Design of a satellite end-to-end mission performance simulator for imaging spectrometers and its application to the ESA's FLEX/Sentinel-3 tandem mission

The performance analysis of a satellite mission requires specific tools that can simulate the behavior of the platform; its payload; and the acquisition of scientific data from synthetic scenes. These software tools, called End-to-End Mission Performance Simulators (E2ES), are promoted by the European Space Agency (ESA) with the goal of consolidating the instrument and mission requirements as well as optimizing the implemented data processing algorithms. Nevertheless, most developed E2ES are designed for a specific satellite mission and can hardly be adapted to other satellite missions. In the frame of ESA's FLEX mission activities, an E2ES is being developed based on a generic architecture for passive optical missions. FLEX E2ES implements a state-of-the-art synthetic scene generator that is coupled with dedicated algorithms that model the platform and instrument characteristics. This work will describe the flexibility of the FLEX E2ES to simulate complex synthetic scenes with a variety of land cover classes, topography and cloud cover that are observed separately by each instrument (FLORIS, OLCI and SLSTR). The implemented algorithms allows modelling the sensor behavior, i.e. the spectral/spatial resampling of the input scene; the geometry of acquisition; the sensor noises and non-uniformity effects (e.g. stray-light, spectral smile and radiometric noise); and the full retrieval scheme up to Level-2 products. It is expected that the design methodology implemented in FLEX E2ES can be used as baseline for other imaging spectrometer missions and will be further expanded towards a generic E2ES software tool.

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