The ESA Earthcare Mission: Approaching Launch

The Earth Explorer Core Missions are an element of the European Space Agency Earth Observation Envelope Programme. They are defined as major missions led by ESA to cover primary research objectives set out in the Living Planet Program. EarthCARE, the Earth Clouds Aerosols and Radiation Explorer, has been selected for implementation as the third Earth Explorer Core Mission and is being developed in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) who provides one of the active instruments. The fundamental objective of EarthCARE is to improve the understanding of the processes involving clouds, aerosols and radiation in the Earth's atmosphere. In order to fulfill this objective, the EarthCARE payload is composed of four instruments, a High Spectral Resolution UV ATmospheric LIDar (ATLID), a 94GHz Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) with Doppler capability, a Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) and a Broad-Band Radiometer (BBR). The four instruments will provide, in a synergetic manner, information on cloud and aerosol vertical structure of the atmosphere along the satellite track as well as information about the horizontal structures of clouds and radiant flux from sub-satellite cells. All the four EarthCARE instruments are now approaching their final development stages and are all scheduled to be delivered for integration into the satellite platform in 2018.