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The German Research Center for Geosciences also known as GFZ-Potsdam has a long history in the definition and development of new spaceborne sensors such as for gravity and optical Earth Observation missions with GRACE, GRACE-FO, MOMS, and very recently with the launch of EnMAP on 1st April 2022. The Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) is the first German spaceborne hyperspectral satellite mission. EnMAP aims at monitoring and characterizing the Earth’s environment on a global scale. Core science objectives are toward studying environmental changes, ecosystem responses to human activities, and management of natural resources. The EnMAP mission consortium is composed of the DLR Space Administration in Bonn that is responsible for the overall project management, OHB is responsible of the space segment, DLR Earth Observation Center is responsible of the ground segment, and GFZ Potsdam is responsible for the science related activities and science mission support.
In particular, EnMAP is accompanied by an extensive scientific exploitation preparation program that has been run for more than a decade to support industrial and mission development, and scientific exploitation of the data by the user community. In the current EnMAP phase, this program includes mission support during the current commissioning phase and the start of the nominal phase planned toward end of October, supported by the EnMAP Science Advisory Group. In that frame, large activities in the GFZ remote sensing group are dedicated to a) hyperspectral sensor simulation, data quality and validation of EnMAP data products, b) development of methods and open softwares toolboxes such as in the QGIS EnMAP-Box for the pre-processing of radiance to reflectance, and for the retrieval of geo- and bio-physical parameters, c) user community training and workshops, development of new educational resources such as in the EnMAP online learning initiative HYPERedu, opening of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the basics of imaging spectroscopy, d) mission support and development of validation and background mission plan, and EnMAP announcement of opportunities.
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