THE ERS-1 MISSION 
In 1981, the Member States of the European Space Agency (except Ireland), 
together with Norway, Austria and Canada, decided to iniatite the first ESA 
Remote Sensing Satellite Programme (known as ERS-1, which is due to be 
launched in 1989). This first mission is oriented towards ice and ocean 
monitoring, the main mission objectives being of both scientific and 
economic nature and aiming at : 
. increasing the scientific understanding of coastal zones and global ocean 
processes which, together with the monitoring of polar regions, will 
provide a major contribution to the World Climate Research Programme 
. developing and promoting economic/commercial applications related to a 
better knowledge of ocean parameters and sea-state conditions 
Table 1 lists the ERS-1 onboard main instrumentation and the various 
geophysical parameters to be measured. 
Two quite different communities will be served by ERS-1 
- The applications community using ERS-1 data on a continuous and 
operational basis for various applications such as offshore petroleum 
activities, ship routing, fishing, sea-ice monitories etc. They require 
data/product delivery within a few (1 to 3) hours after acquisition. 
- The scientific community, more concerned with techniques, usually prefers 
to handle annotated raw data as inputs to models and algorithms, and has 
no requirement for short delivery times (computer-compatible tapes would 
meet their needs). 
Table 2 illustrates the relevance of the various instruments to mission 
capabilities. Fig.4 illustrates the overall ground segment concept and data 
flow of the ERS-1 mission. 
With ERS-1, it is expected that a gradual transfer of applications from 
experimental to operational users will take place, preparing users for 
future operational satellite systems. Although not yet approved, ESA plans 
to propose during the course of 1987, to the Participating States in ERS-1 
that a second flight unit, nearly identical to ERS-1, be launched two or 
three years after the launch of ERS-1, i.e. in the 1991 - 1992 timeframe, 
thereby providing the user community with five to six years of continuous 
data. 
TIROS-N AVHRR REMOTE SENSING APPLICATION COORDINATION IN EUROPE 
There is a growing interest by the European Remote Sensing User Community in 
using AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) data for monitoring 
applications, taking advantage of the highly repetitious capability of the 
NOAA TIROS missions. Few European facilities are already operational in 
acquiring and processing TIROS digital data; to which Maspalomas has been 
added, which is operated by Earthnet and financially supported by the 
Commission of the European Communities. 
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