GEostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB)

MSG (Credit: ESA)

The GEostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB (link opens in a new window)) series of instruments monitor the reflected sunlight and thermal emissions from Earth, to study daily variations and long-term climate changes. There are four instruments in the series which have been designed and built by a European consortium led by RAL Space.

GERB 2 was launched into geo-synchronous orbit on the first of EUMETSAT's Meteosat Second Generation Satellites (MSG-1) on 28th August 2002 and GERB1 on MSG-2 on 21st December 2005. This meets with EUMETSAT's requirement to have two of the MSG (link opens in a new window) satellites in orbit at any time, one providing the operational service and the other acting as a reserve. Each instrument can scan the Earth roughly every three minutes and both are designed to provide a service for more than 15 years.

RAL Space has also developed and operates a major part of the GERB ground segment, receiving data from the instrument in near real-time, then processing and archiving it.

Further information is available on the ESA website (link opens in a new window).