[SatNews] The special EUMETSAT Council meeting on January 30th and 31st recorded progress....

....in the approval process for the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) Preparatory Program, with the sum of contributions increasing from nearly 55 percent to 83 percent and 18 of the 27 EUMETSAT Member States having firmly committed themselves to the program. The EUMETSAT Council also endorsed the payload complement for the EPS-SG space segment, to be developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) under an ESA optional program to be proposed at the forthcoming ESA Council meeting at ministerial level in November 2012. This payload complement consists of the following instruments:

• Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Instrument, expected to be provided by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency
• Visible-infrared Imaging Instrument, to be provided by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), the German Aerospace Center
• Microwave Sounding Instrument
• Scatterometer
• Radio Occultation Instruments
• Microwave Imaging for Precipitation Instrument
• Multi-viewing, multi-channel, multi-polarisation imager
• Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Sentinel-5 Instrument, to be provided by ESA
• Advanced Data Collection System, to be provided by CNES

The decision on the Ice Cloud Imager will be taken at the next Council meeting on 5-6 July 2012. The endorsement of the EPS-SG payload complement paves the way for the preparation of the corresponding Metop-SG program proposal by ESA.