A Potential Operational CryoSat Follow-on Mission Concept and Design

Abstract:

CryoSat was a planned as a 3 year mission with clear mission objectives to allow the assessment rates of change of thickness in the land and marine ice fields with reduced uncertainties with relation to other non-dedicated missions. Although CryoSat suffered a launch failure in Oct 2005, the mission was recovered with a launch in April 2010 of CryoSat-2. The nominal mission has now been completed, all mission requirements have been fulfilled and CryoSat has been shown to be most successful as a dedicated polar ice sheet measurement system demonstrated by nearly 200 peer reviewed publications within the first four years of launch. Following the completion of the nominal mission in Oct 2013 the platform was shown to be in good health and with a scientific backing provided by the ESA Earth Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) the mission has been extended until Feb 2017 by the ESA Programme Board for Earth Observation. Though not designed to provide data for science and operational services beyond its original mission requirements, a number of services have been developed for exploitation and these are expected to increase over the next few years. Services cover a number of aspects of land and marine ice fields in addition to complementary activities covering glacial monitoring, inland water in addition to coastal and open ocean surface topography science that CryoSat has demonstrated world leading advances with. This paper will present the overall concept for a potential low-cost follow-on to the CryoSat mission with the objective to provide both continuity of the existing CryoSat based data sets, i.e., longer term science and operational services that cannot be provided by the existing Copernicus complement of satellites. This is, in part, due to the high inclination (92°) drifting orbit and state of the art Synthetic Aperture Interferometer Radar Altimeter (SIRAL). In addition, further improvements in performance are expected by use of the instrument timing and digital hardware developments used in the Sentinel-6/Jason-CS Poseidon-4 design. It is expected that the mission will also provide data for global ocean services complementary to those of the other Sentinel 3 and 6 missions. With the current planning the development of the potential is expected to commence during 2016 launch in the 2021 time frame.