Speaker
Dr
Ludovic Aballea
(OIP N.V)
Description
In the past decade, there has been a significant reduction in the number of atmospheric sounders with a high vertical resolution in space. This impacts the monitoring of long-term trends for essential atmospheric species, such as Ozone. In this frame, the ALTIUS (Atmospheric Limb Tracker for the Investigation of the Upcoming Stratosphere) mission was proposed by the Belgian Institute of Space Aeronomy to contribute to remote atmospheric trace gas monitoring with a high vertical resolution. For the ALTIUS mission, QinetiQ Space will be supplier of the satellite and mission prime while OIP will be the industrial prime-contractor for the instrument.
The ALTIUS mission will consist of a 2D spectral imager, on-board a PROBA satellite, flying at an altitude of approximately 700 km SSO. The ALTIUS payload will allow observation of the Earth’s atmospheric bright limb in an extended spectral region from the Ultraviolet to the NIR. In addition, the ALTIUS instrument will perform solar and stellar occultation observations in the dark limb.
The ALTIUS payload will be based on the use of dedicated Acousto-Optic Tuneable Filters (AOTFs) in the Visible (450-800nm) and NIR (900-1800nm) range, while in the UV (250-400nm) spectral filtering will be done by a stack of Fabry Perot interferometers. By this way, the ALTIUS payload will perform observations with a spectral resolution better than 10 nm over the complete operational spectral-range.
During the previous phase of instrument design, initiated by BELSPO and ESA, some critical aspects of the instrument design and performances have been investigated. In particular the following development have been undertaken.
- Elaboration of the instrument concept, focused on opto-mechanics
for each channel, and preliminary integration with the platform.
- UV-channel spectral filter concept trade-off selection
- Preliminary thermal and structural analyses
- Instrument performances budgets and engineering budgets.
The status of design achievements at the end this last phase will be presented, focusing on the instrument design and performances. The resulting thermal and structural analyses will also be presented.
Primary author
Dr
Ludovic Aballea
(OIP N.V)
Co-author
Dr
Lieve De Vos
(OIP)
