System definition of the ESA Earth Explorer SPECTRA Mission

摘要

The paper describes the system implementation for SPECTRA, which is one of the candidates for the future ESA Earth Explorer Core Missions. The system will enable observations of defined land targets in various spectral bands from the Visible into the Thermal Infrared (TIR) and with variable directions of observations. These observations will provide samples of the Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) of vegetation. To monitor variations in time of the vegetation properties, the observations will be performed with a revisit of 3 days, assuming cloud-free conditions.