Vadeno Optical Solutions congratulates the project team under The Netherlands and ESA aegis to the successful launch of its Copernicus satellite on October 13th, 2017, from Plesetsk, Russia.
We are excited that our lasers are part of this important mission on monitoring air quality around the globe. According to the project motto “Observing our future”, we will follow Tropomi’s results with great interest.

Observing our future – TROPOMI
TROPOMI will monitor air quality around the earth to cater the scientific and operational community, which is involved in climate and wheather. The data it collects will help to refine e. g. air quality forecasts, environmental hazard and UV warnings as well as operational wheather forecasts. A further major objective of the mission is to better evaluate the impact of trace gas emissions on climate change.
On a daily basis, Tropomi will quantify the principal tropospheric pollutants: O3, NO2, CO, HCHO and SO2. At the same time, it will measure the two main greenhouse gases, tropospheric O3 and CH4. Various parameters of aerosols will equally be examined, as they influence climate change and pollution of the troposphere.
According to ESA TROPOMI is a “space-borne, nadir-viewing, imaging spectrometer sensing ultraviolet (UV), visible (VIS), near (NIR) and short-wavelength infrared (SWIR)”. With passive remote sensing techniques TROPOMI determines at the top of atmosphere the solar radiation reflected by and radiated from earth.
The Copernicus satellite pioneers a series of atmospheric composition Sentinels and has started on a mission of seven years. It is a joint project of Airbus Defence and Space, KNMI (The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute), SRON  (Netherlands Institute for Space Research) and TNO (The Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research). The space mission was assigned by NSO (Netherlands Space Office) and ESA (European Space Agency).

Source for photo: European Space Agency