SCIAMACHY Operations in an Extended Mission up to 2010

Abstract

SCIAMACHY on ENVISAT has now successfully operated more than 5 years in-orbit. With the extension of the ENVISAT mission, the instrument will significantly exceed its originally specified mission lifetime. In order to preserve SCIAMACHY's excellent status, it is necessary to adapt certain aspects of operations to the extended mission. This both concerns instrument measurement execution and monitoring. Special attention has to be payed for the life limited items on-board SCIAMACHY. Therefore the mission scenarios must be revised to ensure that in-flight usage does not conflict with specifications but still fulfil scientific requirements. Additional monitoring tasks are required to understand the performance of instrument subsystems which might be subject to degradation in a longer mission lifetime. Particularly interesting in this respect are scanners and the thermal systems. For these purposes we have developed and implemented an extended monitoring concept. It will permit maintaining SCIAMACHY in a healthy status, a prerequisite for generating high quality scientific data for the years to come.