The aim of this project is to give the students an opportunity to work on a task that is common when dealing with observations from an orbital or any moving sensor. It is often necessary to associate additional information to the measurements from our sensor/detector. In this case, the detector is simulated. The task is to map Sentinel-5P’s data into the field of view of the simulated instrument. However, for simplicity, mapping the Sentinel-5P’s data to the simulated instrument’s pixels is not mandatory.
The result of the project should be a software library and a command-line utility. There should be a function that, on input, takes a list of spacecraft positions and times and returns an image. The image data under the orbital track (items from the list) should be filled in if available in the source datasets. The resulting package should also provide a utility that produces images as they would be observed by a detector in nadir mode.
The main input data are Sentinel-5p data, but the students could use other datasets from other missions if they make a compelling argument why it is preferable to focus on a different mission. The orbital track is specified in a format of longitudes and latitudes as those produced by NASA SSCWeb (https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/data_orbits.html). Note that ideally, information about a satellite’s orbit would be provided in formats available, for instance, through space-track.org, but for the sake of simplicity, this is not required in this project.
Properties of the simulated detector are inspired by the Mini-EUSO detector, presently installed aboard the international space station. Consider a field of view of 44 degrees, nadir orientation (perpendicular to the ground), sensor oriented with a bottom side in the ISS travel direction.
Some steps of the work
- Review to find existing software that would accomplish these tasks or software that does similar things
- Construction of a toy dataset.
- Download ISS orbit data from NASA SSCWeb (https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/data_orbits.html)
- Download Sentinel-5P data under the ISS orbit track, use parameterized FoV of an Earth-observing telescope.
- Development of software that searches data products along the provided satellite track.
- Specify a temporal window in which the data are considered intersecting the orbit track.
- Solving issues related to cropping “images” from the downloaded products.
- Create a cut-out of Sentinel data captured by the simulated instrument.
- Mosaic the cut-out image into orbital track data of the simulated detector
- Resampling and reprojection of images into nadir-like view.
- Preparation of a presentation of the project, including examples using the toy dataset.
Computational resources
A remote computer for long-running code can be provided to students after discussion.
Semester 2020/2021
This project is assigned to Anatolii Kuzheliev and Stanislav Matsunych.
Links/Resources
- Sentinel 5P Data Hub: https://s5phub.copernicus.eu/dhus
- Probably useful: http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/interpolation.html