Abstract

Impact of the global environmental issues has been rapidly increasing nowadays. The depletion of the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect are typical topics among them. The satellite remote sensing is a powerful method for monitoring the global environment. On this occasion, the Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer (ILAS) was planned to monitor the stratospheric ozone layers and the polar ozone holes, and was applied to the ADEOS (Advanced Earth Observing Satellite), to be launched in February, 1995, by NASDA, Japan. ILAS was selected as an AO instruments, with two core sensors; AVNIR(Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer), OCTS(Ocean Color and Temperature Spectrometer), and other five AO sensors; NSCATT(NASA-Scatterometer), TOMS(Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer, NASA), POLDER(Polarization & Bidirectionality of Earth’s Surface, CNES), IMG(Infrared Mapper for Greenhouse Gases) and RIS(Retroreflector in Space). ILAS is a solar occultation sensor (Fig. 1), which measures high latitude stratospheric constituents in both hemispheres. ADEOS is an experimental polar platform spacecraft, to be launched to a sun-synchronous orbit by a H-II rocket. The equatorial crossing time will be 10:30 a.m. (descending). The inclination angle is 98.6 deg., the orbit altitude is 800 km, and the period of one cycle is 101 min. ADEOS is an international satellite, which offers the opportunity to the sensors from outside Japan. The combination of the ILAS (Japan) and TOMS (NASA) will work to give global coverage and the vertical profile for a global ozone distribution.

© 1990 Optical Society of America