a piggyback passenger on the European Ariane 5 rocket launching France’s Helios 2A reconnaissance satellite.
Calipso and CloudSat will round out the A-Train constellation in April. A final element, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, is tentatively scheduled for launch in 2007 or 2008.
Calipso, budgeted at about $228 million including construction, launch and two years of operations, will be the second U.S.-French satellite program to employ the Proteus platform developed by Alcatel Space and the French space agency, CNES.
The first Proteus satellite, the Jason-1 ocean-monitoring spacecraft launched in December 2001, continues to provide precise ocean-height information and is itself a follow-on to the larger U.S.-French Topex-Poseidon satellite launched in 1992 and still in operation despite an original design life of five years.
NASA, CNES, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Europe’s Eumetsat meteorological agency recently agreed to finance a Jason-2 mission to be launched in April 2008. The CNES management board agreed April 29 to finance 86.22 million euros ($103 million) of the mission, including the purchase from Alcatel of a Proteus platform.
Total Jason-2 costs, including a Delta 2 launch and operations, are estimated to be about $275 million.
French and U.S. officials said the collaboration on Earth observation missions between the two nations could serve as a model for a global system now being considered by a number of governments. The proposal for a Global Earth Observing System of Systems, a 10-year program to coordinate worldwide investment in spacecraft and terrestrial environment-monitoring systems, will be presented in February to a Brussels, Belgium, summit on Earth observation.
In a series of presentations and interviews at Alcatel’s satellite-production plant here May 4, U.S. and French officials said that despite the massive paperwork involved in satisfying U.S. and French technology-transfer regulations, the bilateral program has proved relatively simple.
"We now have some experience with this sort of cooperation and everyone benefits," said Joel Chet, director of Earth observation and science at Alcatel Space. "As we think about how a global, coordinated Earth monitoring system could be developed, the NASA and CNES partnership in these programs should set an example.
For Calipso, Ball Aerospace of Boulder, Colo., is supplying the payload under contract to NASA. The U.S. side is also providing the Delta 2 launch, telemetry tracking for the payload and a data treatment and archiving facility.
The French contribution includes the satellite platform and integration with the payload, an infrared imager on the payload and the control of the satellite in orbit.
