NGGM Project Manager

Job description

Location ESTEC, Noordwijk, Netherlands Description: Following the successes of the GRACE and GOCE missions, ESA and NASA established an international cooperation to jointly develop an Earth gravity monitoring mission and create what is today referred to as MAGIC — the "Mass change And Geosciences International Constellation". The Next Generation Gravity Mission (NGGM) is ESA's contribution to the ESA-NASA MAGIC constellation, and is currently preparing the start of phase B2 as a mission of opportunity within the FutureEO-1 Programme. The objective of MAGIC is the long-term accurate monitoring of the temporal variations of Earth's gravity field at high resolution in time and in space. MAGIC will observe Earth’s mass change and strengthen services in hydrology, cryosphere, oceanography, solid Earth, climate change and geodesy. The observables are the variations of the distance between two satellites, measured by a laser interferometer with sub-nanometre precision, and non-gravitational accelerations, to be separated from the gravity signal in the data processing, measured by accelerometers on each satellite. MAGIC will be composed of two pairs of satellites. The first pair, P1 (GRACE...