In the last decade, a mission exploitation program was established by the DLR Space Administration which supports the science community to explore new application potentials and develop software tools for hyperspectral data processing. The program raises awareness of the EnMAP mission, comprises training and education activities and supports national and international cooperation and the exploration of synergies with other missions.
The GFZ Potsdam, Germany, was assigned as the scientific principle investigator and is responsible for the definition of the scientific objectives and the development of the EnMAP science plan. The EnMAP Science Advisory Group (EnSAG) is composed of German and international imaging spectroscopy experts. The EnSAG provides advice to the DLR Space Administration on the mission’s scientific objectives and monitors the agreement between the scientific objectives and the EnMAP program execution.
With the funding provided by the BMWi, a considerable number of science projects have been supported to explore new fields of applications.
A number of pre-flight campaigns, including airborne acquisitions and extensive in-situ measurements, have been conducted in the framework of the EnMAP preparatory activities. The main purpose of these campaigns is to support the development of scientific applications for EnMAP by evaluating the potential performance for the retrieval of key environmental parameters, exploiting synergies with multispectral systems, as well as developing and validating image processing algorithms. In addition, the acquired datasets collected in a wide range of environments are being used for testing data pre-processing and calibration/validation methods and are input for EnMAP end-to-end scene simulations.
The implementation of specific algorithms and applications in the EnMAP-Box enables an easy data processing of simulated EnMAP data and hyperspectral airborne data today and EnMAP data in the future. Training of students and young scientist is supported by EnMAP schools including training to use the EnMAP-Box and to develop additional tools. The implementation of the online learning platform HYPERedu as part of the EnMAP education initiative supports hyperspectral remote sensing training at master level.