An Era of Constellation Observation - ORMOSAT-3/COSMIC and FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2

摘要

FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC is the first constellation observing system tocollect the atmospheric and ionospheric parameters employing radiooccultation technique. It is a Taiwan-US international cooperation program,executed by NSPO and UCAR respectively. The advantage of constellationobservation is to provide the capability to sense a huge amount of data overthe globe with the same satellite configuration. Through constellationdeployment, the users can obtain geographically homogenous distributedmeasurements. FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 consisting of six satellites is thefollow-up program of FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC. It is a joint program underAIT/TECRO agreement; NSPO coordinates the responsibilities of Taiwanteam and NOAA is the representative of the U.S. team. The mission aims tocollect more than 4000 sounding profiles at low- and mid-latitude regionsevery day with 30-minute data latency. The design, integration and test, andverification are implemented to meet the technically challengingrequirements. The paper will provide an overview to the benefits andtechnical challenges of FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 constellation.