Terra Mission Status Update

Status Update Archive

July 6 - 12, 2007

Terra spacecraft and instrument subsystems are in nominal operations.

During the recent TDRS-5 outage, the Terra flight team did an outstanding job in manually rescheduling all contacts and managing the recorder. Due to their ingenuity and teamwork no data was lost. In addition to Terra's excellent 7 year contribution to earth science, the MODIS data is used tactically for wildfire monitoring by the USDA Forest Service MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program (http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us).

Terra completed a -11.13 degree MODIS Roll Maneuver on 7/4/07.

The Terra ASTER SWIR detector reached 83K on 7/6/07 at which point the first science impact begins on bright scenes. An array of amplifier gain/offset adjustments are being considered for use in the coming 6 months. The Japanese instrument team is assessing the cost and schedule to modify existing algorithms to adjust for the degradation and eventual loss of the SWIR band (predicted Dec . 2007).