VENµS: SPECIFICITIES OF IMAGE QUALITY AND IN-ORBIT CALIBRATION MONITORING

Earth observation satellites like Sentinel-2 or Landsat 8 have already demonstrated the importance of a global coverage associated with high resolution (about 10 m) for regional and country scales applications. These applications, such as detailed land-cover mapping, agri-environment policies, water management, vegetation primary productivity and yield estimates, are crucial for defining global change mitigation or adaptation policies. To prepare the future earth observations systems, users raised one question about the increasing of the revisit period in order to limit the impact of cloud-coverage on the applications and to capture rapid phenomena. In this context, VENµS products offer an undeniable added value to explore the benefit of expanding the time rate of high resolution acquisition in visible and near infrared spectral bands.

VENµS provides 5 and 10 m resolution images in 12 shortwave spectral bands every two days over a set of 123 scientific sites, with constant viewing angle and overpass time. Firstly, this article presents briefly the main characteristics of the mission and available products. Then, it explains the objectives and the activities of radiometric and geometric calibrations. A special focus is made on the different radiometric and geometric calibration methods and the associated calculated performances.

VENµS data are freely available to everybody for peaceful and non-commercial uses on the French Theia land data center: http://www.theia-land.fr. Continuous observations will be performed all along the scientific mission duration, until mid-2020.