Huld is thrilled to announce that the instrument for the Copernicus Sentinel-5 (S5) mission is now ready to be shipped to its launch site from Airbus’s facilities in Toulouse, France, where it was on display to the media just a few days ago.
The Sentinel-5 instrument flies on the MetOp-SG A satellite which is part of EUMETSAT’s EPS-SG programme.
The S5 instrument is a nadir viewing push-broom spectrograph with a spectral range covering ultraviolet (UV) to short wave infrared (SWIR). It aims at measuring the atmospheric composition: amounts of trace gases and aerosols. The instrument hosts two telescopes (UV/SWIR and UV2VIS/NIR), and five spectrometers, each with their own detector. The UVNS detectors are split frame frame-transfer detectors, which allows for different exposure times for two different wavelength regions.
Airbus Defence and Space (ADS) is the Prime for developing the S5 instrument and under this contract is tasked with defining the L1 algorithms and delivering the L1b prototype processor and associated reference test data sets. ADS has subcontracted the development of the L1bPP software and generation of the L1 reference test data to Huld.
The results of the Level 1 processing are the L1b products: Earth radiance, Solar irradiance and Calibration products. These are distributed to users and used as the input for Level 2 processing to generate atmospheric composition products.
Huld has been developing the L1b prototype data processing software (a data processor) since 2015. In recent months, Huld team has been working more closely than ever with the Customer team to make final tuning to the L1b processing and get ready for the launch in August 2025.
Mikko Vepsäläinen, S5 L1bPP Technical Lead from Huld commented:
“It is exciting to see everything finally come together, with the instrument calibrated and integrated into the satellite, and the entire data processing chain operating together to generate data products for users. We have worked for a long time refining algorithms, calibrations and interfaces, and processing increasingly accurate simulated data and finally real instrument data recorded on-ground. Yet after sorting out all the details, the instrument will be observing something very concrete: the air we breathe.”
Picture © ESA/ATG medialab