A French-U.S. mission
CNES grasps the opportunity in 1998
CNES selected Calipso at the Arcachon space science seminar in 1998. It is a joint French-U.S. mission, part of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder programme (ESSP).
NASA has overall mission responsibility for Calipso, in association with the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL) in France and Hampton University in the United States. CNES and NASA have jointly managed the project, the exploitation is also carried out in narrow synergy CNES/NASA.
Shared responsibilities
CNES is leading satellite development. It is responsible for satellite control in-orbit, the ground control segment, and is supplying an infrared imaging instrument. It is also establishing an imaging expertise site to monitor quality of imagery from this instrument. IPSL defined science data processing tasks. In addition, CNES is supporting NASA with management and system tasks.
Calipso at Alcatel. Crédits : Alcatel
CNES is in charge of in-orbit satellite operations. NASA manage the payload and forward telecommands to CNES for uplinking.
Calipso science products are retrieved by the Icare data processing and management centre and made available for exploitation by the scientific community in combination with other A-Train data.
