Pre-flight Calibration and Characterization Workshop 19-22 Nov. 2024, ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

Dear workshop participant,

The Pre-flight Calibration and Characterization of Optical Satellite Instruments for EO workshop according to its objectives aims to bring together experts from industry and academia and from both traditional civil space agencies and commercial players.

The workshop was organised to encourage discussion and debate on what is "fit for purpose" for different applications, what is and/or might be possible for the next generation instruments or future challenges. Presentations are available and can be downloaded via the interactive programme. Click on the session of your choice and download the related file of the presentation of your preference.

The workshop was highly successful and at the time it was agreed and encouraged that we should work together as a community to create a workshop report of "good practises" to serve as guidance to the community. Although it has taken much longer than originally planned, for which we apologise, this is intended to reinvigorate that process and look to complete an online document as soon as possible. At this stage the intent is to create a hybrid document where it has a core content that can be downloaded and/or printed together with a more updatable set of appendices where an ongoing collection of case study examples and updates can be collated and made available via the web portal.

To this aim we have created a template document shared document. This template consists of a set of chapter headings, broadly in-line with the workshop sessions, and some suggested ideas for content in italics. We plan to hold a short telecon to introduce this initiative further and seek to obtain volunteers to contribute and serve as chapter "book captains".

Please consider where and what you can contribute and indeed feel free to start to populate the document with real content and sub-sections or at least add your names to indicate where you will be able to draft text. We hope this document can be developed in an iterative manner and at a level of detail that is adequate to provide guidance without being overly burdensome in terms of writing time.

Please use the dedicated repository WS_repository to share relavant documents and materials and if you wish to draft content to be collated into chapters later.