Orbit maps

SOST Orbit Maps

The SOST (SCIAMACHY Operations Support Team) provides maps of the states (limb or nadir) of each SCIAMACHY orbit (choose Geolocation Limb or Geolocation Nadir in the navigation frame). The maps are organised according to their orbit numbers. In the tables below links to the orbit maps are organized according to their date (UTC). The tables are separated to nadir and limb states, explanations to the maps are provided at the end of this page.
Maps are available until   31-DEC-2006 .

Maps of limb states : December 2006

Geolocation

This paragraph is copied from the SOST Weppage("Geolocation").

SCIAMACHY geolocation files exist for nadir and limb states only. They illustrate the start/stop location of each state in the atmosphere (nadir at the Earth surface, limb with start at limb_low = tangent height altitude of 0 km and stop at limb_high = tangent height altitude of 100 km).
The files presented here are either Earth maps with nadir/limb geolocation (gif) or tabular listings of geographic coordinates at state start/stop (geolocation ASCII). The files are based on the swath template provided by the ESA s/w tool ESOV. As the time tags provided in the ENVISAT planning files are derived for the reference orbit, it may occur that the actually executed time tags differ by as much as 5-10 sec from the start/stop times in the geolocation files (shortly before execution the time-tags are updated by Flight Operations to reflect the predicted orbit). Therefore it is recommended to use the Elapsed Time when searching for a particular event along the orbit. The Elapsed Time is the time elapsed since the last ascending node crossing (ANX). ANX time and event time-tags are affected similarly by the time update, i.e. no significant deviations between reference and predicted orbit are expected.
The sub-satellite orbit track displayed in the maps is based on the reference orbit as well. Different track colours indicate the illuminated part of the orbit (yellow) and the eclipse phase (dark blue). The eclipse phase is defined by the eclipse exit/entry times to be given in the Reference Orbit Event (ROE) file.
During the SODAP part of the Commissioning Phase most of the executed states are functional or calibration & monitoring states. Therefore SOST will not continuously generate the aforementioned geolocation files in this phase of the mission. However it is intended to provide typical samples of nadir/limb geolocations whenever required.