THE ERS-1 SATELLITE - APPROACHING 2 YEARS IN ORBIT

After almost two years in orbit ERS-1, the most sophisticated Earth-ob servation satellite ever built in Europe, is delivering huge quantitie s of validated products to the scientific and applications communities . The need for absolute calibration of the onboard instrumentation and its continuous monitoring has been recognised by the user community a nd the Agency alike as an essential element in guaranteeing the best p ossible exploitation of ERS-1's substantial capabilities. The results of these continuous calibration and monitoring activities have served to confirm the outstanding and extremely stable performances of the ER S-1 instruments, which allow the user community to compare multi-tempo ral observations very precisely and thereby obtain a much better under standing of the dynamics of our environment.