PROBA-V Data Products and Calibration, First Results from the Commissioning Phase
Dries, Jan; Adriaensen, Stefan; Benhadj, Iskander; Goor, Erwin; Heyns, Walter; Livens, Stefan; Sterckx, Sindy; Van Roey, Tom; Dierckx, Wouter; Strackx, Gert; Vanhoof, Kris; Dooms, Bart
VITO, BELGIUM

The Belgian-ESA Proba-V(egetation) mission is planned to launch with the Vega launcher in Q2 2013 from Kourou, French-Guyana. Because of the end of ENVISAT-MERIS in 2012, decommissioning of SPOT-VGT in 2014 and with a first launch in the Sentinel-3 program expected in 2016 at the earliest, this mission will play a crucial role in ensuring the continuation of daily provision of global 1 km and 1/3 km data products to the user community, active in global land monitoring, such as agriculture, forestry and forest fire, climate change and desertification. With a 2-daily coverage in the latitude range +/-35° and a daily coverage for the rest of the globe (+75† to -56°), 1 km products daily and 10-daily products for 4 bands (Blue, Red, NIR and SWIR), the specifications closely match with those of the SPOT-VGT products. This ensures a smooth continuation of long time-series studies beyond 15 years, which is specifically important to detect trends in land cover and climate change over extended periods of time. After launch, a commissioning phase for the full system takes place with the objective to fully test and validate the Space Segment and User Segment and to perform radiometric and geometric calibration to ensure the quality of the data products. The commission phase is expected to last for six months and nominal operations are planned to start late autumn 2013.
At VITO the PROBA-V User Segment including the data processing facility, in-flight calibration facility and data production and distribution facility is installed and fully operational.
In this presentation the first results of the commissioning phase will be discussed in terms of geometric and radiometric accuracy. An overview of PROBA-V product catalogue and the dissemination platforms and strategy will be clarified.