The Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM), also known as Jason-2, will extend into the next decade the continuous climate data record of sea surface height measurements begun in 1992 by the joint NASA/Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) TOPEX/Poseidon mission and continued by the NASA/CNES Jason-1 mission in 2001. This multi-decadal record has already helped scientists study the issue of global sea level rise and better understand how ocean circulation and climate change are related. With OSTM, high-precision ocean altimetry has come of age. The mission will serve as a bridge to transition the collection of these measurements to the world's weather and climate forecasting agencies. The agencies will use them for short- and seasonal-to-long-range weather and climate forecasting. OSTM is designed to last at least three years. It will be placed in the same orbit (1,336 kilometers) as Jason-1 and will move along the same ground track at an inclination of 66 degrees to the equator. It will repeat its ground track every 10 days, covering 95 percent of the world's ice-free oceans. A tandem mission between Jason-1 and OSTM will be conducted to further improve tide models in coastal and shallow seas, and to better understand the dynamics of ocean currents and eddies. OSTM is an international and interagency mission developed and operated as a four-party collaboration among NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), CNES, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). CNES is providing the spacecraft, NASA and CNES are jointly providing the payload instruments and NASA is providing the launch vehicle. After completing the onorbit commissioning of the spacecraft, CNES will hand over operation and control of the spacecraft to NOAA. NOAA and EUMETSAT will generate the near-real-time products and distribute them to users. OSTM was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on June 20, 2008. Launch and Early Orbit Operations (LEOP) and the on-orbit Assessment Phase have been completed. Preliminary science data show excellent performance.

Date Published: 9 October 2008
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 7106, Sensors, Systems, and Next-Generation Satellites XII, 710603 (9 October 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.803677

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7106:
Sensors, Systems, and Next-Generation Satellites XII
Roland Meynart; Steven P. Neeck; Haruhisa Shimoda; Shahid Habib, Editor(s)