In the past twenty years, gravimetry missions have demonstrated a unique capability to monitor major climate-related changes of the Earth directly from space – among others quantifying the melt of large glaciers and ice sheets, global sea level rise, continental draught and major flooding events. A Quantum Space Gravimetry (QSG) mission will provide corresponding Essential Climate Variables (ECV) with unprecedented quality compared to the initially demonstrated and already very successful missions like GOCE and GRACE (FO). To respond to the increasing demand of the user community for sustained mass change observations at higher spatial and temporal resolution, ESA and NASA are coordinating their activities and harmonizing their cooperation scenarios in an implementation framework, called MAGIC (MAss change and Geosciences International Constellation). In a future post-MAGIC mission, classical sensors can be combined with a Cold Atom Interferometry (CAI) instrument, or at a later stage a full quantum sensor could be employed. These Quantum Missions for Climate will reach sensitivities, which enable many applications addressing user needs with respect to water management and hazard prevention among others. Several studies related to these new sensor concepts were initiated at ESA, including technology development for different instrument configurations and validation activities. A new study has been initiated, the Quantum Space Gravimetry for Earth Mass Transport (QSG4EMT), with the focus on both, QSG mission architectures for monitoring of Earth's mass transport processes and the development of QSG user requirements.
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The objective of ESA’s Next Generation Gravity Mission (NGGM) is long-term monitoring of the temporal variations of Earth’s gravity field at high temporal (down to 3 days) and spatial (100 km) resolution. Such variations carry information about mass change induced by the water cycle and the related mass exchange among atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and land, and will complete our picture of Global Change with otherwise unavailable data. The observable is the variation of the distance between two satellites measured by a laser interferometer; ultra-precise accelerometers measure the nongravitational accelerations to correct the gravity signal in the data processing. The optimal satellite system comprises two pairs of satellites on low (between 396 and 488 km) circular orbits, at 220 km separation, one pair quasi-polar and the other around 65°-70° inclination. The satellite-to-satellite tracking technique for detecting the temporal variations of gravity was established by GRACE (300-400 km spatial resolution at monthly intervals) using tracking in the microwave band. Today, GRACE is being continued by GRACE-Follow-On, with similar objectives, where the laser interferometry has improved the measurement resolution by a factor of 100 (upper MBW). At 150 km spatial resolution, mass change would become observable in 80% of all significant river basins, against 10% achieved with GRACE. High temporal resolution will reveal large-scale sub-weekly mass variations, with applications in water and emergency management. NGGM is a candidate Mission of Opportunity for ESA-NASA cooperation in the framework of MAGIC. The paper focusses on the on-going Phase A system design and technology pre-development activities.
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