School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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The Metop satellites fly pole to pole, sampling conditions in the atmosphere

The ECIT Institute in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast is part of a UK consortia engaged to build one of the key instruments on Europe's next-generation polar-orbiting weather satellites.

At the UK Space Conference in Glasgow on 16th July 2013, Science Minister David Willetts announced that the UK has secured this key Metop Weather satellite contract.

The European Space Agency has engaged Astrium UK to make a follow-on to the Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS), which feeds data into multi-day forecasts. Depending on how many units are purchased, the contract could be worth up to £150m (170m euros). The new instrument, to be known as the MicroWave Sounder (MWS), will have significantly improved performance.

MWS production will be led from Astrium's Portsmouth factory, but key contributions will also come from SEA Ltd, JCR Systems Ltd, the Rutherford Appleton Lab in Oxfordshire, and the ECIT Institute at Queen's University Belfast.

ECIT is developing the FSS filter technology which will be used in the microwave receiver of the instrument to separate the thermal emissions collected by the antenna from Earth. The team from ECIT working on the technology is led by Dr Raymond Dickie, Dr Robert Cahill and Professor Vince Fusco.

The new MWS instrument will measure temperature and water content at different altitudes. It is fundamental information needed by the computer models that look at what the weather is likely to be several days ahead.

The current MHS instrument was designed for the Metop series of spacecraft. The first of these satellites, Metop-A, was launched in 2006; a second platform, Metop-B, was sent up last year; and a third, Metop-C, is due to go into orbit in about 2018.

But such is the long lead-in time required to design and build meteorological satellites that Esa has already started the procurement of the replacement series, for operation in the 2020s and 2030s. This Metop-SG (Second Generation) system will probably cost close to £2.5bn (3bn euros), with nations across Europe asked to provide various instrumentation. MWS will be the UK's major contribution.

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