Project Organisation

The OMI project is a cooperation between the Netherlands Space Office (former Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programmes, NIVR), the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and the National Aeronatautics and Space Agency (NASA).

Overall responsibility for the OMI mission lies with NSO with the participation of FMI. OMI was built by Dutch Space/TNO-TPD in The Netherlands, in co-operation with Finnish subcontractors VTT and Patria Finavitec.

The Principal Investigator (PI) Institute is KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute). Dr. P.F. Levelt is the Principal Investigator of OMI.

An international team consisting of Dutch, US and Finish scientists are developing retrieval algorithms, in-flight instrument calibration and trend monitoring, the operational handling of the instrument and conducting the data validation.

The International Science Team is lead by the OMI Science Advisory Board (OSAB), which consists of OMI's Principle Investigators (PI)m the Finnish co-Investigators (co-PI) and US Science Team leader.

• The PI: Dr. P.F. Levelt (KNMI)
• The US Science Team leader: Dr. P.K. Bhartia (NASA-GSFC)
• The Finnish co-PI: Dr. J. Tamminen (FMI)

The Level 1b and some Level 2 data processing will occur at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. Some Level 2 processing will occur at KNMI. The data is archived at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC).

The OMI project was started in April 1998. OMI was launched on board NASA EOS-AURA's satellite on 15 July 2004. The mission was supposed to perform measurements for 5 to 6 years. However, the OMI instrument other Aura instrument are still delivering valiable measurements. Therefore, and, in cause of OMI, to fill the time gap with successor instruments (TropoMI on the ESA/GMES Sentinel 5 Precursor mission, planned for launch in 2014, and the operational Sentinel-4/-5 missions), the Aura Mission has been prolonged till 2014.