Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich

Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, also called Sentinel-6A, is a radar altimeter satellite that continues the sea level record begun by TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992 and carried on by the Jason satellites. It was developed in partnership between the European Space Agency, the European Commission through the Copernicus programme, EUMETSAT, NASA, NOAA and France's CNES. Its payload combines a Poseidon-4 radar altimeter with a microwave radiometer, a GNSS radio occultation receiver, a DORIS receiver and a laser reflector array. It launched on 21 November 2020 and is named after Michael Freilich, a former director of NASA's Earth Science Division, with an identical twin, Sentinel-6B, to follow five years later.