Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
monit-
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weather and
climate
change

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p50.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p47.

p48

But by 1988, it started to become apparent that their development might be delayed. At the seventh Council meeting in March of that year, the Secretariat acknowledged that the scheduled launch date for the first of the new satellites had slipped to the end of 1995. This change was not necessarily disastrous because delays were accumulating in the scheduled launch date for the third operational Meteosat, MOP3, now known as Meteosat 6. Providing, therefore, that the development of the MSG programme did not slide further, there was a chance that MOP 3 might bridge the gap until the first of the next generation of Meteosats was ready for launch. This kind of juggling of launch dates is not unusual.

A few months later, at the eighth Council meeting in June 1988, the delays to MSG were looking more serious. For the first time the delegates fully expressed at a Council meeting their concerns about the costs, meteorological priorities and technical complexity of ideas for the next generation of Meteosats and decided to conduct further studies of alternative instrument packages for the new satellites. Despite the extra time needed for these studies, it was not yet inevitable that EUMETSAT would need an additional satellite to bridge the gap between the first and second generation of Meteosats.

What was clear was that the satellites of the Meteosat Operational Programme, MOP, would still be in orbit after 30 November 1995, the date when ESA's contract to operate the satellites of this series expired. EUMETSAT, therefore, needed to decide how its ground segment would be managed and operated after that date. A Resolution passed at the eighth Council meeting first acknowledged this impending issue, and authorised the Secretariat to undertake preparatory work on "an extension to the present ESA MOP programme".

Nine months later the Secretariat told the fourth meeting of the Policy Advisory Committee PAC, in March 1989, that the first possible launch date for MSG had slipped to 1998 and that ESA had been asked to evaluate how MOP could be extended by four years and what that would cost. The minutes recorded "Taking note of the current launch schedule the PAC considered that if the MOP was to be extended then there would be a requirement for an additional satellite."

The need for this interim satellite raised four significant questions. What would be the technology of the interim satellites. What would be the technology of the interim satellite? How would this satellite be paid for? What would be the nature of the ground segment, that is, what would its architecture be? And, who would be responsible for the definition, development, management and routine operation of the ground segment elements?

Satellite technology was the easiest issue to resolve, ground segment operations the hardest. Answering the question of how to pay for the MTP created a crisis (see table 2).

First, satellite technology: part of EUMETSAT's strategy for the operational series was that it should always have a set of spares ready for substitution of a failed unit close to a launch. EUMETSAT's Secretariat and the Agency's Executive were fully aware of this policy and they talked in a low-key way about the possibility of assembling these spares into an interim Meteosat spacecraft as soon as delays in the

11th January, 2016

The next text page in the hard copy of the book is page 50
Page 49 contains a table of GNPs (Gross National Product) which I, as the author of this history, did not have an opportunitty to check with the original sources. The figures come from EUMETSAT's papers. For a short time this author's note said GDP (Gross Domestic Product)-- when it should have said GNP. In fact the issues of GNP V. GDP is significant, and a debate took place within the Meteosat Transition Programme. GNP is what correctly should be written. Original published work double checked by the author on Monday, 11th January, 2016. The Science Museum in London has formally accepted from the author, Helen Gavaghan, an English language copy of this history into its Library.

SEE ALSO| |

1. Meteorologists shed political shackles, a review of Declan Murphy's history of the first 25 years of EUMETSAT (2011), by Helen Gavaghan.

2. An interview in 2010 with Dr Tillman Mohr, a special advisor to the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation, in Science, People & Politics.

eChapter| |TOP

Contents

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Ch.1

Ch.2

Ch.3

Ch.4

Ch.5

Ch.6

Ch.7

Ch.8

The History of EUMETSAT is available in English and French from EUMETSAT©.
First printed 2001. ISBN 92-9110-040-4

Eumetsat meteorology meteorological artificial satellites
European Space Agency weather climate policy politics history