In the past twenty years, gravimetry missions have demonstrated a unique capability to monitor not only major climate-related changes of the Earth directly from space like quantifying the melting of large glaciers and ice sheets, global sea level rise, continental draught, major flooding events, but also effects of large earthquakes and tsunamis. To respond to the increasing demand of the user community for sustained mass change observations at higher spatial and temporal resolution, ESA and NASA are coordinating their activities and harmonizing their cooperation scenarios in an implementation framework, called MAGIC (MAss change and Geosciences International Constellation). This builds upon the heritage from the GOCE, GRACE and GRACE-FO missions as well as on-going pre-developments on laser–ranging interferometry in preparation for the Next Generation Gravity Mission (NGGM). The new Laser Tracking Instrument (LTI) is being developed by the industrial lead SpaceTech GmbH with scientific lead at Albert Einstein Institute under contract to ESA. To consolidate the performance of the mission concept and the technological and programmatic feasibility of the entire mission, technology risk-retirement activities will be conducted to achieve Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5/6 for the LTI at the end of Phase B1 and TRL 6 at the Instrument Unit level at the end of Phase A. Additional presentation content can be accessed on the supplemental content page.
ESA activities and perspectives on Laser Tracking Instrument for NGGM/MAGIC mission
International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2022 ; 2022 ; Dubrovnik, Croatia
Proc. SPIE ; 12777
2023-07-12
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
ESA activities and perspectives on Laser Tracking Instrument for NGGM/MAGIC mission
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2023
|Laser metrology concept consolidation for NGGM
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2019
|The European way to gravimetry: From GOCE to NGGM
Online Contents | 2016
|Proof-of-concept demonstrator for the off-axis retroreflector interferometer configuration for NGGM
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2021
|Mission Planning and Target Tracking for Autonomous Instrument Placement
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2005
|