Advanced land observing satellite (ALOS): On-orbit status and platform calibration

The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) was launched on January 24, 2006. Since then, it has been operated successfully on orbit, delivering a variety of high-resolution images in numerous quantities and contributing to disaster management support many times. This paper reviews the last 15 months’ operations and on-orbit status of the ALOS spacecraft, with the flight data analysis of the bus subsystems and the mission subsystems. A particular emphasis is given to the assessment, calibration and validation of the mission-related platform performances such as orbit determination and control accuracies, attitude determination and control accuracies, attitude stability, and pixel geolocation determination accuracy. Efforts to improve these performances are also reported.