Five Years of Envisat In-flight Payload Operations

Since its launch in March 2002, the highly successful ENVISAT mission has provided valuable support to Europe’s Earth Observation research giving long term continuity of science return and contributed to several disaster monitoring campaigns. This paper presents the operational status of the Envisat payload, comprised of 10 multi-disciplinary earth observation instruments, after more than five years of in-orbit operations. A summary of the availability of the instruments will be given, comparing the present status to that from the early operations phase. This is preceded by a short overview of the operations facilities available at ESOC . During the in-flight experience some instruments suffered major anomalies. This paper highlights the main operational changes that contributed to the successful implementation of work-around solutions which allowed these instruments to resume operations. A description is also given of some of the optimisations employed both on-ground and on-board to recover instruments in the shortest feasible time following an anomaly.