Carbon dioxide monitoring satellites instrument passes vacuum test
Europe's pioneering Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring mission has cleared a significant development milestone, marking further progress towards a new era of greenhouse gas monitoring from space.
Engineers at Thales Alenia Space have completed the vacuum testing phase for the first satellite's imaging spectrometer, demonstrating its ability to operate in the extreme conditions of space.
Once in orbit and operational, the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) mission will measure atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations. Remarkably, CO2M will make it possible to distinguish between natural and human-induced sources of carbon dioxide and methane.
The mission's data will, therefore, provide vital evidence to strengthen climate action and emissions transparency worldwide.
At the heart of the mission is a powerful optical instrument – an imaging spectrometer, designed to capture a 250 km-wide strip of Earth in four different parts of the light spectrum, from visible light to wavelengths invisible to the human eye.
To achieve the precision needed, the instrument must be aligned in the same conditions it will experience in space: a vacuum environment, with its detectors cooled to temperatures as low as –20°C for the visible and near-infrared cameras and –123°C for the shortwave-infrared cameras.
Tiny precision spacers, accurate to less than one thousandth of a millimetre, were custom-made and installed beneath each of the four cameras to fine-tune their alignment. Tests carried out in vacuum confirmed that all four spectral channels are now perfectly focused.
The campaign also took advantage of the space-simulated test environment to measure several key performance characteristics of the spectrometer. These included its ability to minimise unwanted stray light, its spectral response across all four bands, and the performance of its detectors once fully assembled.
This critical milestone has now been successfully completed during the instrument's first measurement tests inside the vacuum chamber at Thales Alenia Space's facilities in Cannes, France, marking an important step toward preparing the mission for launch towards the end of next year.
The campaign also included a thermal balance test of the spectrometer, allowing engineers to check that its thermal behaviour matches their predictions and giving them valuable data early in the testing process.
With this important milestone completed, the instrument is being returned to normal conditions for the integration of its remaining components: a cloud imager and a multi-angle polarimeter, which together with the spectrometer form the satellite's full instrument package.
In addition, the development of the first satellite has also passed another milestone – its cloud imager has been completed and has been delivered to Thales Alenia Space by OIP Sensor Systems. This instrument will play a crucial supporting role in the mission by identifying and filtering cloud-contaminated data.
The mission will consist of three identical satellites, which means that it will only take 3.5 days to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane around the globe.
While the instruments for the first satellite are being prepared for launch, development of the spectrometer for the second satellite is also advancing at Thales Alenia Space's facility in Cannes. It is scheduled to undergo the same alignment campaign in summer 2026.
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