News
Twenty years ago ... Topex/Poseidon was launched
When Topex/Poseidon was launched from Kourou on 10 August 1992, it was already a successful outcome for all the work involved in the frame of a cooperation between Nasa and Cnes, both on the human and the technical planes.
The 13-year mission that followed (until 2005) marked the beginning of a new era in altimetry including a blooming applications and a growing community (see Image of the month, <link internal-link>August 2012).
The mission's success is also lies in the fact that during this life, Topex/Poseidon was not alone and the history still continues with the current missions.
Indeed, merging satellites in flight simultaneously on different orbits, such the association between Topex/Poseidon and ERS was a fine example how altimetry satellites can operate together to track with a high spatial resolution the ocean variations.
Topex/Poseidon is also the first satellite to describe a reference orbit, exactly follows by Jason-1 (from 2001), by Jason-2 (from 2008) and soon by Jason-3 (2014) and Jason-CS (2017). The cumulative duration of all of these missions is also the key of success to build a time series long enough to better understanding the interannual variations and the climate change.
The story continues...
<link fileadmin images altimetry tp_1st_cycle_vs_100years.png download> | <link fileadmin images news mod_actus download> |
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Ten days of Topex/Poseidon satellite measurements (top) provide more details than in situ observations over the last hundred years (bottom). | Map of the day (2012/08/10), twenty years after the launch of T/P, Ssalto/Duacs Near-Real Time merged map of Sea Level Anomalies around the globe (click to animate). |
Further information:
- Missions:
- <link internal-link>Topex/Poseidon
- <link internal-link>Thirteen eventful years
- Image of the month, August 2012: <link internal-link>Altimetry, 20 years and still growing
- Altimetry: <link internal-link>Altimetry history
Image of the month 
