Satellite & Space Missions

Biography

Biography: Yaroslav Yatskiv

Abstract

The development of Ukrainian space project "Aerosol-UA" for study of the terrestrial atmospheric aerosol spatial distribution and microphysics to quantify the aerosol contribution to the climate change is discussed. The aerosol remote sensing concept of the project is based on precise orbital measurements of the intensity and polarization of sunlight scattered by the atmosphere, aerosol and the surface by the scanning polarimeter ScanPol accompanied by the wide-angle multispectral imager-polarimeter MSIP. The ScanPol designed for remote sensing of aerosol properties to measure Stokes parameters I, Q, U within the spectral range from the UV to the SWIR in a wide range of phase angles (Milinevsky et al. 2016). Expected ScanPol polarimetric accuracy is ~0.15%. The spectral channels of the ScanPol are used to estimate the tropospheric aerosol absorption, the aerosol over the ocean and the land surface, the signals from cirrus clouds, stratospheric aerosols caused by major volcanic eruptions, and the contribution of the Earth's surface. The imager–polarimeter MSIP will collect images on the state of the atmosphere and surface in the area, where the ScanPol polarimeter will measure, to retrieve aerosol optical depth and polarization properties of aerosol by registration of three Stokes parameters simultaneously in three spectral channels. The main feature of the MSIP channels is the splitting of the image by a special prism-splitter for four images on the same image detector in each channel. In that way we can simultaneously measure four polarization components at 0°, 45°, 90°and 135° as images in each of three polarization channels. One of the special features of ScanPol/MSIP concept is calibration of the MSIP using ScanPol data in the same field-of-view with ~1% expected polarization accuracy. The instruments of "Aerosol-UA" experiment is planned to be launched at the new satellite platform YuzhSat developed in DO Yuzhnoye (Figure 1).