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At its core, a stratospheric ozone mission
A part of ESA’s EarthWatch programme since 2016, ALTIUS is a Belgian-led satellite mission whose primary objective is producing a near-real-time data product for monitoring the Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer.
The ALTIUS scientific team at BIRA-IASB, who leads the retrieval algorithm development as well as provides mission performance evaluations and scientific guidance to ESA and other consortium partners, is in the process of expanding the mission capabilities for further observing the atmosphere’s composition.
As “ESA’s Ozone Mission,” ALTIUS serves an important role for the scientific community. The ozone layer provides a natural protective shield for our planet against the Sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. Since the discovery of the ozone hole and depletion of this protective layer since the 1970s, the long-term monitoring of ozone has been of critical importance. New satellite missions like ALTIUS will prevent a gap in the measurement record and allow for the continued observation and study of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Expanding to a wide range of important atmospheric molecules
In further developments led by the ALTIUS team at BIRA-IASB, ALTIUS’s mission is now being massively expanded to also include a large suite of other important atmospheric molecules.
The scientific team is currently hard at work developing up to 21 independent processing chains, representing 10 species in addition to stratospheric ozone: NO2, aerosols, polar stratospheric and mesospheric clouds, mesospheric ozone, NO3, BrO, OClO, and water vapour, as well as the retrieval of atmospheric temperature profiles. The long-term monitoring of these species provides the scientific community with valuable data for vital scientific studies, including climate change modelling and prediction.
ALTIUS’s remarkable capability to retrieve different atmospheric molecules is made possible thanks to its innovative instrument, which uses three independent spectral imagers that detect in a wide spectrum of wavelengths in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared.
ALTIUS also boasts the ability to probe the atmosphere using scattered sunlight, or the light directly transmitted from the Sun, the Moon, the planets, or bright stars, with always the same objective: the vertical distribution of constituents of the atmosphere. These measurements will become available to the scientific community following the launch of ALTIUS within the next two years.
