Envisat fast facts
Size
- Envisat is the size of an articulated truck
- 10m x 4m x 4m with solar panel and ASAR stowed
- 25m x 7m x 10m with solar panel and ASAR deployed
Weight
- 8200 kg at launch
- includes 300 kg hydrazine fuel for orbit control thrusters
Power
- solar array generates 6.6 kW of electricity after five years in orbit
Orbit
- orbits Earth every 100 minutes at altitude 800 km
- global coverage every 3 days (for most instrument)
- exact repeat coverage every 35 days
Lifetime
- 5 years design life
- both ESA's previous Earth Observation Satellites ERS-1 and 2 significantly exceeded their design lifetimes
Instruments
- ten instruments observing Earth
- in wavelengths from 0.2 micrometer to 10 cm
Data gathering
- Envisat will collect 1 Petabyte (1015 bytes) of data over its lifetime
- enough to fill the hard disk drivers of a million desktop PCs
Datalinks
- 2 x 100 Mbit/s links via European Data Relay Satellite
- 2 x 100 Mbit/s direct downlinks to ground receiving stations
- each link 2000 times faster than a standard computer modem
Data storage
- 160 Gbits total data storage on board
- enough for 1.6 million square kilometres of SAR imagery plus one complete orbit of data from all the other sensors
Construction
- satellite built by consortium of 50 companies led by Astrium
- ground segment built by consortium of 20 companies led by Alcatel Space Industries
Launcher
- Arianne-5 launch vehicle from Europe's Spaceport Guyana Space Centre
Cost
- 2 billion Euro over 15 years
- works out at 7 Euro per citizen per ESA member nations or about 1 cup of coffee each a year
Participating states
- Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom