Imager for EarthCARE mission

Surrey Satellite Technology (

) has signed a €30m (£26.8m) contract with

, Germany, for the supply of a multi-spectral imager (MSI) for the European Space Agency’s (

) EarthCARE mission.

According to the ESA, EarthCARE is a joint European-Japanese mission intended to improve the understanding of the Earth's radiation balance and to minimise uncertainties in climate change prediction models by measuring simultaneously the vertical structure and horizontal distribution of cloud and aerosol fields together with outgoing radiation over all climate zones.

The SSTL-built MSI will use new technologies developed in Europe to provide information on the horizontal structures of clouds, such as cloud type and cover, and cloud optical and microphysical properties.

Operating from an orbit of around 400km, the MSI will image the Earth at 500m ground sample distance (GSD) over a swath width (the strip of the Earth’s surface from which data will be collected by the satellite) of 150km.