Gepubliceerd op 27 maart 2020
Unfortunately all good stories come to an end, even so for PROBA-V. After more than 6 year of operations of this “gap filler” satellite between SPOT-VEGETATION and Sentinel-3, 2020 marks the end of the operational mission.
PROBA-V’s operational lifetime will run until June 30, 2020. This means all daily and 10-daily products will be guaranteed in near-real-time until that date. Let’s give you a short update on what will change the upcoming months, before and after June 2020.
The PROBA-V team is working on a number of efforts to ensure continuity of end-user products, such as Top-of-Canopy reflectance (TOC) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), by switching from PROBA-V to Sentinel-3.
From July 1, 2020 onwards, the mission will be transformed into an experimental mission with focus on Europe and Africa. For these continents, PROBA-V data will be acquired in 100 m, 300 m and 1 km resolution, but with limitations on delivery time. Unfortunately, due to orbital drift, the quality of the data will decline over time. Other scientific scenarios such as moon acquisitions will also be planned.
The entire archive will remain available—open and free—for anyone to use after the operational mission lifetime, including all Mission Exploitation Platform functionalities. The distribution platform will receive an upgrade in the coming year.
The PROBA-V team is working on an improvement of data in terms of cloud masking, atmospheric correction and radiometry. This will result in a reprocessing of the entire archive to ‘Collection 2’, which is projected to be released first half of 2021.
In 2021 they wish to launch a first demonstrator cubesat containing the same instrument as PROBA-V. With this cubesat they intend to complement the PROBA-V 100 m data. In a later stage the data will be enriched by a second cubesat containing a TIR instrument. This could for example facilitate land surface temperature and water stress research.
In the meantime, please continue your research on PROBA-V's rich and long-term dataset and if you have any more questions, do not hesitate to contact them or subscribe to their newsletter to stay informed!