Sener Aerospace has signed a contract to supply scanner and calibration mechanisms and electronics for the Forum mission (Far-Infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring), which will be the ninth Earth Explorer mission by the European Space Agency (ESA).
By measuring the radiation emitted to space by the Earth, this mission will provide new insights into the amount of planetary radiation and how to control it. This will lead to improvements in the climate models and, thus, to further precision in climate change assessments and climate prediction.
The mechanisms supplied by Sener Aerospace will allow sequencing the regular calibration and scanning points of the atmosphere’s surface in an automated way. As a result, it will allow building a complete map of the surface and monitoring its evolution over time, with the aim of understanding how temperature is regulated on the surface.
Pablo Campo, Project Manager of the Forum’s mechanisms, comments,“The aim of this mission is to obtain unknown information on the behavior of the climate and global warming. It involves studying an infrared band that is not covered by any other Earth observation satellite, in order to regulate the climate. We will be able to map the heat balance of the atmosphere and see, layer by layer and component by component, how much heat the Earth receives and stores from the Sun and how much it emits back into space. ESA has made this mission urgent”.
Sener Aerospace has experience in similar mechanisms, such as the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite’s scanner. The insights obtained in this program will enable the team at Sener Aerospace to develop this system in an extremely short time, in line with the mission’s urgency.
Sener Aerospace has been in the international space industry since 1967 and provided equipment and systems to over 1,500 satellites and space vehicles on the Telecom market, as well as nearly 300 devices and systems on board NASA, ESA, JAXA and Roscosmos missions, with a 100% reliability rate.
ESA and NASA missions include HRE, SEOSAT/Ingenio, CHIME, LSTM, Hubble, Rosetta, SMOS, Pléiades, Herschel&Planck, JUICE, Athena, Solar Orbiter, Proba-3, Gaia, BepiColombo, ExoMars, Curiosity, Euclid, LISA Pathfinder, MTG, FLEX, LOP Gateway, Mars2020, Earth Explorers, COPERNICUS and Galileo. Science projects include the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the telescopes William Herschel, EST and ELT. In the commercial market, Senner provides supplies to the manufacturers of communications satellites, as well as in New Space (constellations Spainsat NG, Globalstar 2G, O3B, Iridium NEXT, OneWeb, OneSat) and in launchers and vehicles such as ATV, IXV, ARIANE 6, VEGA, Verta and Space Rider.