TOP > Report & Column > The Forefront of Space Science > 2015 > The Scientific Achievements and Issues Brought by SMILES
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Towards the Next Observation Plan With the high-sensitibe observation beyond the common sense of the atmospheric observation satellites, the SMILES has brought us with a lot of new knowledge. However, on 21th April 2010, unfortunately the observation had to be stopped atmospheric observation due to instrumental failures. We are now making the next plan to continue the high-precision observation. The measuring instrument is designed to take the high-precision measuring of temperature as a priority along with the trace gasses. This is because it is necessary to know the thermal structure for understanding the earth’s atmosphere, and to retrieve the altitude distribution of the trace gasses from the measured brightness temperature, we need the temperature information. (*4) At first, the SMILES aimed at deriving the altitude distribution of ozone from the bottom of stratosphere (15km) to the top of mesosphere (80km), but it became possible to derive that of higher altitude (100km at ver3.0 of SMILES level 2 (*4)) with the high-sensitivity observation of SMILES, which was beyond our imagination. However, there is no information of the temperature of that height, so we put a lot of efforts in processing the data. Measuring the trace gasses and the temperature at the same time has become a necessity to make full use of the high-precision data. It is expected that the data of higher precision based on the demonstrated technologies of SMILES is not only used to watch over out atmosphere from the space, but also used for the scientific researches such as the inflow process of the substances from troposphere to stratosphere, the effects of the processes of middle atmosphere on climate change and the interactions between solar activity and upper atmosphere, as well as used as the basic data taken by the chemical transport model for predicting the future ozone layer. (Koji Imai) (*4) Deriving the altitude distribution from the radiation intensity: The radiation intensity observed by SMILES would be calibrated by the data processing system on the ground and the altitude distribution of trace gasses (Level 2 data) would be derived by the higher level system.
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