Solutions

Mission

PROBA-V is an earth observation mission for global Vegetation Monitoring, providing data continuity for Vegetation Monitoring after SPOT-Végétation missions reached end-of-life (in 2014 after more than 15 years) and before Sentinel-3 mission becomes operational. It was thus intended as a so-called gap-filler mission between SPOT-5 (EoL 2012) and Sentinel 3.

V for Vegetation
The ‘V’ in PROBA-V stands for vegetation. The imager spans a 2250 km field of view and collects light in the blue, red, near-infrared and midinfrared wavebands, ideal for monitoring plant and forest growth as well as inland water bodies.

PROBA-V was endorsed by the Belgian Government in order to ensure continued global monitoring of vegetation. In order to avoid a gap in this monitoring, funding for the full development of the PROBA-V mission was provided by BELSPO to ESA in 2010.

PROBA-V was launched in 2013, allowing for performance comparison with SPOT-Végétation till 2014, and takes over its operational role within ESA’s GMES programme (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) by providing the scientific community and a significant number of operational data users a complete composite of Earth’s land cover every two days.

A remote sensing mission for global Vegetation monitoring.

Orbit: Sun-synchronous polar orbit, 98.73° inclination at 820 km altitude
Coverage: Daily latitude coverage from 75°N to 35°N and -35°S to -56°S, full coverage every two days

OIP’s Participation

OIP was the industrial prime contractor for the payload and responsible for the design, development, testing and calibration of the Vegetation Instrument, with following main subcontractors:

• XenICs (SWIR detector development) (Leuven, B)
• DSI GmbH (Data Handling Unit development) (Bremen, D)
• AMOS (telescope manufacturing) (Liège, B)
• CSL (calibration/testing) (Liège, B)

OIP participated in phases A/B/C & D.

Status

The PROBA-V development started beginning 2009 and was completed in 2013. The satellite was successfully launched in May 2013 and operational since December 2013. It even survived the extended mission life duration of 6 years.

PROBA-V was launched from ELA-1 at Guiana Space Centre on board the second launch of the Vega rocket on 7 May 2013 together with the Vietnamese VNREDSat 1A satellite, and Estonia’s first satellite, ESTCube-1. The launch will mark the first test of the new Vespa dual-payload adapter; PROBA-V will ride in the upper position of the Vespa adapter, and VNREDSat 1A will sit in the lower position.

The usable lifetime of PROBA-V highly depended on the local time of the descending node (LTDN). Given that PROBA-V has no onboard propulsion, the natural drift of this LTDN depends on the satellites’ in orbit injection accuracy. Based on the injection accuracy specifications of the VEGA launcher, a usable lifetime between 2.5 and 5 years was predicted. A nearly perfect injection was realized bringing thus PROBA-V mission to the longest lifetime estimate and even allowing extension of the lifetime …

Partners

OIP was the industrial prime contractor for the payload and responsible for the design and development of the Vegetation Instrument, with XenICs [B], AMOS [B] and DSI GmbH [D] as most important subcontractors.

VITO is the principal investigator and QinetiQ Space is mission prime.

The project was funded by BELSPO.