The Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) carries the state-of-the-art L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) called PALSAR-2 which succeed to the ALOS/PALSAR. ALOS-2 was launched on 24th May 2014, and is performing the initial functional verifications of onboard components and systems. This paper describes the initial launch operation results, and the plan of the performance evaluation regarding to the orbit control and determination.

ALOS-2, the next-generation Japanese SAR satellite, is designed to perform autonomous precise orbit control of Earth-referenced repeating orbits for effective repeat-pass SAR interferometry. The orbit control accuracy requirement of ALOS-2 is 500m (95%) with respect to the reference Earth-fixed flight path. This accuracy is guaranteed for all latitudes by not only drag-makeup maneuvers but also frequent inclination maneuvers. The on-board software of ALOS-2 can handle operations of orbit determination, maneuver prediction and planning, and maneuver executions for both drag-makeup maneuvers and inclination maneuvers. This feature of autonomy is expected to be great help for efficient ground operations of ALOS-2.

A spectral atmospheric general circulation model called AFES (AGCM for Earth Simulator) was developed and optimized for the architecture of the Earth Simulator (ES). The ES is a massively parallel vector supercomputer that consists of 640 processor nodes interconnected by a single stage crossbar network with its total peak performance of 40.96 Tflops was achieved for a high resolution simulation (T1279L96) with AFES by utilizing the full 640-node configuration of the ES. The resulting computing efficiency is 64.9% of the peak performance, well surpassing that of conventional weather/climate applications having just 25-50% efficiency even on vector parallel computers. This remarkable performance proves the effectiveness of the ES as a viable means for practical applications.