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IRSUTE, A HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION THERMAL INFRARED 
RADIOMETER FOR ENVIRONMENT STUDIES 
Thierry Phulpin 
Bernard Seguin 
Frangois Becker 
CNES, Agence Frangaise de l'Espace 
DP/OT 
18, avenue Edouard Belin 
Toulouse, Cedex 31055, France 
ISPRS Commission VII / Working Group 1 
ABSTRACT 
IRSUTE (for Infra Red Satellite Unit for Terrestrial Environment) is a scientific mission for land surface 
fluxes determination with thermal imagery at high spatial resolution. It will serve to optimize the 
methods of atmospheric correction, decoupling surface temperature and emissivity and ultimately retrieve 
fluxes combining with Information at lower resolution and better repetitive from METEOSAT, AVHRR 
or ATSR. Other applications to geology, soil characterization, fire detection, thermal pollution are 
envisaged. The main characteristics of the system and instrument have been defined according to the 
mission requirements in the phase O/A study started in 1994. A first design is proposed in this 
presentation. The instrument will exhibit channels at 3.7, 8.8, 11 and 12 um and an additional visible 
channel with 40 m resolution. The Field of View should be 10 to 40 km. The instrument will be on board 
a small satellite at 720 km with a phase of 3 days in order to ensure a high temporal repetitive of 
observation on selected test sites equipped with adapted ground truth instrumentation. 
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