On Friday 29th April, we were pleased to welcome Dr Martin Unwin of SSTL, to present his webinar entitled ‘CDE Webinar – Dr Martin Unwin, SSTL. The Scout-2 HydroGNSS Microsatellite Mission’. This talk continued our ‘Data digitisation, rescue, and re-purposing’ webinar series.
Scout missions are a new Element in ESA’s FutureEO Programme, demonstrating science from small satellites, with a three year launch schedule, under a limited budget. Data will be made available freely using a data service delivery approach. HydroGNSS has been selected as the second ESA Scout Earth Observation mission, primed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, with support from a team of scientific institutions. The microsatellite uses established and new GNSS- Reflectometry techniques to take four land-based hydrological climate variables; soil moisture, freeze/thaw, inundation and biomass. The initial project is for a single satellite in a near-polar sun synchronous orbit at 550 km altitude that will approach global coverage monthly, but an option to add a second satellite has been proposed that would halve the time to cover the globe, and eventually a future constellation could be affordably deployed to achieve daily revisits.
Further information and details, this and the wider webinar series is online at https://digitalenvironment.org/cde-webinar-series/#MartinUnwin.