The Meteor-3M spacecraft series represented a follow-up to the Meteor-3 series to provide a modernization of Russia's national meteorological satellite system sponsored by Roskosmos.
The overall objective are environmental monitoring in the following fields:
- Monitoring of ocean and land surfaces
- Meteorological observations: Distribution of cloud data and vertical ozone profiles, monitoring of global atmospheric parameters such as temperature and water vapor profiles and to obtain sea surface wind profiles and SST
- Measurement of vertical profiles of aerosol, ozone and other constituents in the atmosphere (SAGE-III)
- Measurement space environment parameters (space weather) such as: particle fluxes and radiation density fluxes.
On Meteor-3M-1 carried the US instrument SAGE-3, which was flown as a joint mission of Rosaviakosmos and NASA. A corresponding cooperative agreement was approved by the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission on 16 December 1994.
The Meteor-3M-1 sensor complement consists of the following instruments: MR-2000-M1; KLIMAT; MIVZA; MTVZA; MSU-E; SAGE-III; SFM-2; KGI-4C, and MSGI-5EI.
Meteor-3M-1 was successfully launched on Dec. 10, 2001. It stopped functioning on 6 March 2006 due to a breakdown of its power supply system resulting in a loss of communications with the spacecraft. - The spacecraft (with a design life of 3 years) provided over 4 years of successful operations.
It was planned for the Meteor-3M series to combine the meteorological observations of the Meteor-3 series with the Earth-surface observations of the Resurs-O1 series, starting with Meteor-3M-2 with an originally planned launch in 2007.
The Meteor-3M-2 sensor complement was to consist of the following instruments: MTVZA, MSU-MR (2 instruments), MSU-SR (2 instruments), IKFS-2, MSGI-MKA, KGS-4S, a DCS (Data Collection System), RRA (RetroReflector Array), and SAGE-III of NASA/LaRC.
The Meteor-3M series was cancelled after the first mission in favor of the Meteor-M series.
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