ILRS Missions Working Group Meeting

The following report summary for the ILRS Missions Working Group shows summary and referenced to Slide files presented at the General Assembly meeting

1. MWG MEMBERSHIP AND ACTIONS

1.1 Membership
Prior to ILRS Meeting:

At the Governing Board Meeting, a new coordinator was appointed. The new ILRS Coordinator and Deputy are:

Other new members to the MWG include from this period and last includes:

Retained membership include:

Also, as announced prior to and again at the ILRS meetings, Dr. John Degnan has announced his retirement from NASA. The MWG wishes to express our deepest gratitude for his many years of service to the SLR community and the ILRS including the Missions Working Group. We wish him well in his future endevers.

1.2 Membership action

• More active participation to be recruited for membership - keep trying
  
• Change Mission Request Form to reflect satellite name in message Subject line - no action

2. PAST AND CURRENT ACTIVITY SINCE LAST MEETING
(March 2002, Nice, France)

2.1 Campaign/Mission Status
Campaign and mission status reports were provided for the Etalon -1, 2 campaign, the LRE campaign campaigns and are summarized below. Updates on the Reflector, Starshine-3, and METEOR-3M campaigns were updated on the slides but not presented. The METEOR-3M campaign was presented at the ILRS General Assembly.

The Etalon -1, -2 campaign was updated by Ron Noomen, Delft University in from the Analysis Working Group report. A recommendation was made and accepted to promote the Etalon campaign to a permanent mission status with the campaign tracking priority. The committee accepted the recommendation.

The LRE status was updated by Maki Maeda, NASDA and proposed the second campaign in next year. There were discussions about preparatory work and more information such as visibility and signal strength experience to be clarified before going to the campaign. Action will be on going by NASDA and CRL.

2.2 Mission/Satellite Data Base for Satellite Signature Study/ COM
Information is on going.

3. CONTINUING AND FUTURE ACTIONS
Work with satellite organizations to get Mission Request Forms and Support Plans completed and put on Web is ongoing. The Satellite Tracking Priority List was provided on the slide files.

There was an introduction of the Intelligent Scheduling Software. A paper was presented at the laser workshop by Bart Clark from HTSI. In his presentation, he discussed the ability to schedule one to many stations to automatically assign and adjust tracking priority by many factors. It was agreed by those in the meeting to establish a splinter group consisting of all working groups to discuss this further. A meeting is anticipated in Nice in the Spring of 2003.

4. UPCOMING MISSIONS WITHIN 2002
The following missions are currently planned for launch within 2002. Updates were provided for the following missions:

• ICESat - 1 (launch December 2002) - Update by Peter Shelus - CSR
  
• ADEOS-II (launch December 2002) - Update by Maki Maeda - NASDA

Both of them have restricted ranging requirements in the pass due to the possibility of damage to other optical sensors onboard the spacecraft.

• ICESat has minimum concerns since only laser pointing at Zenith could cause problems.
  
• ADEOS-II has complicated story and a global tracking campaign of launch + 34 days should be observed. Following that only stations registered with NASDA and following strict restrictions will be permitted to track.
  

5. UPCOMING MISSIONS BEYOND 2002
ANDE (launch Late 2003) - Mr. Andrew Nicholas from the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) presented an introduction to the ANDE mission. There were discussions in objectives and mission feasibility in comparison with the past (GFZ-1) and current (Champ or Grace) missions.

CryoSat (2004), Gravity Probe B (April 2003) and NPOESS (2013) status was updated in slide files but no details were provided at this meeting.

6. OTHER MISSION NEWS

• Jason Maneuver messages are not following proper formatting guidelines. The Jason team was notified and is working on the issue.
  
• India remote sensing satellite IRS was updated by Elango K.Udayar, ISRO.
  

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Last modified date: Friday, November 05, 2004
Author: Scott Wetzel Scott Wetzel
Maintained by: Carey Noll