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The CRISTA experiment was designed and developed at the University of Wuppertal to study small scale structures like eddies, waves and turbulence in earth's middle and upper atmosphere. Four limb scanning liquid helium cooled spectrometers and three telescopes were simultanously operated to acquire global maps of temperature and atmospheric trace gases with very high horizontal (ca. 500 km x 650 km) and vertical (ca. 2-3 km) resolution in the 15-150 km altitude region. About 14 trace constituents and temperature were measured simultanously.
CRISTA was successfully launched in November 3, 1994 with the Space Shuttle STS-66 Atlantis. On board the free flying platform ASTRO-SPAS (Daimler-Benz Aerospace) CRISTA performed its measurements travelling 50-100 km behind the shuttle between November 4 and 12, 1994. The platform was then retrieved and safely returned to Earth by the shuttle.
An extensive ground-truth program (CRISTA-campaign) including rockets, balloons and ground-based measurements from 42 sites on the globe was set up to validate and complement the in-orbit measurements.
The CRISTA mission was co-manifested with NASA's ATLAS-3 program.
The CRISTA-SPAS mission flew again in August 1997.
Please use the Navigation Bar above to get to the ftp sites from which data from both CRISTA1 and CRISTA2 can be downloaded.
There are numerous documents available from the point of contact given below describing the instrument and the data. Some material including recent publications are available on-line from the CRISTA homepage at the University of Wuppertal.
Of special interest for CRISTA1, please see the following:
Offermann, D., K.U. Grossmann, P. Barthol, P. Knieling, M. Riese and R. Trant, "Cryogenic Infrared Spectrometers and Telescopes for the Atmosphere (CRISTA) experiment and middle atmosphere variability", J. Geophys. Rs., 104, 16311-16325, 1999.
Riese, M., R. Spang, P. Preusse, M. Ern, M. Jarisch, D. Offermann and K.U. Grossmann, "Cryogenic Infrared Spectrometers and Telescopes for the Atmosphere (CRISTA) data processing and atmospheric temperature and trace gas retrieval", J. Geophys. Rs., 104, 16349-16367, 1999.
Of special interest for CRISTA2, please see the following:
Grossmann, K.U., D. Offermann, O. Gusev, J. Oberheide, M. Riese, and R. Spang, "The CRISTA-2 mission", J. Geophys. Res., 107 (D23), 8173, doi:10.1029/2001JD000667, 2002.
Eidmann, G., D. Offermann, B. Schaeler, M. Jarisch and F.J. Schmidlin, "Stratospheric variability of temperture and ozone as inferred from the second CRISTA mission: Zonal means and local structures", J. Geophys. Res., 107 (D23), 8180, doi:10.1029/2001JD000721, 2002.
Kuell, V., F. Olschewski, M. Jarisch, D. Offermann and K.U. Grossmann, "Trace gas variability in the stratosphere", in print, Adv. Space Res., 2003.
The Principal Investigator of the CRISTA program is:
Prof. Dr. Dirk Offermann
The WDC-RSAT point of contact for CRISTA: firstname.lastname@example.org.