The ESA CaRMA Campaign: An Overview of the Acquired Data

Kurzfassung

In preparation of the hyperspectral CHIME mission, the European Space Agency (ESA) has initiated a large campaign between April 2025 and October 2025 in the agricultural area of Puch, West of Munich, Germany. A wide range of optical instruments such as hyperspectral satellite, multisensorial airborne and UAV based high-resolution RGB data acquisitions have been acquired together with frequent in situ measurements characterising soil and vegetation. Contemporaneously, the high-performance aircraft-based radar system F-SAR was deployed to provide data in preparation for the RADAR mission ROSE-L. Effective implementation of remote sensing campaigns requires close coordination among multiple operational and institutional partners. In this context, the synchronization of data acquisition activities with ASI (PRISMA), Teledyne (DESIS) and DLRs EnMAP ground segment was essential to ensure optimal temporal resolution. Between 1st of April 2025 and 31st of Oct 2025, overall, 35 cloud free hyperspectral datasets from DESIS, PRISMA and EnMAP could be recorded resulting in one acquisition on average every ~6 days. Similarly, the coordination of airborne HySpex (DLR), HyPlant (CzechGlobe) overpasses for recording complementary hyperspectral, fluorescence and thermal observations under comparable conditions enhances the scalability and validation activities. In total, six airborne hyperspectral flights were successfully conducted. Five out of six overpasses were planned (North to South) to align with synchronous hyperspectral satellite overpasses. One acquisition was addressed to the effects of bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) with an adjusted flight strategy. UAV airborne data was collected by DLR a) with a user-friendly consumer UAV (RGB) on a weekly basis resulting in nearly 15.000 high resolution RGB images and b) by GFZ with a UAV carrying and hyperspectral HySpex & LIDAR setup. In situ data include overall two soil sampling data sets acquired by DLR and GFZ aiming to derive SOC, pH, texture and other key soil parameters. Microtops measurements for atmospheric characterization (DLR), and weekly sampling of vegetation traits like Leaf-Area-Index (LAI), Aboveground Dry Biomass, Canopy Nitrogen Content and Canopy Carbon Content for respectively leaf, stem and fruit by LMU to support the calibration and validation for remote sensing methodologies.