Guidelines on the improvement of future missions support for thematic applications v1
Creators: name: Catucci, Antonella
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019

description: The main objective of the task 3.4 “Future missions support for thematic applications“ is to analyse the opportunities for technologies not currently being deployed within the Sentinels fleet and at proposals for future missions, which could address some of the needs and gaps expressed in WP2.The work will provide details about this analysis together with Guidelines and Recommendations that could support decision makers and institutional actors in design new missions that could benefit the agriculture sector.To achieve the task objectives, the work performed includes the following major logical steps:1.Review of the current EO missions relevant for the agriculture applications 2.Analysis of future already planned EO missions inthe Copernicus framework and analysis on how they can improve capabilities in the agriculture domain 3.Analysis of EO existing and planned missions out of the Sentinel framework 4.Summary of the survey results in comparison with the defined requirements (results of WP2) and guidelines for future missions planning.The workflow described starts from the analysis performed in project User requirements analysis (WP2)that provided main gaps in terms of mission parameters (payload, revisit time and spatial resolution) that affect EO applications in the agriculture domain.Considering thisinformation,a detailedsurvey of existing and planned EO missions at institutional (Copernicus) and Commercial levelhas been realised. The extensive analysis includesall the missions at worldwide level and takes into account also the current planned extension of Sentinel fleet (in this case some uncertainties in terms of planned lunch dates occurred) and new micro-satellite constellations that are revolutionizing the current EO mission paradigm. The objective of the survey is to focalise what are the missing capabilities of EOcurrent missions and provide guidelines for future developments.The first part of the work performed has been focussed on the survey; the next version of the present deliverable will focus on providing a critical analysis of the results obtained and related recommendations.Someinitial comments especially on SAR constellations and hyperspectral satellites are already includedin the present version and in particular:SAR: the analysis performed show thatoperational and planned SAR missions are generally compliant with the spatial requirements and most of them provide dual polarization data, useful for agriculture applications. On the other side, the need of frequent acquisitions, that is less than 4-5 days of revisit time, is a major issue especially affecting L-band sensors. Future SAR missions should focus on the improvement of the revisit time, achievable by tuning the following parameters:•Number of satellitesThe constellations allow to improve the revisit time; solutions with new generation of satellites in cooperation with existent missions are a possible solution. •Satellite AgilityUse of Gyro device, Right and Left Looking, electrical steering allows to improve the satellite’s agility to acquire image as soon as possible.Hyperspectral: operational and planned Hyperspectral systems are generally compliant with the spectral requirements, whereas they do not meet eitherthe spatial resolution requirements. Since the systems are generally composed of a few number of satellites (1 or 2 in general), they also offer a limited revisit that in principle can be improved using the agility of the satellite, but not enough to reach the 3 days objective. Only use of a constellation may help on this aspect. The most challenging objective is the improvement of the spatial resolution in the whole VNIR and SWIR, because it requires taking into account other design parameters such as spectral resolution and spectral range. Thus, to achieve high performances, a larger payload is needed