Thales Contracted by CNES For French-Chinese Observation Satellite

by Sara M. Langston with the blog faculty Source: ASDNews Cannes – Thales Alenia Space announced that it has signed end December 2010, a contract with French space agency CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) to produce the Surface Waves Investigation and Monitoring (SWIM) instrument. This wave-scatterometer spectrometer was chosen within the scope of a joint French-Chinese program to develop an Earth observation satellite, the "China France Oceanography Satellite" (CFOSAT), built jointly by CNES and the China National Space Administration (CNSA). The CFOSAT satellite will detect and characterize surface winds and ocean wave spectrum properties. Mission objectives are to understand, monitor and characterize sea surface states (winds and waves) over the entire planet, then incorporate this information in meteorology and climatology models. The SWIM instrument will be paired with the SCAT instrument made by China to form the payload for the CFOSAT satellite, which will be based on a CAST platform.

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