July 8, 2016

Satellite

The Megha-Tropiques system is composed of:

  • a mini-satellite developed jointly by France and India, which includes:
    • a platform derived from the Indian IRS platform
    • a set of four payloads
      • MADRAS, developed jointly by CNES and ISRO
      • SAPHIR, provided by CNES
      • SCARAB, provided by CNES
      • a radio-occulation receiver GPS, provided by ISRO

SAPHIR and SCARAB are cross track scanning radiometer: the scan track is perpendicular to the satellite track and the spots enlarge with the scan angle.

MADRAS is a conical scanning microwave imager: the incidence has to be constant to take advantage of the polarization information. The spot size remains the same but the scan track follows a semicircle.

Megha-Tropiques instruments fields of view
Orbital configuration of Megha-Tropiques satellite
MP4 Format ~28 Mb (or WMV format ~21,5 Mb)

PSLV launcherThe Megha-Tropiques satellite was launched by an Indian PSLV launcher on 12 October 2011, on a 867 km orbit with an inclination of 20°.

This orbit and the characteristics of each instrument provide the following time sampling.

Number of measurements per day for MADRAS
Number of measurements
per day for MADRAS.
Number of measurements per day for SCARAB
Number of measurements
per day for SCARAB.
 
Nota: The number of measurements per day for SAPHIR is one less than for SCARAB.